Mental Health Check
When I started my March pages for my Bullet Journal, I started looking for some new ways to keep track of my mental health. I was already doing daily gratitude but I wanted something else.
After a little bit of relentless Googling and Instagram searching, I finally stumbled upon “Pixels.” Pixels are a visual way to track your mental health each day. Essentially, you choose some emotional qualifiers for each day. For example I chose the following:
Amazing Day
Great Day
Average Day
Exhausted Day
Frustrated Day
Sad Day
Then you assign a color to each one. Every morning, you go back and fill in the color that most closely lined up with your emotional state from the day before. The key is to be honest with yourself. If you had a day where you were just feeling kinda meh and sad, fill that in. The idea of the Pixels is that they help put your emotional life into perspective.
I chose to make a Pixel Mental Health Check page that covered February, March, April, and May because I think by the end of May I will need a new bullet journal.
After each month finishes, I add up the totals for each day. While I did have a few days in February where I was sad or frustrated or exhausted or a combination of all three, there were far more amazing, great, and average days than anything else.
When I created this page, I knew that it was going to require me to be honest about how I was feeling on any given day and then document it. Sometimes that isn’t the easiest thing to do. There are days where I don’t want to admit that yesterday sucked. Because let’s be honest, mental health and talking about it are still pretty stigmatized. We don’t talk about it and admitting that you had a bad day where you were sad or angry all day, doesn’t come off well in the hyper focused on “living my best life” world we live in.
But I think that living my best life means being honest about my emotional health. If there is a day (or a string of days) where I don’t have a great day, that’s okay. What’s more, since I started doing Pixels, I realized that I have far more great and amazing days than anything else and that is super encouraging on the bad days.
When I finished the page, I saw that I had a pretty glaring blank spot in the bottom righthand corner, so I decided to make a little “Create Joy” List. The list serves as a reminder of things that make me happy. Having that little list helps me remember that there are simple things I can do on a bad day to help me feel better. Having those things written down, has made them more concrete ideas for me. Now when I am having a bad day or can feel myself getting sad, I think of that list and do one of the things. I cannot tell you how much it has improved my life.
Being so honest about my mental health in this way has, I feel, improved my mental health by leaps and bounds. It is a great way to not only track how you are feeling, but to see that there are usually more good days than bad days. Even if you aren’t a bullet journal person, I highly encourage everyone to try this. Just do it for a month, it could make a huge difference.