Amusingly for your baby/bathwater metaphor, the first example that sprung to my mind for this is the Birth Plan all pregnant women are encouraged to produce these days.

Mine included a fair bit of "if bad thing X happens, do Y; if bad thing A happens, do B; in horrific circumstance G you must absolutely do H", which turned out to be a jolly good idea, as we did indeed end up following one of the (less horrific) alternate paths.

I suppose I experienced it less as a reinforcement to self-control as a "thank god I don't have to think about that, we already decided I was happy with what the doctor is suggesting". Tony might have experienced it differently.

Mmm. Yes, I can certainly imagine that if you know a particular cluster of difficult situations is approaching and roughly when it'll arrive, that's a particularly good opportunity to have prepared your responses in advance and psyched yourself up to exercise self-trust.

When I wrote the post above I was mostly thinking in terms of things that come on you unexpectedly, because that's more the sort of thing that tends to happen to me. I'm inclined to think that having to exercise self-trust unexpectedly is qualitatively more difficult, other things being equal – but on the other hand I'd bet that the 'bad things' you're hinting at there are significantly worse than the ones I usually have to worry about :-)