Welcome to Week 2: Physical Care of the Bullet Journal Challenge series! In case you missed it, the #BulletJournalChallenge announced on www.bulletjournal.com is the perfect way to find inspiration for all the ways you can use a bujo for self-care. The details of the challenge are here. My post about Week 1, personal care, can be found here.
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This week’s topic is physical care. This includes:
- Health
- Fitness
- Beauty
- Nutrition
This an area of self-care that I struggle with, especially when I’m feeling stressed, sick, or tired. Physical care is always the first thing to go when I’m feeling overwhelmed, but the prompt this week is making me pause to consider why I do this. With that said, here are some ways that you can use your bujo for physical care, plus a few ways I’ve used mine.
Habit Tracking
The most obvious way you can use your bujo for physical care is to create habit trackers specifically for exercise, nutrition, beauty, and health. If keeping track of habits are new to you, or you’re trying to start a new habit, I highly recommend starting small. If you want to start exercising, but you haven’t been physically active for a long time, start with a smaller goal of exercising for 20 minutes or even simply walking around the block a few times a week. The last thing you want to do when building a new habit is to burn out before you even get started.
Other habits you could track are your water intake, keeping track of medications or vitamins, days you use a skincare routine, or if fixing your hair or makeup is something you’d like to do, but don’t always do because of time or energy, you could keep track of that as well. It’s important that you don’t overdo it trying to track too much all at once if habit tracking is new to you. I talk extensively about why keeping simple habit trackers is a good idea here, but the main take away is you don’t want to sabotage your attempts at building good habits by making habit tracking a chore.
Morning and Evening Routines
As part of a challenge I participated in over the summer of 2017, I created a self-care planner in a Moleskin journal and I loved it. I still use it to this day, though it’s starting to get full and I’m in the process of migrating important pages from the self-care planner to my traveler’s notebook. One of the things I made a page for a morning and evening routine. As you can see in the picture below, I haven’t quite decided on an evening routine yet (I’m still figuring out what works for me now that I have two children) but I wrote down an ideal morning routine.
If you’re at a loss for morning and evening routines, here are a few of my favorite ideas:
For mornings:
- Morning pages
- Eat breakfast
- Prayer/devotion/mantra/setting intentions for the day
- Exercise (walking, yoga, dancing, YouTube workout, etc.)
- Spend five minutes reviewing your bujo and plans for the day
- Listen to an inspiring TED talk (either as you get ready or on your commute)
For evenings:
- No screen time two hours before bed
- Journaling
- Coloring
- Reading
- Exercise (walking, yoga, dancing, YouTube workout, etc.)
- “Morning pages” (if your mornings are truly too crazy, you can write your pages at night)
- Prepare for the next day (lay out clothes, prep meals, pack bag, etc.)
- Go to bed at a reasonable hour
Make Resource Pages
A resource page would be like having a physical version of a Pinterest board in your bujo. You could list favorite exercise YouTube videos, your favorite health and fitness blogs, favorite healthy recipes, or books and magazines you want to read (or have read) about wellness. You could also make a list of challenges you want to partake in or accounts to follow that will help you with your health goals.
Exercise
Aside from using a habit tracker to hold yourself accountable to an exercise routine, you could print off or draw exercise routines and store them in a pocket on a page. I did this with some yoga routines that I found on Pinterest and I like how convenient it is to simply remove whatever routine I want to use. I don’t have to use my phone or computer to look up the routine, which for me, is a huge bonus because then I don’t get distracted before I start exercising.
If you want to keep printed out routines in your bujo, too, here are some of my recommendations. If you purchase anything through my links, I’ll earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I appreciate your support!
The Challenge
For me, the hardest part of this week’s challenge is actually following through with the pages I’ve made for physical care. I don’t know how many times I’ve tried tracking exercise in my bujo, only to have it slide because of feeling too tired. I don’t personally keep track of the amount of sleep I get each night at this stage in my life because, at the time of this writing, I have a six-month-old that still likes to night feed. I talk more about how I decide which things I track here.
However, the Bullet Journal Challenge series has me rethinking how I feel about physical care. While exercise may not be a top priority for me, I do enjoy yoga and going on walks, so I’m going to make an effort to find ways to include my two young children in my physical care. Realistically, that is the only way I’m really going to make any sort of exercise routine work for me because if I have a moment to myself, I’d rather be writing, crafting, reading, or gaming (really, anything but exercise.) One thing that has started working for me is using playlists on YouTube to have dance parties with my three-year-old and finding mother and baby yoga videos to do with my 6-month-old.
The #BulletJournalChallenge Series
If you’re interested in participating in the challenge, I’ve listed each week’s topic here:
- Week 1: Personal Care
- Week 2: Physical Care
- Week 3: Psychological Care
- Week 4: Emotional Care
- Week 5: Environmental Care
- Week 6: Social Care
- Week 7: Professional Care
- Week 8: Reflection
If you’re on Instagram, make sure you follow the hashtag #BulletJournalChallenge for inspiration! Also, if you’re reading this long after the challenge is over, I encourage you to do the challenge anyway. Self-care is so important to your overall well-being, and it’s never too late to start taking better care of yourself.
Do you use your bujo to help with physical self-care? Do you have any tips on following through with your routines? I’d love to hear your advice in the comment section!
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