PLAN WITH ME: How to Bullet Journal for Mental Health | MedCircle

PLAN WITH ME: How to Bullet Journal for Mental Health | MedCircle



Organization is a key aspect of better mental health. Bullet Journaling is a way to do that. MedCircle host Kyle Kittleson uses a bullet journal to track the way he cares for his own mental health. Discover how to bullet journal for mental health in this MedCircle PLAN WITH ME livestream.

Check out his bullet journal here: https://amzn.to/3b6r37U

00:00 Intro
01:53 What is bullet journaling?
03:36 What ISN'T bullet journaling?
04:49 Avoid this pitfall
05:48 How to set up the journal
09:08 2 unexpected mental health benefits of habit tracking
15:00 How to pick which habits to track
16:12 Use this criteria for tracking
17:50 #1 thing to remember when you bullet journal
19:22 Kyle's completed bullet journal
21:52 Final bullet journal basics
23:23 Q&A
25:50 How to watch more like this

In Kyle's “PLAN WITH ME” video he will show you exactly how he uses his bullet journal (“bujo”) to track how he cares for his depression and anxiety. Habit tracking has also been known to help those with ADHD maintain organization.

hi youtube it's kyle kittleson here with med circle we're 15 000 people away to 1 million subscribers incredible what a milestone for us for the community for med circle thank you so much for supporting this credentialed mental health education now today i wouldn't consider this necessarily mental health education i'm not a doctor i'm not a therapist i just i just interview them on tv um but every monday i go live here on youtube to talk about something related to wellness or mental health and last week i talked about bullet journaling as one of the core strategies i use to maintain um you know my overall mood and well-being we got a lot of positive feedback on this my gosh so in this video this week i'm going to actually show you how i bullet journal what bullet journaling even is and some of the ways you can utilize this process to perhaps i don't even want to say improve your life but just add this activity to your life to give you those moments of reflection and mindfulness i think it's really important here that we don't position this as a way to improve your life maybe your life doesn't need improvement um i don't we don't have to come from a a place of lacking you're probably good right now but this might be a tool that could make things even better and i guess that is a form of improvement but i just want to make sure that people don't use this um or that we don't say you know that you need to change your life you need to improve it i don't know maybe you do maybe you don't who knows only you know that um i will answer comments towards the end of this video and if you're watching this on replay we will have chapters set up so you can scroll through to get exactly what you need but first let's start with what bullet journaling is and what we're going to talk about today bullet journaling is a form of habit tracking mood tracking expense tracking planning and organizing your appointments actual journaling and writing but it's all done in a bullet journal here is a branded bullet journal there it is bullet journal we will link to one an affiliate link in the description below this video and inside the pages are not lined they simply have these dots all over them and the dots allow you to create your own pages or templates if you go google bullet journal templates bullet journal pages you'll find lots of inspiring design ideas i'm not an artistic person i wish i was i'm a very minimalist person so once we explore my bullet journal today you'll see that the aesthetic i choose chose is very minimal and easy okay there are some people who spend hours creating beautiful pages with lots of colors and images and color keys and all these things i don't do that minimal simple to me this is something that takes five to ten minutes at the beginning of the week and all of 60 seconds once a day during the week so in a week time i'm probably spending you know 17 minutes on this but i feel like i get a lot out of it so that's number one i do not bullet journal for my appointments for anything other than i track behaviors and i track my sleep so it's habit tracking and tracking sleep this is different though than goal setting and goal tracking and i think this is very important i'm not sitting here and making a list of saying i have got to work out three times this week and then i check it off when i do it i have a spreadsheet that you'll see here in a little bit and i check off how many times i work out so this is not to make sure i hit certain milestones this isn't to make sure i get enough sleep this isn't to make sure i take my meds every morning this is hey did you take your meds this morning how much sleep are you getting how consistent are you being with any number of habits and we'll talk about habits in a little bit so that's very important as well i think it is a great supplement to your goals and it's a great way to look back and see all right am i doing the things that i would need to do in order to achieve something but i don't use this as a goal setter this is a habit tracker this is supposed to tell me the truth the real the realness if i only went to the gym once this week it will be reflected in this journal um i also think it's important and i can hear dr romini in my ear already um and i don't know if she would agree to this maybe she'll watch this and tell me but i can hear dr romney one of our clinical psychologists at med circle going you know i think that's great if bullet journaling is helpful too and you want to do it but look out for or don't make it where it consumes you where this becomes the your bible as opposed to something that helps you i know there are a lot of people if one little issue gets if they don't draw a line perfectly in their bullet journal everything falls apart if they miss one day of habit tracking everything falls apart yeah this is supposed to be easy no one's making you do this when i first started bullet journaling i could feel myself drawing my first page and i made a mistake the line looked bad and i thought oh my gosh i'm gonna have to start over and i don't know you don't have to this page is just gonna look a little different than the other pages no big deal we're not going for perfection here remember that