How I use planning to calm anxiety - and planner flip through

[VIDEO TRANSCRIPT]

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Hello my friends!  I hope you're doing well.  Have you ever felt worried or nervous or unease about something that's going to come up or something that may or may not happen? Well, that's called anxiety.  In this video I'm going to talk about how I plan when I'm feeling anxiety and how I feel planning helps with that.  In this video, I will also be doing a flip through of my planner showing you what I wrote on my planner pages this week.   

 

It's a natural human feeling to feel anxiety.  So let me say that again, it's a natural human feeling to feel anxiety or worry or uneasiness and you certainly have the right to feel that way.  So, what I do is when I'm feeling like that, I try to reign those feelings in through my planning process.  I'll either do some planning in my planner here or I may do some journaling.  I feel planning and journaling are very intertwined.  So, I'm going to start doing a flip through of this and continue to talk about the subject as I'm going along.   

 

So, this binder is the new Tonya Plans Binder that will be sold on TonyaPlans.com And it is a beautiful tan color.  It is made very well and the quality is extremely good.  It is a strap binder as you can see here, this is the spine.  This binder looks tan but in certain lights, it has a pink undertone.  There is a deep outer slip pocket here.  And this binder has tons and tons of organization.  As you can see it has several card slots here as well as a see-through card slot, a slot where you can slip your papers in here.  You have a zippered pocket here that is gusseted.  You also have another pocket here that goes all the way down to the spine of the binder.  It has two elasticized pen loops, so you have a beautiful flyleaf here.   

 

So, imagine a binder being open, and you just have an out on your desk.  And maybe you don't want people to see what you have written on your planner; you can just rest it on this page.  But this is the great thing.  It has another pin loop.  So, you can put a third pin and your binder.  I decided to put the card slots on this side of the flyleaf.  So, if you don't want people to see the type of cards that you have here, you kind of have a way to hide it by opening the binder like this.   

 

So, let's get to this week's planning pages.  So, this is my March spread.  It is a month spread across two pages, I put some beautiful washi tape here that has gold foiling on it.  It's very pretty.   

 

I think that the heart and core of each person who likes to plan and journal is someone that is looking to gain some type of control.  Life is constantly moving, there are lots of moving parts.  When you're writing on paper, you have a moment to quiet your mind and actually dump thoughts out of your head about the things that you want to do or the things that you plan to do.  And this is helpful I think too, because paper is actually still paper isn't moving.  Like if you use electronics to plan and that's becoming popular, a lot of people are using electronics to plan.  I've tried it and I ended up going back to paper planning because I like the stillness of paper.  Paper calms your mind and writes something down.  There's something tangible about it that I don't feel when I do digital planning.  That's just my personal opinion.  I love the stillness of paper.  I love the feel of paper and being able to grab something and know that what I wrote is there. 

 

So, let's take a look at some of the things that I have here.  All Sundays, I use these simply gilded stickers.  And by the way, I'll have a link below if you want to save $5 on these stickers and washi but I like to put my stats here.  So, I will record my Instagram stats and my YouTube stat.  Please take note of how many followers I have on YouTube.  If you haven't taken a moment to subscribe to my channel.  It's a small thing that you can do to really help me continue to make videos like this.  And here are my Instagram stats.  If you didn't know I am on Instagram and my handle is Tonya_plans.  And there you can see pictures of my planner spreads.  So, if you want some planner inspiration, you can hop on over there.   

 

What I do is I color code; my planner pages the colors and pink are my family items.  Blue is for me only and yellow are work related items.  So, when you see yellow items like these are meetings for work.  Here I have a reminder to give my dog or heartworm medicine and here I have a symbol to remind me when my cycle is scheduled to begin here's a little sticker when my job gave us a small increase across the board for all employees.  I work for the health care system.  So, the recent events in the world have been really hard on hospitals.  So, I really appreciate them doing that for us.  And here are just some other appointments that I have written in my planner.   

