The “Night Before” Plan
Creating a plan leads to results.
If you’re anything like me, I’m always looking for ways to be independent. Be my own boss. Create my own deadlines. Make my own sleep schedule - that’s a must.
To many of us, planning can feel restrictive. Just like the rest of our lives, there is a desire to “go with the flow” when it comes to our health that can sometimes lead to judgment toward anyone with a strict routine. But that’s not what I’m promoting here. I’m suggesting the happy medium between total rigidity and utter chaos.
Chaos means complete disorder and confusion, and that is exactly what happens when we leave our health to chance without any structure.
Whenever I start with a new client, the first thing I say to them is that I don’t want their health to take up any more effort, time, or money than it needs to in order to still get the results they want. That means that for individuals looking to get an almost supernatural result like The Rock, it’s still going to take a big sacrifice. However, if your goal is to be healthy and feel confident in a bathing suit, we can create a framework for fitness, nutrition, and recovery that requires the least amount of effort while still achieving those results.
Getting any kind of positive result will take sacrifice. Our goal is to make that sacrifice as manageable and sustainable as possible. The first step?
Planning.
Just having a plan increases our likelihood of following through. This plan is commonly referred to as an implementation intention in the literature, and it has been proven to increase compliance by up to 50% just by establishing a plan ahead of time.*
“Getting any kind of positive result will take sacrifice. Our goal is to make that sacrifice as manageable and sustainable as possible.”
It’s important to remember that creating a plan does not mean we are required to follow through. Life happens and there are going to be days where the plan doesn’t work out. We’re not going to shame ourselves for that, we’re going to keep moving forward.
Creating a plan takes the guesswork out of the hundreds of decisions you need to make everyday. Whether you realize it or not, making decisions is exhausting, and the more you reduce your cognitive burden through implementation intention, the higher the likelihood of following through with decisions that truly align with your goals.
If you plan your lunch ahead of time, I expect you’ll choose an option that fits your health goals. When we wait until lunch time to decide - when you’re starving and everyone from the office is headed to Shakeshack - odds are that you won’t make a decision that aligns with your health goals.
Planning doesn’t eliminate these kinds of decisions. You can plan to have a salad for lunch and still go to Shakeshack with your buddies. But the odds are lower. And in our modern environment with highly palatable foods all around us, we need to set up the odds to be as favorable as possible.
Cindy Crawford says her goal is: “Be 80 percent good, 80 percent of the time.”
That’s all we’re looking for. We’re not striving for perfection because it doesn’t exist and getting past 80% would require a sacrifice I’m not willing to make.
The best way for us to follow through on our health habits is to create a plan, and that’s where the night before plan comes in.
“Be 80 percent good, 80 percent of the time. ”
The night before plan requires less than 5 minutes and it takes the modern habit tracker and flips it on its head. Habit trackers allow you to tick off what you’ve done already, but I want us to create a plan for what we want to do in the future. It’s super simple and can be done on a notecard:
Wake Up Time:
When are you exercising?
Stress Management:
Breakfast:
Lunch:
Dinner:
Snack:
Bed Time:
Before you go to bed each night, take the time to write down the plan. This plan will probably be the best case scenario for the day and you probably won’t be able to hit it perfectly. Maybe you said you were going to go to bed at 10pm, which turned into an 11pm bedtime instead of midnight if you hadn’t made the plan.
The night before plan gives us tiny wins. You may not have followed your lunch plan, but you did still have the apple you said you were going to have. You may not have gone to the gym for the full hour, but you still got a 20 minute walk in during your lunch because you had the plan and you remembered that “some is better than none.”
We sometimes believe that this kind of planning is too juvenile, but with how many temptations we have in our everyday lives that lead us away from optimal health, this framework is the mature approach. Maybe someday you won’t need your notecard, but today, we’re meeting ourselves where we’re actually at, and establishing a tool that gets us maximal results with minimal effort.
*Sources:
Gollwitzer, P. M., & Brandstätter, V. (1997). Implementation intentions and effective goal pursuit. Journal of personality and social psychology, 73(1), 186-199.
Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta‐analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69-119.
Oettingen, G., & Gollwitzer, P. M. (2010). Strategies of setting and implementing goals: Mental contrasting and implementation intentions. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (5th ed., Vol. 1, pp. 329–360). Wiley.
