TLDR: I discovered competing to beat future!me is more motivating than trying to avoid being beaten by past!me.
Expanded: I’ve been experimenting with diet/exercise since my previous habits of continual low-grade movement and snacking has become impractical. I knew I do much more intense physical activity in competition than on my own, so I tried mindhacking to think of my past self as competition. This didn’t work as a generic idea, didn’t work despite keeping track of what exercise (kilometers run, reps lifted, etc) I did on that day on the previous week, and wasn’t helped by leaving comments to future!me on the records. (Goading from opponents in competition usually is motivating.) I think I’ve hit a successful approach though!
Key changes seemed to be increasing the time difference to a month, and also thinking of competing with my future self. That is, the thought “Past!me ran X kilometers, so I need to do more than X” wasn’t particularly motivating, but thinking “I’m at X kilometers, but if I can do X+Y then future!me will have a much harder time beating that and I might win!” is motivating. This probably implies something useful about how my brain handles time discounting, but for the moment I’ll take the success and make use of it.
Edit: Crud, this was under “latest” so I read over the year without catching it was last year. sigh
TLDR: I discovered competing to beat future!me is more motivating than trying to avoid being beaten by past!me.
Expanded: I’ve been experimenting with diet/exercise since my previous habits of continual low-grade movement and snacking has become impractical. I knew I do much more intense physical activity in competition than on my own, so I tried mindhacking to think of my past self as competition. This didn’t work as a generic idea, didn’t work despite keeping track of what exercise (kilometers run, reps lifted, etc) I did on that day on the previous week, and wasn’t helped by leaving comments to future!me on the records. (Goading from opponents in competition usually is motivating.) I think I’ve hit a successful approach though!
Key changes seemed to be increasing the time difference to a month, and also thinking of competing with my future self. That is, the thought “Past!me ran X kilometers, so I need to do more than X” wasn’t particularly motivating, but thinking “I’m at X kilometers, but if I can do X+Y then future!me will have a much harder time beating that and I might win!” is motivating. This probably implies something useful about how my brain handles time discounting, but for the moment I’ll take the success and make use of it.
Edit: Crud, this was under “latest” so I read over the year without catching it was last year. sigh