How to Turn Your Bullet Journal Into the Ultimate Wellness Journal

If there was such a thing as Daytimer’s anonymous, I’d like to say I’d be in charge but in reality, I would be one of the poor souls who was going back week after week, with no end to the addiction insight. My addiction to writing lists and keeping a day planner started when I was a young girl, watching with admiration as my mom would use her fancy colored markers (that we’re strictly off-limits to me) in her pretty coil-bound journal every day. I wanted to be just like her.

When we discovered the Bullet Journal, we both fell in love! Total creative autonomy, no lines to be confined by, and no limits to how many pages a single week (or day) could cover.

My obsession with journaling is met with an equal love for all things wellness - this too started at a young age, but that’s a story for a different blog post. The point is, when I discovered the bullet journal and realized I could use it to create my very own personal wellness chronicle, I was overjoyed.

I’ve been playing around with the Bullet Journal for years. I now have a small collection of five or six on my bookshelf dating back to 2014 and I just keep refining my method. I feel as though I’ve finally got the perfect system to keep track of all things wellness - from daily food and fitness journaling to important tracking and planning tools like the habit tracker and meal prep plan.

Before I dive into the templates I use, I wanted to say that journaling is something I do for self-care, which is why I like to invest a lot of time into it. There are stretches of time, usually on vacation or over Christmas, that I don’t journal at all - and I don’t feel guilty about it. It’s easy to feel guilty when you miss a day or a week (or a month) here and there, but it’s important to keep reminding yourself why you’re journaling in the first place.

Keeping a wellness journal is a great way to stay on track of your goals and intentions, but it’s not the be-all-end-all. You can still make decisions aligned with your goals/intentions without spending time writing in a journal daily, and you can definitely still practice self-care without a journal, but this is just a form of self-care that speaks to me. I love to set aside a couple of hours every Sunday to sit (outside if the weather’s nice!) and plan the upcoming week and make my journal look pretty. It’s a time for introspection and creativity for me, so if you love it as I do, by all means, follow my plan exactly or adopt only one or two of my templates to make it work for you!

My Ultimate Bullet Journal Templates

Month at a Glance

I use two pages to draw out a monthly calendar that includes appointments, birthdays, events, and other important dates. My month at a glance page also includes goal-oriented entries such as progress pics and weigh-in dates to stay on top of my fitness goals. Personalize your month at a glance page to fit your goals and lifestyle. I am continuously adding to these pages as events pop up in my life and I like to have three months into the future drawn out in my journal so I can stay on top of all upcoming important dates. I even add an inspirational quote to this page because a little #inspo is nice every now and then.

Monthly Habit Tracker

This is my favorite part of my Bullet Journal. Having a place to track daily habits that are aligned with my wellness goals is crucial to ensure I’m staying on track. If you haven’t read Atomic Habits by James Clear, I highly recommend you do. This book seriously motivated me to drop detrimental habits and pick up ones that help me become the best version of myself.

If you’ve just started tracking your habits, my advice to you is less is more. When I first started, I wanted to track every little thing and it became overwhelming and frankly a bit stressful seeing how little I “accomplished” each week. Another piece of advice I’d like to give you is that you can use your habit tracker to quantify things like the number of steps taken per day or the number of hours of sleep per night. This helps you identify patterns in your life; e.g., the correlation of a low number of hours slept with sugar intake. I also like to use happy/sad faces as a daily rating system. Check out the pic below for an example of one of my recent monthly habit trackers.

Week at a Glance and Meal Prep Plan

This is one of the most important parts of my Self-Care Sunday Bullet journaling session. In the week at a glance, I make note of any important events, appointments, and to-dos for the coming week. I reference my month-at-a-glance pages to make sure everything I planned at the beginning of the month is included. My favorite part of this weekly planning is Meal Prep! I don’t actually prep a lot of food on Sundays, but I still like to follow this template to make sure everything I need gets on my grocery list for the week. See below for a photo of my meal prep plan.

Day Plan

I write a plan for each day in the morning while I eat breakfast. It includes an intention for the day, to-dos, and three things I am grateful for that morning. It also includes a food-mood journal where I record my meals and how I feel throughout the day. I don’t track calories, but I do like to keep track of what I’m eating so if any symptoms pop up for me, I can look back on my meals and see where they might have originated from. This is extremely helpful if you deal with anxiety, acne, or GI issues like bloating, gas, IBS-related symptoms, etc. as those can all be significantly impacted by the food you’ve eaten recently.

You may also want to use a similar system to track workouts as well, but since I pretty much follow the same workout plan every week, I don’t feel the need to do this anymore.

I also like to follow-up with my day plan in the evening before bed. This is when I write down anything that might potentially keep me up at night. I also cross off to-dos and move items that I didn’t get done that day to another day to make sure I don’t forget any important tasks. I also like finishing the day off by writing down the magic I witnessed that day - any acts of synchronicity, moments of intuition, moments of beauty, etc. On less busy nights, I like to dedicate more time to journaling in the night to write out some visions for the future. Usually, the inspiration for these are the problems I’m having in my personal life or at work that I want to resolve but I don’t know-how. I write a paragraph or two from the perspective that these issues have been solved. I include how I feel, what it’s like now that I no longer have that problem, and how my life has changed. Not only does this give me a real sense of calm about any situation I’m encountering, but it is also kindling for sweet dreams and also helps with manifestation.

Goal Setting

Ah, a wellness journal would definitely not be complete without a little goal setting! I like to keep my goal setting pretty simple. I follow the S.M.A.R.T. system - Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. For each one of my goals, I always start with the shift in identity that must happen for me to reach my goal, which is something else I learned from James Clear in his book Atomic Habits. By starting with your identity, it becomes much easier to see why you want to do something and stick with it, and in turn, your ideal processes for working towards the goal and the outcome of achieving the goal are more easily refined and attained. I break my goals into specific categories like fitness, diet, self-care, relationships, personal growth/learning, etc. I also make sure to put reminders in my month-at-a-glance to refer back to my goal-setting page every couple of weeks to see how I’m doing.

Conclusion

There you have it! My ultimate wellness journal. Of course, your ultimate wellness journal may look very different from mine but I wanted to share with you what system has made a profound difference in my life. The possibilities with a bullet journal are endless; you could track your dreams, write out your bucket list, keep track of your own recipes, etc. That’s what makes the bullet journal so exciting!! So, do you keep a Bullet Journal? What’s your go-to way of staying on track with your wellness goals? Let us know in the comment section below and share this post with anyone who would benefit from making their own ultimate wellness journal!

Happy writing!!