Introspection is not particularly trustworthy.

My point was that your favorite theory cannot make sense of what people take themselves to be doing in situations such as those discussed above. You may argue that we shouldn't trust these people because introspection is not trustworthy, but then you'd be effectively biting the bullet.

If you consciously (as opposed to acting on auto-pilot) decide to move to "an even better state", you have in fact evaluated your current conscious state and concluded that it is not the one you want to be in, i.e. that something (at least the fact that you'd rather want to be in some other state) bothers you about it.

You may, of course, use the verb 'to be bothered' to mean 'judging a state to be inferior to some alternative.' However, I though you were using the verb to mean, instead, the experiencing of some negative hedonic state. I agree that there is something that "bothers you", in the former sense, about the above situation, but I disagree that this must be so if the term is used in the latter sense--which is the sense relevant for discussions of negative utilitarianism.