um now let's talk about some of the habits that we can track actually it might be better if we just show you um what a design setup looks like and then i'll talk through it so bridget when you're ready throw up that clip and today is monday november 1st and this was i did this this morning and i filmed it and sent it to bridget who is live on this call and so this is how i start each uh week on in my bullet journal now typically i'll do this on sunday nights so that on monday it's ready to go but sunday was halloween and i was trick-or-treating with my nephew and i didn't feel like coming home after that and doing this so i did it this morning so you'll see it's very very simple um i know someone's going to ask the pen i'm using is a uniball vision micropin and i don't have the size but i'll find it and put it in the description so the first thing i do is track all the habit or list all of the habits that i want to track during the week now looks like it's stalling on my end i don't know if it is on your end um it should be much clearer and easier maybe it's my internet but you'll see that i have made a i can't even see what i'm writing anymore so i'm just going off bridget can you send me a text and let me know if people can see this or not um so you can see that in the left-hand column i've written down some of the habits that i want to track and then on to the right i've listed the days monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday saturday and sunday i've put in my prozac that i want to take uh whether i worked out and um whether or not i've taken some vitamin d yeah it looks like guys that it's not coming through very much i'm sorry about that we're using new software so this uh will will have to get addressed in future videos um bummer but there's lots of great uh bullet journaling templates you can watch on youtube that are not of me and actually something you can see because this is clearly not good um don't take it down bridgette let's see if can you i mean is there anything we can do to fix it other than taking it down yeah maybe that looks a little better i don't know but also guys you get the idea right this isn't rocket scientist rocket scientist this isn't rocket science you just make a graph okay now in the second graph i'm tracking my sleep that gets a sec a separate spreadsheet so to speak uh you can see on the third column from the left i screwed up what was supposed to be a moon so i just scratched it out one uh error i made in this actual graph is that i started the week on monday it should start on sunday because i track on sunday night what time i go to bed and what time i wake up monday morning and then i track how many hours i slept on sunday night but we have a graph and then the graph is at the bottom of the page and it just tracks your tracks how many hours of sleep you get each night so at the beginning of each day you can see from the graph in the middle of the book how many hours you slept you point that on the graph and then you'll see throughout the week where in the week you're getting more or less sleep now tracking all of these habits and tracking your sleep uh by itself may or may not do anything for you i like it because it just gives me a little time to reflect each morning on what i need to do and what i've done in the day prior and that day but what is really uh useful is seeing where there is some correlation to your mood or your attitude not to bring up dr romney again but dr romney has shared on med circle that she um i forget the system she calls it but essentially she gives every day a plus a minus or a zero plus days are good minuses are bad zero days are you know not good or bad just a normal day um and if she sees that she's getting a lot of minuses and i and i might be screwing this up a little bit maybe she uses numbers or something but it's more or less the same idea but if she's seeing a lot of minuses she's going okay i need to do something here i i'm working too much i've got too much too many things in my environment that is causing me this type of unnecessary stress so i need to make some adjustments where what i like to see is how my mood is compared to my sleep on the days i get more sleep how is my mood i also might want to see why is it that every wednesday i seem to wake up earlier or why is it every friday i seem to go to bed later or whatever whatever that reason is and it might be something that you're not even aware of that's the real kicker here and the real value is that you might be waking up groggy every tuesday morning and you don't know why and you might not even realize it because tuesday could be it just runs in through your life you don't recognize that it's every tuesday you just go sometimes i wake up tired well it might be every tuesday you wake up tired and it's because every monday you i don't know go to an ice cream social and eat ice cream and you have a lot of sugar and you don't sleep well so you wake up early on tuesday i don't know i'm making things up but you want to look for those correlations or trends to see if there's something within your environment something that you can control that might be able to improve your life for example i thought if somebody had asked me how much do you sleep on an average night i would say probably 10 hours is my average however when i look at it there are days i'm only sleeping seven or eight hours and i thought i didn't know i only slept that much i thought i was sleeping 10 hours a night no matter what not the case so and that's important for me because i have crohn's disease and i have to look at my sleep as a way to treat crohn's and so if i think i'm getting 10 but i'm only getting seven and then i go tell my doctor yeah i'm sleeping great i you know i sleep ten hours a night and i'm not i'm giving my doctor wrong information and that of course affects my treatment one another uh benefit is uh medication management getting people getting myself included to take their medication consistently consistently is difficult i don't have the rates in front of me but people who consistently take their meds as prescribed it's it's i remember being surprised that it wasn't a higher number there are so many of us who who can't do it we forget we don't like the way it makes us feel something else comes up whatever this really illustrates when you start tracking this how