Dot or Bullet Journaling for Mental Health

I can say that I am a person who journals, since spellcheck won’t take the word “journaler”, which is essentially what I am. I wrote about journaling in my blog post about journaling for mental health which is part of my series about using different methods to treat mental illnesses besides using psychotropic medications. I didn’t include this post on bullet journaling in that series since I already had a section on journaling.

From the first entry I highlighted you can read about the benefits of journaling and how it has helped me personally over the years. Even though I have journaled for many years, I have just started my 2nd bullet journal this month. The first one lasted four months, but you can control how long it lasts based upon how you fill it up.

In this post I want to introduce you to what is often called “bullet journaling”. Bullet journal is also shortened to “bujo”. Bullet journaling can be done in many ways. The first thing to know is it involves a journal that has dots in it instead of regular lines. This helps to draw graphs, charts, and other designs. Bullet journaling was started by Ryder Carroll. His version is very different than how I do mine. Others have taken his premises and have expanded it creating bullet journals to track physical and mental health as well as issues like budgeting, addictions and much more. I have gotten inspiration and ideas from various people online focusing on mental illness in their bullet journals. I have found most of these resources on Pinterest and YouTube.

Carroll’s book is called 'The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future', and an example of him explaining bullet journaling is here on YouTube. At the bottom I have a link to a lengthy article about how to use bullet journals to help mental health.

Some people call bullet journals dot journals, or dot grid journals. To stay away from violent imagery, and to use less letters, I will refer to them as dot journals from now on. I’ll give you two lists of tools. The first list is the austere list- the very basics of what you will need to get started. You can gradually buy more items if you get into it, but never have to. I do a bunch of crafts, so I already had most of the tools I use.

List 1: A journal with dots or graph lines & a writing utensil. It’s that simple.

List 2: A dot or graph journal, pencil, gel pens or any pens, glitter gel pens, ruler, stickers with pictures, stickers with words, stamps, stamp ink, paper, punches, a sharpie (don’t use directly on journal or it will bleed through), random decorative pics from magazines, stencils, paperclips, scrapbook paper and whatever you want to use.

I have many pages of this sort of tracking with the three categories which are Mood Tracking, Habit Tracking, and PTSD Symptom Tracking.

And I do have to add as a side note, that I just opened and used these ‘Up & Up’(A Target Product) gel pens and am disappointed with the pens not being as thin as other gel pens, some of them not writing smoothly so that I’ve had to push down harder, putting pressure on my carpel tunnel hand. I also misunderstood the contents that said, “fashion and glitter” gel pens. I thought that meant the pens were both fashionable and glitter pens. But in fact, a smaller number of them are glitter pens. It’s not false advertising exactly, but I think they were being questionable with their wording. I have used many Up & Up products that are fine.

This seems like a mess of a page because I haven’t filled out an entire month of information. But what I have done is drawn arrows and have written tips to help you understand.

These charts, and the graph for the Mood Tracker are very important to me. I look back at them when I am done and figure out things such as: I am much more likely to binge eat if I get six or less hours of sleep and I am more likely to have a higher mood score if I do more things on the list. The cool thing is after you get a month or two of this information filled out you have a data set that will only get better as you gather more data. You can analyze this data (which is fun to me because I like charts, graphs, and analyze myself, and society too much), or you could have someone help you look at the information such as a weird graph/chart nerd like me, or a counselor.

This is a fake Mood Tracker graph. I chose February because a theme was easier to come up with and it has the least number of days. It’s hard to find much space to make your graph and chart trackers decorative, but I have shown here that it is possible. Especially if the décor is not too dark you can write over it, so it won’t matter that it’s there. This is the general 1-5 Mood Graph I use. I used to use a 1-10, but found I have much more room to write comments at the bottom about why my mood was particularly higher or lower than my average any particular day. But you will see in a later blog post Halloween/Autumn Dot Journaling that I have made a 1-10 graph just to show how that would look. You can do it any way you would like.

Before making my 1st dot journal I researched Pinterest, Youtube, and blogs. Many people are generously sharing their work, so there are many sources online that are easy to find.

If you have been part of the mental health care system, as a client or professional; I have been both, but more so as a client, you will have at least heard of doing affirmations, and possibly even know that studies have shown that saying affirmations is helpful in improving self-esteem. On this page as you can see, I have just started listing my affirmations. I have more in my previous journal and will try to fill this up. If you can’t think of anything good about yourself ask others you trust who aren’t just trying to flatter you. You don’t have to believe the positive affirmations right away. You can say them or just read them. I need to read mine more. Sometimes on my journal pages I make ahead of time I write a note to myself, telling myself to go back to my affirmations page and read them.

