they’re roughly along the lines of “This is gonna hurt” or “Ow” or “Yep, that was painful”
I’m not a therapist or an expert, but I think you need to dig deeper. Why are those thoughts coming up, of all the (true) thoughts you could be thinking? I would guess that there are supplementary thoughts to those, ones that magnify or exaggerate them, like “This is going to be too painful” or “That was unbearable.”
What sets those latter two thoughts apart is that they imply that the pain is somehow excessive, which (if true) would justify stopping. But whether the pain is “excessive” is kind of fudgeable by whichever side of your mind wants to quit. (Of course there is such a thing as excessive pain, and pain could be a legit sign of a problem, as /u/memoridem has pointed out.) If thoughts like these are underlying and giving strength to your urge to stop, try to figure out what exactly you mean by “too much” and see if the “too much” claim is really true. Then if it’s not true, formulate a response to memorize.
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.
I’m not a therapist or an expert, but I think you need to dig deeper. Why are those thoughts coming up, of all the (true) thoughts you could be thinking? I would guess that there are supplementary thoughts to those, ones that magnify or exaggerate them, like “This is going to be too painful” or “That was unbearable.”
What sets those latter two thoughts apart is that they imply that the pain is somehow excessive, which (if true) would justify stopping. But whether the pain is “excessive” is kind of fudgeable by whichever side of your mind wants to quit. (Of course there is such a thing as excessive pain, and pain could be a legit sign of a problem, as /u/memoridem has pointed out.) If thoughts like these are underlying and giving strength to your urge to stop, try to figure out what exactly you mean by “too much” and see if the “too much” claim is really true. Then if it’s not true, formulate a response to memorize.
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.
Well, I hope it does go as well, or better.