consistent you really are being with your care your self-care which includes the medicine you take which includes self-care behaviors if you start tracking this and you say all right i gotta take my uh medication every day and i wanna go on a few walks every week and i wanna make sure i meditate a few times a week and i want to make sure that i'm drinking enough water whatever the things are that you want to track that are good for you you're going to see real quick how much of that you're actually doing and it could surprise you either way you might be thinking i don't drink enough water there's no way and then you start tracking the water you drink and you go oh my gosh i'm drinking plenty of water but what i'm not doing is having me as having any solo time i don't have that and i don't have that because i've been tracking my behaviors and my habits over the last three weeks and i don't see it and so this is an opportunity for you to see where there are areas in your life that you could add some reinforcing habits or behaviors too and where in your life you might be um you know struggling a little bit most people track their habits they track their good ones they go i'm gonna track how much water i drink how many times i go for a run uh blah blah i also track my bad habits i track every day that i have um a drink of alcohol so and i don't drink a lot but i want to see how much i am drinking so in my habit tracker i will have my medications i work out the supplements i want to take and then i will put no alcohol and every day i don't have alcohol i check that box now it is not designed for me to not have alcohol this isn't saying all right kyle do you not have alcohol and every day you do it you get a check mark it is did you have alcohol today yes or no you can have as much as you want go for it just track it here and let us know if you did let us know let me know the journal no if i did have alcohol and you'll start to see very quickly that you may or may not be participating in those less desirable behaviors more or less than you think it's really again not a way to set goals not even a way to improve your life necessarily it is to get a snapshot of the reality of your life at least this is how i'm utilizing the habit tracking in a bullet journal now one question is against what type of things should i track well my first piece of advice on when you decide what to track is to not track a lot one big mistake people make early on is they get excited they go well i'm gonna track everything what time i wake up what time i go to bed what i'm eating what i'm drinking who i'm spending time with how much time i spend at work how much time i'm doing self-care what supplements i'm taking how much time am i spending reading doing yoga meditating partying with my friend i mean it just goes on you can't track it all you'll go nuts okay don't don't don't do that pick a small amount of habits that you would be curious to know about if if there was a genie in front of you and he said ask me whatever if you can figure out whatever habit you're doing in your life on a consistent basis and i'll tell you what that habit is what would you want to know would you want to know how if you were getting enough water would you want to know if you were how often you were exercising would you want to know how often you call your parents whatever it is what do you want to know track those and don't make it a long list um two the criteria for tracking should be very simple for example one of the items on my list is no caffeine i like rarely ever get to check the box that says no caffeine by the way so today i thought i was gonna do it woke up didn't have any caffeine i thought oh maybe today's a no caffeine day good for me i buckled i had a little canned coffee thing that i had right before this and so that means i had caffeine that to me is the criteria did i take any caffeine if i took a little bit if i have a sip of green tea for my criteria that means i had caffeine so i can't check off that i did not have caffeine on my list the criteria should be really simple if i have one glass of wine at dinner that means i had alcohol that day it doesn't mean i get to put no alcohol because i it was just one glass of wine and i had a lot of water a lot no it make it easy for you to track yes or no there are some things that aren't that easy for example how many glasses of water did you drink in a day if you're trying to hit your eight eight ounce glasses of water i don't know if that's correct but that's what i've heard eight eight ounce glasses of water you would want to set up a separate tracker for that on your page you don't have to have everything in one spreadsheet so to speak um i don't track my water because i tried tracking my water and um it's too much work y'all that's what i mean it's just wait i'm going to drink water and be like remember i drink this water no i i'm not going to do that so keep it civil with what you want to track um and then before we go to some questions here it's really important to if you're going to explore bullet journaling as a way to help yourself that you go into it not trying to make this perfect if you're inspired by anything that we've talked about in this video and you go google or youtube bullet journaling you're gonna be blown away by people's pages they are works of art i mean they're gorgeous beautiful it makes you want to go make one of your own and if and if you can do it great but what happened for me is i got the journal and i got my ruler and i got my pins with different you know like the special pins for all this and blah blah and then i'm making my page and i'm screwing up left and right oh my gosh this looks so bad i mean my first bullet journaling page that first week it looked like a third grader just went to town and this notebook it looked terrible this is not about for at least for me in the beginning about making it look good this is about can i consistently track my habits and my behaviors and to do that i want to focus focus on just the tracking part rather than focusing on how does it all look how beautiful is it you know can i is this instagramable i'm not doing this for instagram doing this for me now if you're someone who wants to do this for instagram and you're artistic and you want to turn this thing into a work of art go for it how fun for you that's just