A mindfulness journal is the perfect way to track your progress in any area of life especially if you have a hard time STARTING and STAYING CONSISTENT.
Most companies measure their employee’s success and performance by KPI’s, KEY PERFORMING INDICATORS. KPIs evaluate the success of an organization/employee or of a particular activity/process in which it engages. We can use Quality of LIFE KPI’s to help us measure not just our success but to check-in emotionally, track our health, and so much more.
Looking to improve in a certain aspect of your life? Here’s a few KPI’s you can start tracking today:
Health Issues
Recent & Past illnesses, injuries, hospitalizations – include dates, doctor’s names, causations, release dates, etc.
Health conditions that run in your family – especially those that are known to be hereditary.
Allergies, skin changes, rashes – It can be a simple as a pimple, suffering from bad allergies, what kind of allergies, any new IBS flare ups, eczema trends.
Noticing the Unknown & Invisible
By writing everything down, you may begin to understand & see things about your dietary needs, behaviors, and choices that you never noticed before.
It will give you a new perspective.
Maybe you’ll see a direct correlation between the food you eat and health conditions.
A journal will help you see how lifestyle and diet factors intermingle with one another.
Creates Habits and Organization.
Writing & recording your daily progress in the pages of a journal will transcend into your daily life, helping you make a habit out of making healthy decisions.
Exercise & Food – what you did, what you ate, when you ate, how much did you lift, did you meal prep, was it a cardio workout.
Financial Tracking & Saving – Set a daily, weekly, monthly budget. Track what you spend money on, how often you spend and allocate a percentage of your income to savings.
Professional & Personal Development – What are you doing to improve in those areas of life. Are you in a new class or program, have you started reading a new book, implemented a new approach or program at work?
Sleep, Drinking Water, Life Goals: Are a great place to start when creating new habits and organization.
Mental Health
Our emotions are fickle and affect our minute-to-minute mood swings! Start paying attention to your little “emo” mood changes throughout the day. What makes you feel anxious and excited? When do you feel most relaxed? This stuff is all about you and pertains to your mental health.
Keeping your journal is about SO MUCH more than fitness goals and tracking our meals!
Everything we do daily affects our mental health. Sleep, diet, physical health, socializing, writing, organization, knowledge, etc.
When we address all those aspects in a mindfulness journal, we also be addressing our mental health.
There’s no right or wrong way to start your mindfulness journal. You of course need to purchase a journal to start but everything else is up to you. When you write a journal entry or how often you write may depend on your reason for keeping a journal, so don’t feel pressure to track everything, instead really narrow down what it is you want to improve. We want to monitor what is happening but don’t want to create a bad habit of obsessing.
Give yourself some GRACE, if you’re new to writing your feelings & thoughts out you may seem silly, that will subside the more you write and reflect on past entries. You will see how far you’ve come, how quickly your feelings change and all the things that matter when improving mental health & quality of life!