 

So, I'm going to hop on over here to some of my daily planning pages.  So, this is a day and this page over here is a whole day.  So, all of these planner answers there's a section for your prioritized daily task list, a section for any appointments that you have, or if you want to block off time for something and then here's a whole section for daily notes.  And I pretty much do this every day.  I like to divide my daily tasks list into two sections into a personal section and a work section.  So here are the personal items that I wanted to do that day.  And here are the work-related items I want to do that day.  And I put any appointments over here.  If there's something that's happening for the entire day, like a birthday, for example, I will put that at the top here so I know that that's kind of a reminder for the whole day. 

 

This washi tape down here is to drip washi and is from the Cookie Sticker Co, I believe that's the name of the shop.  And here's a reminder for me to write down my blood pressure.   

 

So actually, what I did in this video is I prepped my planner pages for the week.  So, you will see where I haven't actually checked off a lot of items because I was prepping for the week.  So here is another day, I have this beautiful washi down here, I think it matches the original planner pages.  I like to put in reminders to call people in my planner because I get so busy sometimes, but working full time and having a family and being a YouTuber, I sometimes forget to call and connect to people.  So, I like to put that in my planner as well.   

 

So, I have some things here that I want to do personally and some things that I want to do for work on each of the days.  And again, I have work color coded in yellow.  Here at the top of this planner page, I made a reminder that it is a moon phase.  As I've been journaling, I've started to learn more about myself and I noticed that I have certain mood changes related to the moon phases.  So, I do pay attention to the moon phases.  And I'm so happy that this planner has the moon phases on the planner because that way it reminds me to look out for the mood changes in myself and others.   

 

Here I am starting to write a small shopping list that I know I want to do on that day.   

 

Here is a note that my nephew is staying after school that day, and that I need to take my niece to dance practice.   

 

And here are some other things that are written down like my nephew staying after school and a doctor's appointment here.  And finally on Saturday, I am prepping.  And here I decided to write in a section for the two teenagers in my home.  I feel that is important when you're responsible for other people, especially if you are a major part of their life.  I sometimes find it helpful to write a little small list just for them.  This helps me cut down on the anxiety that deals with other people because I don't want to forget to do something for other people, especially if they rely on me. 

 

So, I love doing this type of thing here.  So, some of you are into stickers and some of you are not.  At first, I wasn't into stickers very much.  I was very busy, especially when I worked outside of the home.  Now that I work from home full time, I don't have to worry as much about people looking at my planner because when I was at work, I had my planner open and people could walk by and kind of see what was on my planner pages.  With working from home, I feel more comfortable with using stickers and washi on my planner.  So, I started using stickers more and more since I started to work from home.  And I found that there's something with that.  I think that it is a stress reliever.  It kind of takes your mind off of things when you're trying to choose what sticker or washi to put in your planner, it does take away from that worry feeling because your mind is on something else.  And yeah, it is a small thing.  I really found that it's helpful.  And I enjoy looking at it.   

 

There is such a thing as planner, boredom.  And I started to feel that.  I got bored with my planner pages.  And I was like, “Oh, man, you know, I know that this is the planner that I want to use and that I like to use.  But how can I make this more interesting and make me want to write in my planner?” And I found that stickers and washi does that for me.  At first, I wasn't sure about that.  But then the more and more I started to use it, I got excited about the type of stickers that I could put on my planner.  And it is an artistic outlet.   

 

So, with the anxiety topic, I find that with the world constantly moving and changing.  There's something anchoring about using paper planning.  Please let me know in the comments what you think about that.  I think it's important that when you're feeling worry and anxiety, it's important to recognize what you can control and what you can't control some things you can't control.  So those we got to let go.  But the things that you have some type of control over like I may not be able to control what the government is doing.  But I might be able to take a small step by voting for example, maybe I can't control everything my children do.  But I might be able to take a small step trying to be an influential part of their life and making sure that I do my part.  Planning on paper makes me feel as if I'm stopping those moving parts in life just long enough so I can give some thought to those areas in my life.  And I want to say a word about the weekly compass down.  The weekly compass is a great way I think to help focus on those moving parts as well.   

