The point of these incentives is not to override your actual long-term needs and wants, but rather to artificially bring their consequences up to the near term so that you work with your inherited systems rather than against them.
You shouldn't set a goal to exercise daily if doing so makes you feel bad. You should set that goal specifically when you have recognized it makes you overall feel better, even if it costs a discomfort in the moment.
Some people can easily align their behaviour with their long term needs and wants. If you are such a person, these incentive structures will not help you and you will be confused about the need for it.
Daily is probably excessive, but regular exercise will very likely be a bit unpleasant for most people, and that's not really a reason to avoid it.
My comment was not about avoiding unpleasure. My comment was about learning to listen to yourself, instead of tricking and forcing yourself as the default mode of behavior. Unpleasure is a very interesting and helpful thing when you're learning to understand yourself, by the way. But only if you pay attention, rather than "Use every motivation strategy you know, every trick in the book".
What scares me is that such a method might end up just overriding any kind of long-term-goal adjustment from the inside. If you force yourself to write daily (and god forbid, publish what you wrote!), do you know how to make this forced writing actually attentive to yourself? Or do you just do it because you promised yourself, and ignore any inner protest? Could it end up a daily article about, say... forcing oneself to write?
My point is that there is a group of people for whom that is practically reason to avoid it. The unpleasure is large enough that it doesn't happen.
Some people can force themselves by just "listening to themselves" whereas others get more mileage out of first listening to themselves, and then setting up a commitment scheme.
This is an opportunity to introspect on why your actions didn't align with whatever goals you set. Maybe you don't actually want to reach the goal at all.
As with anything else. The value of the journey isn't an illusionary destination, but rather what you learn along the way. You'll likely find that you don't follow the path you imagined, likely because you found something more exciting along the way.
It's as if the goal is some sort of sacred object for change rather than something to be obtained.
In the book it specifically teaches how to "patiently and kindly listening to one's needs"
https://www.amazon.com/Self-Parenting-Complete-Guide-Convers...