I have heard of many people making gratitude journals, or making gratitude lists the last couple years. I didn’t research how this was helpful. I just used my own experience. I find that when we recognize what we have and feel thankful about it, it makes us a little more satisfied with our lives. If you can’t think of something to be thankful for think deeper. I am always thankful for my five (or six) senses, the ability & gift of walking, and not being homeless, things many people take for granted. I’m not saying I am more evolved in any way. I hope to continue to realize more things I am thankful for.

I set up my journal pages ahead of time so that I can wake up in the morning and have a decorative page, such as this, or one with positive messages, like this quote, “She believed she could so she did,” which is encouraging. Having a page ready has helped me want to journal. But I know others who don’t write in their journal every single day & don’t know how long they are going to write so its easier to write and decorate as they go.

Some of my pages have themes and some don’t. Some are quite plain. This one is a little more decorated than others. I called it “Femme Strong” because people often think you can’t be feminine and strong.

In these two pages I am showing two things. One is that these pages are much plainer than the previous page, and closer to how other journal pages look. I don’t have time to make every page as pretty or decorative as I want so I just do it occasionally.
I’m also showing that some of the pages I do are half pages, and some are full pages. The 16th & 17th are on one page, while the 18th has its own page. Right now, I am still mixing my pages between half and full pages. I am trying o figure which is best for me. When I write ½ pages I usually have to do some more journaling on my laptop afterwards. A full page can generally give me enough room to get out everything I need unless I need to process a lot. Also, with my carpel tunnel a ½ page often is better.

These pages are just examples of pages that are decorated averagely with washi tape and sticker words to give you an example of how pages will look filled out. I think script can be art, so I like seeing journals filled out and not to stark; sans personality. I have many other pages that are filled out with designs I like better, but I made this fake page in case someone would enlarge the page, trying to read my journal. There’s nothing interesting here.

When looking at dot journal examples, even mental health ones, I didn’t see many examples of actual journal pages, so I decided to create decorative pages with journal entries I thought were a decent length. But I had seen examples of people writing an entire week’s worth of journaling on one page.

On this first page you can see an average week of someone jotting down the important thing/s that happened each day. On the second page I have made a page that more specifically relates to someone who might have a mental illness or PTSD like me. I say “someone” because again, these things I wrote down are not real. So don’t go telling my partner I was using a dating app. Or any of the other stuff I concocted. I’m a writer so I make shit up.

I think this, what I would call “micro-journaling” which might be a good start for someone who has never written in their lives outside of school. It can be more handy than the longer journal form in a way because one has to choose the most important event in the day, and when you are trying to figure why you felt like crap on the 24th while looking at your Mood Tracker, its much easier to look at this than sift through a longer journal entry.

I must admit that I got this idea from others. I call mine “Fuck That” a name I made up myself. And I think “brain dump” was something mentioned by others. You can also make up another title for this section if you don’t like to use the f-word. I in fact think that people who suffer from mental illnesses, have had atrocious things happen to them, and or suffer from PTSD have a right to use whatever kind of fucking damn shitty language they want! No, I don’t believe in randomly swearing all the time because it shows a lack of vocabulary. But I don’t espouse the ideas of a society that thinks it’s okay to expose our kids to countless hours of violent movies and video games, yet they can’t hear a swear word or see someone breast feeding.
So in my “Fuck That” section, which is fully decorated with more colorful language in various fonts, I also add colorful drawings to enhance the colorful language. I have justified anger about what has happened to me in my life! It helps to get it out. It’s not just about the rapes, but issues that are a product of my traumas and frustrating things that happen to most people. It helps me to yell on paper, so I don’t feel like doing it as much in real life.

Since therapy is an important piece of mental health care, I created the “Counselor Corner” so that I can jot down things my counselor said that I need to remember, or want to work on. Its also in case something happens during the week that I want to remember to discuss with my counselor, as well as other issues. It has been very helpful taking my dot journal to my counseling appointments.

There are many ways that you can maintain a journal or a dot journal. You can take some of my ideas, or even disregard them. I just wanted to introduce the subject to people as a method to help mental illnesses, but also show that we all have stress and things can be overwhelming, so you don’t need to have a mental illness to keep track of your moods, certainly not your habits, and actually, journaling never hurt anyone.

Here is a good article with a lot of information on mental health dot journaling.