Why are those thoughts coming up, of all the (true) thoughts you could be thinking?
At a guess, it could simply be because pain /hurts/, and I live a comfortable enough life that before I started this exercising thing, I haven't had to worry about anything worse than a headache or cat-scratch or the like for years. The other day, when I was doing 24 push-ups in a row instead of 5 groups of 5ish, by the time I hit the last one, I'd call the pain level at least on the order of magnitude of the migraines I used to get or the time I got a nice hospital-visit-requiring scalding, but fortunately fading away a lot quicker. I simply wasn't looking forward to inflicting that upon myself each day, every day, for the rest of my life as I maintained my health. (Or, put another way, to stick my hand into the gom jabbar daily without even a knife being held to my throat.) If that was what it was going to take, then I was willing to try, even if it involved applying some of the Dark Arts to my own mind to make it seem worthwhile...
... But if tomorrow's modified exercise routine goes as well as today's did, then I might not need to go to such extreme motivational measures. In which case my having started this thread will turn out to be more than worthwhile, at least to me, even if the response that did the trick didn't actually have anything to do with LW-style rationality itself. :)
Well, if you do any exercise from a relatively untrained state, some muscles are going to cramp up which hurts like hell but after doing exercises for a bit of time that problem goes away. I think it's only the increases in the exercise level that are painful, in the long term you'd feel as much pain from regular exercise as you would otherwise from just moving around as usual.
"Cryonics has a 95% chance of failure, by my estimation; it would be downright /embarrassing/ to die on the day before real immortality is discovered. Thus, I want to improve my general health and longevity."
That thought has gotten me through three weeks of gradually increasing exercise and diet improvement (I'm eating an apple right now) - but my enthusiasm is starting to flag. So I'm looking for new thoughts that will help me keep going, and keep improving. A few possibilities that I've thought of:
Pride: "If I'm so smart, then I should be able to do /better/ than those other people who don't even know about Bayesian updates, let alone the existence of akrasia..."
Sloth: "If I stop now, it's going to be /so much/ harder and more painful to start up again, instead of just keeping on keeping on..."
Desire: "I already like hiking and camping - if I keep this up, I'll be able to carry enough weight to finally take that long trip I've occasionally considered..."
Curiosity: "I'm as geeky a nerd as you can find. I wonder how far I can hack my own body?"
Pride again: "I already keep a hiker's first-aid kit in my pocket, and make other preparations for events that happen rarely. How stupid do I have to be not to put at least that much effort into making my everyday life easier?"
Does anyone have any experience in such self-motivation? Does this set of mental tricks seem like a sufficiently viable approach? Are there any other approaches that seem worth a shot?