How to become a PC?

Timeless decision theory: If you choose not to improve now, you'll choose not to improve in all similar circumstances. You certainly don't want to be trying to make dietary and exercise changes at the age of 65 trying to undo decades of a sedentary lifestyle. Future you will always wish that they had started earlier.

I try to view problems as opportunities. If it's raining outside, that's training in the rain. Snowing? Awesome, snow running! Too hot? High-temperature training. Too cold? Low-temperature training. I'm too tired? Fatigue training. I also try to look at things from what I call a "mediative" point of view. So let's say I'm out running my regular route but it's cold, windy, raining, etc, and I feel miserable. I try to remember how I felt running the same route on a beautiful day and bring my mind back to that state. Or if I'm fatigued, I try to remember a day when what I was doing felt easy and set myself the challenge of trying to regain that mindset. Again, it's about turning problems into opportunities: fatigue is an opportunity for fatigue-mastery. It helps to take an interest in the mental element of training, sports, etc, so you can think of mastering mental adversity as part of your training.

If you can find someone else to exercise with, it could help a lot. For me having someone else counting on me to show up is an excellent motivator.

"people who don't even know about Bayesian updates, let alone the existence of akrasia..."

I think you're confusing the map and the territory. There are people who are unaware of the word akrasia, but I don't think there are many people who are unaware of akrasia itself. Same thing, to a lesser extent, with Bayesian updates;

Much as immortality seems to be a popular goal around here, "I want to live a long time" and "I want to be immortal" are both abstract and distant goals, which complicates motivation. My brain (and I suspect other people's brains) responds better to goals that are more concrete and closer in time.

E.g.

"I want to improve my chances that the hot girl/guy that works in the next department over will say yes when I ask them out"

or

"I want to run that 5k next summer in less than 30 minutes"

are much more concrete and immediate goals, and therefore more likely to succeed as motivation.

Lukeprog's How to Beat Procrastination is a good instructional for building any kind of habit. Personally none of it really stuck for me until I read Nick Winter's The Motivation Hacker though (it has basically the same information as Luke's post, it just stuck with me more).

Beeminder is also a good way to pre-commit (mentioned in both Luke's post and The Motivation Hacker) to things in order to combat impulsiveness. I recommend this approach to using beeminder in order to also increase expectancy. Impulsiveness and expectancy are two of the components in the "procrastination equation," which, as Luke says, "accounts for every major finding on procrastination, and draws upon our best current theories of motivation."

I don't think that you get a lot of motivation from surface thoughts like the one you listed.

What motivates you at the moment to do the thing you are doing? What are your greatest fears? Explore those questions and see how the answers relate to your agenda.

Attractiveness: Health and fitness are effective at getting the attention of others.

After a few weeks I started to enjoy the process of exercising itself. At that point it became it's own reward, no motivation required.

So here's a new motivation for you - keep doing it and you'll start to like it. :-)

In case anyone's interested - today's magic number was 30, and I just completed the exercise set. Which means that I've accomplished my first self-improvement goal in, well, essentially ever.

Sure, 30 toe-touches/sit-ups/etc a day isn't all that impressive compared to what a lot of people are capable of - but it's 30 a day more than I was doing a month ago. And starting tomorrow, I have a new plan: burpees. Again, few to start off with, but more every day, until either something breaks, or I decide to do something more interesting.

I used to be an avid strength trainer and enjoyed working out. Recently I was injured, and now my workouts for the forseeable future include the treadmill and only the treadmill, which I deplore. I've also had to alter my diet quite a bit to consume fewer calories to account for my change in workout routine. As a result of all this, I'm having perhaps my most difficult battle with the sort of situation you are talking about -- I'm having to do stuff I hate consistently in order to stay healthy and fit (though I don't care about cryonics...).

Here are some things that work for me:

• Build a strong plan in order to make execution mindless. I fill out a 30-day whiteboard calendar with my workouts for a given month. Then I cross them out only after I complete the workouts. Then I do the workouts. My diet is of a similar strict, pre-planned nature in an effort the make day-to-day execution mindless. I have prohibited foods (fast food, alcohol, soda, dessert) & required foods (raw vegetables, raw fruits, 2 liters water, multivitamin) & a daily framework for my meal schedule. I find it help to separate the planning phase of diet and exercise from the doing phase.