 

So now I'm going to talk a little bit about the weekly compass because I think the areas on a weekly compass helps with anxiety and it helps ease your mind because it makes me feel that I'm not missing anything and I am addressing all the appropriate areas in my life.  So, here's what I wrote on my weekly coffee.  So, at the top part of the weekly compass, this deals with yourself care, then the bottom section deals with other people.   

 

So, let's take a look at the top section.  So, when you're talking about self-care, making sure that you take care of yourself, making sure you are together, I'm glad this is at the top.  Because if you don't have yourself together, then you can't deal with other people, which is the bottom part of the weekly compass.   

So, when you're talking about self-care, how this works is you write it the most important thing you can do this week, and each of these areas.  So, for your physical wellbeing what is the most important thing I can do this way? Here's an example.  I often work out more than that, because working out is a habit for me, and I absolutely love it.  But I only quote myself two, three times a week for social and emotional wellbeing.  The most important thing I can do this week is connect with friends at a branch from my mental wellbeing.  The most important thing I feel I can do is meditate.  And when I meditate, I put my feet up vertically on a wall.  And that helps with fluid retention in my legs.  So that's something that I do when I meditate, and I just let everything go.  Hopefully that makes sense for spiritual well being.  The most important thing I can do this week is to attend an online church and read the Bible.   

 

So, here's the bottom part.  And it talks about my roles, what I am to other people, I am a mother to other people, I am a wife, I am a daughter, and I am an employee.  So, these are roles that I want to work on.  And now I want to think about what is the most important thing I can do as it relates to these roles.  So, my role as a mother, the most important thing I can do is check on the kids' grades and I want to sit down and watch a movie with them and hopefully spend some quality time together.  The most important thing I can do this week as a wife is go date night, I want to check out this new restaurant.  My husband was telling me about the most important thing I can do as a daughter is to call my mom and help her with her taxes.  My role as an employee, the most important thing I can do is to prepare for our ERP go live, upgrading to a new system and I need to prepare for that. 

 

I think the weekly compass and the items on the weekly compass do a good job addressing those different areas in your life.  So just continuing to flip through my planner here I have a family photo and this clear false sheet protector of blank envelope a stamp in here some extra weekly conference cards, I have a shopping meal planner here where I can write down what I plan to prepare for meals for the week and a shopping list for these meals over here.   

 

Lately, I haven't been filling out this form.  I want to do something different with my meal plan.  I don't like the pressure that I'm feeling that all the meals are on me.  What I want to do is when I have my family weekly meetings with the kids, and hopefully my husband will be there too.  I want to get their input on what we should prepare for dinner because I don't like all of that responsibility being on me.  And I think they should probably be able to help me come up with some good ideas and some different things that we can prepare throughout the week.  It can be quite a bit of pressure trying to come up with what you're going to prepare for your family because especially if you're trying to prepare healthy meals that are not pre prepared because pre prepared meals tend to have a lot of sodium in them sometimes, especially if you want to cook fresh meals.  I've really struggled with that.  Most days I get off at 6pm and that only leaves me about three hours before bedtime and it's really a crunch sometimes to start dinner and prepare something I need to do a better job in the meal planning area because a lot of the meats that we have are frozen in our deep freezer so by preparing a meal plan ahead of time, I will know what meats to take out to be thought and ready to go by the time we're ready to prepare dinner.   

 

Another thing I want to do is start assigning certain days for meal preparation.  I want to start tasking the teenagers in my home with the responsibility of preparing meals on certain days, especially days that I work late until 7pm.  Preparation certainly helps take some of the anxiety out of every day about what you're going to eat.  So, this binder comes with the fly leaf here as well as a clear page lifter so it's a lot of great organization and features in this binder. 

 

At the time of this video this binder is not for sale yet but please be sure to check the description area because you may be catching this video a couple of days later and it would have been released for sale on Tonyaplans.com.   

 

I hope you found this video helpful and me talking about how I use planning to help reduce or ration.  Hopefully you found some tips in there that will be helpful for you as well.  Please let me know if writing in your planner helps you when you start to feel a little uneasy.  I love talking to you guys and I learned a ton of information from you guys by chatting with you in the comments.  Please don't forget to like this video.  This is Tonya helping you feel more organized so this can be a best year yet.