I've noticed this myself. My personal theory is that the emotional response (the anxiety, the resistance) originates, and stays in the back of the brain (the limbic system if you prefer) and never makes it to the prefrontal cortex, where it can be combated with logic. The limbic system naturally would have not conception of time, it's just there to assess risk. Therefore for as long as you're considering cold-calling Malcolm Gladwell, the risk remains, and so it stays on full alert.

There's only two effective methods I've found to combat this; 1. To act on total impulse before the limbic brain has a chance to mount a full assault on the plan, and 2. To write down exhaustive lists of risks and objections and address and plot contingencies for each and every one. It's ludicrously time consuming, but writing it down forces the anxieties into the language center of the brain (frontal lobes) and seems to short circuit the anxieties. 

I liked the metaphor that Chip and Dan Heath used in their recent book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard http://www.heathbrothers.com/switch/.  They likened the emotional brain to an elephant, and the logical/rational as the rider. Definitely worth a read as you explore this space.

And you're right that the emotional/impulsive brain doesn't compute relative scale well at all.  The cold calls feel 1000s of times more daunting than the payoff of closing a couple deals.  I suspect there's some hyperbolic discounting at work there.

Maybe read up on hyperbolic time-discounting and pico-economics over at LessWrong?

In the 8 circuit model of consciousness, the time-aware part of the brain is the third circuit aka the semantic-verbal-dexterity circuit.

The circuits that cause you neurotic behaviors would be the first (bio-survival - what's safe/nonsafe) and fourth (socio-sexual/tribe, aka who's cool and who's not cool). Maybe also the second (territory/dominance - who's above/below). Those circuits really have no conception of time. The third one is the time-binding circuit and is all about keeping track of the past and future.

Slight annoyance with SETT: I have to reload the page in order to write a new comment if I've already made one. Maybe I'm missing something though...

Yes, correct. You can make tricks all day long, but ultimately you will have to confront resistance head on. There are two methods that work: 

1. Increasing health to improve mood, energy, diligence. Supplements, nootropics, diet, sleep, exercise, sunshine, social time, etc. 
2. Meditational tricks to eliminate the experience of resistance. My primary one is praying in tongues in my head, aka glossolalia, which has significant scientific support. 

I had to deal with this a lot when I was into pickup. You know that going and talking to a girl has zero downside, lots of upside, but it's a constant battle. Some observations from that point of view:

-- The first three approaches you do every day are going to be hard no matter what. You just have to force yourself to do them. As you say, the brain doesn't realize that the pain only lasts until you walk up and open your mouth. It feels like forever. But once you talk to three girls/groups of girls, subsequent ones are easy. I imagine this would translate to sales calls... force yourself to make three, and then you'll be okay.

-- The more days off in between, the harder it is. Almost exponentially. You can go out every day for week and get some momentum going, but once you take off three days or so, it's like starting all over.

-- I might expand your metaphor to say that it's not that the brain doesn't know that the pain is temporary, it's that it forgets very quickly that it's temporary. After three approaches you feel great and are ready to talk to anyone, but by the next day that part of your brain has totally forgotten that you got over the pain the day before. 

Hyperbolic discounting, as others have mentioned, seems pretty relevant here. It's related to the fine, fine, fine, fine, PANIC! pattern.

How? I guess the long term losses from failing to take rational actions loom less large in the imagination than the fleeting horrors of personal embarrassment. 

The best book I came across on it was Ainslie's Breakdown of Will, which was strangely literary.

Whoa! Super weird, I was just thinking about exactly this last night. For me, it was the realization that every acute experience of fear I have is just like this.

Usually when I rock climb it's bouldering - low problems that never get high off the ground, cushy pads to fall on, no fear of heights or falling triggered. Last night I went sport climbing, where you go up on ropes and then your belayer lets you down by lowering you on the rope. I went to Vertical World in Seattle, it's a shiny new gym in a giant warehouse so I got about 60 feet off the ground at the highest point.

They have a thing called an "auto-belay", which is a spring-loaded spool of rope hanging from the top of the wall. You clip into that rope and when there's no weight on it, it's pulling up gently to keep the rope snug. When you load it with weight, at first it lets rope out, but like a seatbelt it catches quickly, and at that point it lowers you slowly to the ground.

Two key things about that: you drop a couple feet in free-fall before it catches you. And you have to drop in free-fall: if you try to lower yourself until it catches you, it never will, because you have to load it abruptly for it to catch. You have to drop on it.

I have a strong fear response not to falling but to the anticipation of falling. And the auto-belay made it really clear to me because it's just a momentary jolt, lasts a fraction of a second and then everything is OK.

But when I'd get to the top, the anticipation of that momentary jolt was enough to paralyze me for just a second. I'd think, how can I avoid this? I'd start lowering myself gently to try to sink into it, but then it just gave way, and the flash of fear got worse. The whole time, I knew intellectually, all I have to do is jump and it'll catch me two milliseconds later. And so I would, and my heart would race from that momentary drop.

My realization was that my most acute experiences of fear are extremely short-lived, but they can be so intense they paralyze me. And they're also almost always about an experience that will hardly last a moment, too.

And the only way I've found to get through them is to just will myself through it - the pickup "3-second rule" is the same thing, I think. It's like getting into a cold pool by just jumping in. I'm not being present for the experience. I'm just committing myself and shutting my brain off and going, and then the fear and the shock happen and then it's over.

That bothers me, in a way. I want to be able to go through this stuff in a present way and feel these sensations and not feel like I have to run roughshod over myself just because I'm not strong enough to sit with my own urges and fears. The metaphor extends well: When I'm getting into an icy-cold pool I deliberately do it slowly so that I can feel it all happen bit by bit. I think it helps me realize, in my guts, that everything's OK, and it lessens that fear.