• Have medium-term requirement that relies on daily requirements. I add 1-minute of treadmill work per workout x 20 workouts per month. I am only allowed to add 1 minute after each completed workout, and I must get to the forecasted requirement for the next month. Day 1, Month 1 starting requirement was 20 minutes. Day 1, Month 2 requirement was 41 minutes. Day 1, Month 3 requirement is 61 minutes, though I'll likely max out at 60 minutes. This, in effect, is a 60-day ramp-up-phase that is (a) manageable & reasonable, and (b) forms a useful habit.

• Pay limited attention to medium-term results; pay no attention in the short-term. Learn some good fundamentals on weight loss and fitness, build a strong plan you can follow, then just do it for 90 or 180 days, weighing in monthly. Weighing in (or comparing other fitness benchmarks to your starting condition) more often can be useful only if (a) you recognize how much this stuff tends to flucuate daily and (b) how much cumulative effort is needed to see significant improvement. In most cases, people weigh themselves obsessively early in a diet, lose 5 lbs after starving themlselves for a week, gain 2 lbs back after two weeks and then give up because they are hungry and discouraged 'cuz 3 net lbs wasn't worth that two weeks of hungry, cranky hell. Instead, build the good, strong plan, mindlessly and blindly execute for 90 days, then check and (perhaps) adjust accordingly.

This may not be especially helpful at the 3-week mark, but it can be good motivation to look back on your progress periodically. If body composition is part of your goal, take pictures periodically, and do "before and now" comparisons (you don't have to show anyone else; this is strictly for your own benefit). Do something that used to test your limits and notice that it feels easy now. Keep a log of little aches and pains, and review it to see how they've quietly fixed themselves.

Fitness can feel Sisyphean at times. Zooming out a little not only lets you feel more accomplished, it can get you excited for the future.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure this technique generalizes well to non-fitness endeavors.

To keep motivating myself to stay healthy I keep researching and trying new things such as a paleo diet, cold thermogenesis, various supplements, intermittent fasting, neurofeedback, and most recently a sleep induction mat. This all helps overcome boredom.

Ask yourself, "What would Missy do?"

And then skip the part where she loses control of her spy agency and gives herself brain damage.

I find that human beings are motivated more by social benefits than rational self-interest. If it is possible given your age/gender/current size, focus on getting a sexy body and on how cool and attractive it will make you to the people around you. If you can successfully obtain that goal, which is slightly adjacent to the goal of being healthy, you will already have experience maintaining the habits of exercise and watching what you eat, and you'll be well equipped to continue to do as such for as long as you desire.

This has worked for me pretty well for six months. I'm addicted to working out.

In my experience, there is only so far one can go on sheer willpower (i.e. by overriding System 1 with System 2). A more reliable approach would be to hack (train) your System 1 to like apples and to crave exercise.

Incidentally - that initial thought - do you actually believe it?

You don't need to in order to think that it's worth taking care of yourself. After all, it would also be embarrassing to be signed up for cryo and then have a heart attack and die away from a hospital such that they can't freeze you. Or any number of ways of failing to get the cryo done right, that would be helped by being healthier.

What do you mean by PC? I am not convinced you are using the term properly (I thought the thread will be about something else entirely).

Can somebody who actually knows this area give some probabilities on when immortality will actually be achieved? I genuinely am not qualified to do this, but surely somebody on this site may know enough to at least enlighten the rest of us somewhat on the matter.

The recent thread about Willpower as a Resource identified the fundamental issue.

There are tasks we ought to do, and tasks we want to do, and the latter don't suffer from limitations. Find tasks that server your purpose that you want to do. Then do your best to remind yourself that you want the end, and therefore you want the means. Attitude is everything.

I read on Neil Gaiman's blog (wish I had a better source) that one hour of exercise (up to 30/week) gives about two hours of extra life expectancy. That's a very useful thought, because my akrasia likes to make excise feel like a waste of time. That feeling is absurd (i.e. easily shaken off) when I know what I'm doing actually gives me a net time gain.

