Plan for Chaos: Self-Care as Crisis Management

I have two daily habits that are crucial: meditation and bullet journaling (which really is just end-of-day journaling with some goal review and habit tracking).

Unfortunately, I have totally slacked off on both of these things this year, which of course is what my brain decided to think about while actually meditating this morning.

2025 is the most societally asinine, chaotic year I have ever had the misfortune to live through, and it’s the one where suddenly the habits it’s taken years to establish are… less important?

I suspect this might be a familiar train of thought.

Meditation is only useful if it becomes a practice before things go south.

You can’t just pick it up in the middle of a crisis – this new, foreign habit isn’t magic.

Sure, it might help calm the mind a little, but the whole point of it being a ‘practice’ is that it’s a return to something reliable. Your mind has to learn what it feels like before everything is on fire.

And even if we’ve done that well, when flames appear we suddenly “can’t find time” to do the very thing that keeps us calm and sane.

Daily self-care practices are like pillars that support your life.

The pillar practice of writing every night helps calm my mind, which helps me sleep better.

Skipping this makes my sleep worse…

• which means I’m more tired in the morning…
• which means I’m less likely to meditate
• which means I’m less focused and work longer hours…
• which means I skip the writing again and/or go to bed too late…

You can see how quickly things go downhill.

The pillars become dominoes.

I know I’m not alone in this, and I think part of it is our mentality around self-care habits in the first place.

The first hurdle is to recognize that we need them, the second to make time for them. But I think there’s a third issue.

We see self-care habits as a luxury.

Oh, I’m up earlier than planned this morning, so I “get to” meditate. How nice.

If we valued ourselves enough to prioritize our own health – in every area – we’d actually say:

Guess I’m starting work 5 minutes later today because things got a little hectic this morning, but my minimum 5-minute meditation is non-negotiable.

There’s a reason I say 5 minutes; we think these habits have to be a solid hour or something impressive to matter.

They don’t.

Meditating for “only” 5 minutes every day is far better than meditating 20 minutes once a month.

Consistency is the most important thing here, because otherwise it’s not a “habit” at all.

Consistency is the reason bullet journaling had such a massive impact on me.

It was something I started during a difficult time in my life, and became a catalyst for many other positive changes (probably due in part to habit stacking, which I wrote about here).

It was an unglamorous, slow build, but it mattered.

If you do it well, at some point positive habits will become a routine part of your life. But if you’re not careful, the reverse can happen; a slow descent into complacency.

We’re left playing catch-up on the roller coaster of being a person, which is both frustrating and reassuring. There will be upswings and downswings, and the goal should be reducing the depth of the troughs between them.¹ 

Yeah, the world might be on fire, but that’s all the more reason to meditate.

What habit pillars do you consider non-negotiable, and how have you been keeping up lately?

This is a gentle nudge to pick the journal back up, schedule a painting session with yourself, or start winding down an extra 30 minutes tonight with that book that keeps catching your eye. It doesn’t have to be complicated; whatever activity gives you a renewed sense of life and energy is something that matters, and you can make time for it.

Footnotes:
¹ As much as we’re able to, anyway. There will always be things out of our control, which is why I choose to focus on the things I can change.