The Balance Planner in twenty minutes
A Wellness Recovery Action Plan you will actually finish. Eleven questions, one sitting, and a PDF you can hand to someone before you need to.
For the Balance Planner. 20 minutes. Private on this device; nothing is sent anywhere. Not clinical advice.
Who it is for
You have been steady for a while and know it will not last forever. Or you came out of an episode and the discharge paperwork said "make a plan" without saying how. The Balance Planner is for the quiet stretch: it only works if you write it when you are well, because the person who needs it will not be able to write it.
The short version
- Skip the name question if it slows you down; it only personalises the PDF.
- Daily maintenance (questions 2 and 3): write the three things that keep you level, not the ten you aspire to. Sleep window, one meal you do not skip, the medication time. If you cannot name three, that is the finding.
- Triggers (4 and 5): name the last two things that preceded a bad week, then the one move that would have helped. Past tense is easier than hypothetical.
- Early warning signs (6 and 7): borrow from the Warning Sign Map if you have one. If not, ask the person who noticed last time.
- Serious signs and breakdown (8 and 9): write what you would want a stranger to do. This is the part you cannot write mid-episode, which is why you are writing it now.
- Support people (10): names and how to reach them. One of them should know this plan exists.
- Crisis (11): what helps, and what makes it worse. The second list is the one people get wrong.
- Export the PDF and send it to one person on the list. A plan nobody has seen is a diary.
A worked example
An invented reader, so the mechanics are visible. Your answers will differ.
Say your last two bad weeks both started with a project deadline and three nights of five hours. The trigger is not the deadline; it is the sleep you traded for it. Question 5 then writes itself: "when a deadline lands, the sleep window is the one thing that does not move, and the deadline is renegotiated instead." That sentence, on a PDF your partner has, is the whole value of the tool.
The one thing
Review it on the same date each year, or after any episode. A plan that describes who you were two years ago is worse than none, because people will follow it.
Evidence: what the people who stayed well actually did.