But the patients who didn’t write out any plans were at a significant disadvantage, because they never thought ahead about how to deal with painful inflection points. They never deliberately designed willpower habits. Even if they intended to walk around the block, their resolve abandoned them when they confronted the agony of the first few steps.
It’s worth noting that this method of planning - also known as ‘implementation intentions’ - have also been shown to be really effective in combatting procrastination. The thinking goes as such: rather than trying to extinguish the cues that cause procrastination (boredom, needing a break, etc.), come up with some kind of plan regarding how to respond to them ahead of time (“I’ll set an alarm for 5 minutes, and allow myself to visit Facebook until the alarm goes off.”) We tend to fail when we try to extinguish a negative impulse, rather than plan for it. For more on procrastination, there’s a nice paper here: http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gollwitzer/2010_Wieber_Gollwitzer_Procrastination.pdf
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