Hello everyone! My name is Leah O’Neil

I’m new here on the blog and am so excited to be here! I am on the Simple Stories Creative team and I’m going to be popping in a few times throughout 2017 to show you how I use and decorate my Carpe Diem planners to organize my life, to document the past and present, and to plan for the future. I truly have a love affair with paper products and accessories. The possibilities for what you can do with an empty planner are ENDLESS, which is probably why I have so many…I tend to collect them. I have lots of planners and I use several at a time. I typically have only one designated as an agenda, to plan out my days/weeks/months. The other planners I actively use all have different functions. The one I’m going to be giving you a peek into today is my wellness planner!

This is the coral Carpe Diem planner by Simple Stories. I am using this planner to track/manage my emotional and physical health. One thing I am specifically using this planner for is to help me manage my anxiety. I wrote a lot more about why and how I set this planner up in a recent blog post with Simple Stories. You can read it and see more photos like the one above, here! Today, I want to show you a couple of projects in this planner using the Simple Stories Faith collection.

The first project is a monthly calendar layout for March. The calendar inserts are from the Simple Stories Fitness collection and I used the Faith collection to decorate. I am using this monthly layout to track my anxiety. I am marking high anxiety days by writing “HA” on the date, and the “T” stands for trigger, so if I notice something specific that triggered the anxious feelings on those days, I make a little note. Identifying triggers will help me eventually find ways to navigate around those anxious feelings, or work through them. I also marked birthdays and plans with family on the calendar, because my relationships with family are sometimes affected by my anxiety and I want to make sure I’m spending time with family regularly, as opposed to accidentally isolating myself, as a lot of people with anxiety tend to do.

I find decorating my planner pages to be a creative outlet for me, which helps put me in a good state of mind. I chose the Faith collection to decorate with because the colors and nature-inspired design elements are very calming to me.

I sprinkled uplifting messages all over this layout!

Along with the calendar layout to help me track my anxiety, I am also using a doc-it journal that tucks into the back pocket of my Carpe Diem planner. I’m using this notebook to journal more details about those higher anxiety days, such as how exactly I am feeling and what I did that worked and did not work to calm me down. I will also occasionally journal on other days to help track my mood and stress levels a bit. Not only does the journaling provide an emotional outlet, but it will also help me notice trends in what leads up to those high anxiety days.

I decorated the cover of this journal, again with uplifting sentiments that I found comforting and strengthening. The journal and the embellishments are all from the Faith collection as well.

I hope you have enjoyed this glimpse into my wellness planner! You really can use a planner for any and everything, but I’m so glad I set this one up for this purpose. It has been so helpful to me! If you’d like to follow along with how I’ll be using this planner, I hope you will check out my Instagram account! I post lots of planner inspiration over there and I will definitely be updating you on this planner. Stay tuned for my next post here on the blog. I’ll be showing you another creative way to use and decorate a planner!

Until next time creative friends,

Leah

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