not going to be my journey to go on now i will show you a this is what it would look like all completed the outline at least so you can see this week i have prozac workout vitamin d you know because i have pre-arthritis in my hips how fun is that and i'll check so i took my prozac this morning so this is typically what i would do the next day and so in the little box i just put a little dot just like that easy and then here's where i'll track my what time i go wake up what time i go to bed and then i'll put how many hours i sleep and then those hours will be tracked in this chart from 5 to 13 hours monday through sunday so let me put a sheet up of a completed week and let's see here's a good one i've only been doing this for six weeks too and i will tell you the real uh the real benefit for me is sorry i'm putting this over here because there are some things that you know people don't need to see um the real beauty is just i just like i never write anything down on paper anymore everything is digital everything in med circle is run digitally all my communication is digitally like most people so it's nice to get back to pen and paper every single day even if it is just for less than 60 seconds so on october 11th you can see we have a completed week here all right so for whatever reason i didn't take my prozac on saturday or sunday that other med propecia i didn't take at all that week because my prescription ran out i actually just got it in today and i only worked out on wednesday that's the truth so the the absence of dots means it didn't happen you can see no caffeine on friday i had no caffeine every other day i had caffeine and then we can look at my sleep down here and you can see the hours and the track tracking down there now i have this aura ring now except this is just this isn't an actual or ring this is what you wear to um they send you a sizing kit and this will track sleep so i'll probably stop tracking sleep in here once i get my actual aura ring but i might uh supplement it with some different types of habits or behaviors to track i really enjoy it it's a relatively inexpensive investment you don't have to use the brand name bullet journaling bullet journal you can use any journal that has dots in it you don't have to have fancy pins you can use any pin you want you don't need a ruler even because there's plenty of dots you just draw the line follow the follow the dots it's it's very simple and there's no wrong way to do this some people live their whole lives through a bullet journal other people like me only use it for you know very specific things but if you are somebody who likes to plan likes the feeling of being organized and can see the satisfaction of tracking your behaviors and habits each day and looking and very and when i say looking it's not like we're researching this it's quick you just look is there any correlation i know monday was a really great day for me why is that oh hey i i worked out i didn't drink caffeine i didn't drink any alcohol i took all my meds and i got 10 hours of sleep the night before no wonder monday was a good day you know so you can start to see those correlations and if you do go to a doctor or a therapist and they go how's your sleep well you can go let me tell you how my sleep is you know you got it all right here ready to go it is uh something that i really enjoy doing i wouldn't be presenting it if i didn't enjoy doing it i'm on week six we'll see how long this goes maybe i quit next week i have no idea maybe i'll do it for the rest of my life we will see i am going to s now check in to see if there are any questions from the live youtube audience uh let's see here there is an app yes so there uh there are lots of habit tracking apps i tried two or three of them did not like them i think it's because i don't like being on my phone and so then i'm gonna start each day or end each day by getting on my phone that just does not sound like a good way to start or end my day so i i did the app thing wasn't for me but hey if it's for you go for it um [Music] somebody said this seems like a lot of work i would say it it depends on what your definition is of a lot of work there is a learning curve for sure um that's why i really encourage you to watch some actual bullet journalers on youtube to get inspired with how you want to leverage your own bullet journal um people saying i'm angry about caffeine okay let's see let's see thanks kyle this was extremely helpful well that's nice [Music] it's better to do it by physical writing the simple act of using a pencil is therapeutic i i agree i like it um and this is something i i don't travel as much as i used to as most people but i still have done a little traveling as of late and i've brought this with me and when this moves more into the goal area than in the habit tracking area but what it does is when you have this and you're traveling there's a part of my brain that goes oh i better make sure i do that i better remember to do that because i'm going to track it later and when i'm traveling that's usually when my brain goes offline my brain goes oh who cares how much water you drink or if you exercise or what or what time you go to bed like you're traveling everything you can do whatever you want and uh this keeps me more in line or at least i can see if i'm more in line or not um okay i'm gonna stop there i really apologize for that video it was hopefully going to really illustrate um what it's like to actually sketch out a page but again there are there's no shortage of those um out on the internet and on youtube i appreciate you all being here live hopefully this was helpful to somebody we'll be back next monday with either more mental health and wellness insight and tips what's working for me or other members of the med circle team updates on med circle or what we have on the docket for med circle this week in med circle we have new videos coming out of course on our youtube channel we have new blog posts coming out on our website and we have uh new emails going out to everyone on our email list so if you are not a med circle member and would like to become one you can go to medcircle.com and start there for free thanks for being here and remember whatever you're going through you got this

#PLAN #Bullet #Journal #Mental #Health #MedCircle

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