Also, those two hours are going to h be in the future, making them more awesome, with flying cars and stuff. Right?

How about simple enjoyment? I don't know what kind of exercise you're doing, but e.g. for running most people who get through the initial pain end up really enjoying it. I'm sure there are parallels for other forms of exercise.

I've found that you can do a fair amount of weight loss by making eating trivially inconvenient. This allows procrastination to work for you and helps discourage eating when you're not all that hungry.

Examples:

Record everything you eat and how much of it you eat, unless it is something very healthy like raw fruits/vegetables or a calorie free item. This helps turn healthy foods into a lazy option.

Take a small serving of food rather than taking one big portion, and then put the container back, which makes not having a second helping into a lazy option.

As a more meta example, allow yourself to have a demotivated day periodically while not changing the overall habit of you being dieting. If you've eaten healthy for the past 3 weeks, and you cheat tomorrow, but then you go back and eat healthy for another 3 weeks, and then cheat again, the amount you're eating healthy as a percentage is frankly still great enough that your health will be much better for it. You want thinking of yourself as "not dieting" to take a concerted effort on your part to break the habit, so that you can instead be lazy and continue to keep your habitual dieting, as opposed to thinking of dieting as a broken habit from only a brief lapse.

(Note: I was able to get this kind of thinking to work for weight loss, so I'm a lot thinner now, about a hundred pounds below my high weight and now at a healthy BMI range, but I'm still not that athletic or physically fit, so if being a good hiker is very important to you, this may not be sufficient even if it works for you just like it worked for me.)

I'm a pretty fit guy. I don't consider myself to be that fit, but most of my social groups have attributed that to me. Here's what I do:

• Lifting weights. Specifically, training for powerlifting and Olympic weightlifting. Developing maximal strength is the best way to develop a strong body, and a strong body is significantly harder to kill. Cardio is easy when you're strong.

• Train for specific, concrete, realistic goals in short, medium, and long term. For the short term, my current goal is fat loss, as measured by either defined abs or 180lbs (whichever comes first). After that, my short term goal will be to squat 400lbs. My medium term goal is to compete in a powerlifting meet this year, where I'll total 500kg, and a weightlifting meet, where I'll total 200kg. My long term goal is to be strong and healthy so as to prolong my life expectancy.

• Develop habits and behavior patterns that accomplish your goals. For me, this is lifting consistently and adhering to my diet. I do not think about these things -- I just do them. They're as much a habit as brushing my teeth or taking a shower, and as such, require almost no willpower.

First, I concur with /u/maia's suggestion: Find a partner. (Categorize that under "Shame," because you will be ashamed to quit when someone else is looking. Or file it under "Fun," because it can be a lot of fun to exercise with others.)

Second, you may also want to pay attention to the unspoken, automatic thoughts you have when you are losing motivation. Try to articulate them in sentence form so they can be interrogated. (For example, one might be something like "I'm never going to make any real progress" or "I'll always be a quitter.") Having identified a few, think up a good response sentence (e.g., "I won't make immediate progress, but I never expected to. If I keep working at it every day, including today, I will almost certainly be pleased with the results" or "Just because I've quit a lot in the past is no proof that I must always quit" or "Only the final attempt at habit-forming is ever successful, so it's natural that the losses outnumber the wins. No need to get down because of them, but I still want this attempt to be the winner, so I'll work at it again today.") Write down the response sentences on index cards, memorize them, and repeat them to yourself often (and especially when you sense your motivation slipping.) See if that's helpful, and do report back.

(These come from my understanding of cognitive behavioral therapy.)

Arguably the most well... discussion post title I have ever read. Thank you for the hearty chuckle :)

Regarding exercise in particular, maybe take caffeine to give you energy to exercise? I think maybe I remember reading that caffeine is good for your health for other reasons as well but I'm not sure.

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..."

I had taken "painful" to be intended metaphorically, and meaning only "I don't want to", but some of the comments below are suggesting otherwise. So can I check what you are actually saying: is exercise literally painful for you, in the same sense as a stubbed toe or a bad tooth are painful?