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Affirmations are a great way to retrain your thought patterns. If you find yourself feeling negative or low, it can be really helpful to use affirmations to change the way you’re thinking. 

And if you’re already using a bullet journal for your to-do list, your journal prompts, and goal setting, adding affirmations is a natural way to go to keep working on yourself and your personal growth. 

Like with anything else related to bullet journaling, there will be basically infinite ways to set up an affirmation spread.  Here are some of the best ideas, starting with ideas for total beginners. 

Why Use Affirmations?

People who use affirmations use them to change their mindset or retrain their thought patterns. Our behaviors–the things we do and feel–are always a reflection of what we subconsciously believe. So if you deep down believe that you are not good enough, your feelings will reflect that through emotional pain and insecurity, and you will behave in ways that prevent you from improving or making progress in life.

Affirmations work to change those deep beliefs and allow us to build a positive self-image. As you are building a positive self-image, you’ll find that your feelings are changing, and your behaviors are too. You may find that you are less impulsive, less reactive, or less likely to self-sabotage. And on the other hand, you might be more present, more happy, and more willing to let people in when you feel that you deserve these things. 

Many people who use a bullet journal like to keep a page for affirmations in a weekly or monthly spread. 

Bullet Journal Affirmation Inspiration Pages

If you are just getting started and feeling overwhelmed at the idea of writing all these affirmations, consider starting for the first time by setting up a spread for that month and filling it with inspirational quotes you find online. 

You might choose to write in a motivational quote each morning first thing, to set the tone for your day, or you might prefer to find positive quotes at the end of each day that relates to or ties back to what your day was like.

This can help manage negative thoughts, set your perspective so that you are either feeling positive about a great day or reflecting on how you can learn from and change a tough one. 

If you’re struggling with self-image, you might want to consider incorporating my post 109 Law of Attraction Affirmations For Beauty to Glow With!

Or, if you’ve got a baby on the way, you might like Peaceful and Positive Birth Affirmations.

Depending on your style, you might prefer to set this up like habit trackers. Or, you could try a line for each day, or as a more freeform and creative version that starts with blank pages and gets filled in with bubbles as the month goes on, more like a vision board. 

Either way – incorporate some color therapy or doodles to make it your own! 

Monthly affirmation bullet journal inspiration

If you don’t love to fill blank pages, consider a monthly spread where you set the affirmations for the month in advance. Just like you would prep a monthly calendar and your daily or weekly spreads in advance, you can also work ahead on an affirmation journal spread that you can use daily. 

If you like to say affirmations in the mirror in the morning or at night, this can be a great way to focus in on exactly how you want to be directing your mind. Making sure that you are using the affirmations over a longer period of time can help them sink in. 

I like to keep a post-it note inside my bullet journal where I write down affirmations for the following month as they come to me. This helps me use affirmations that I know I could have used the month before, so they feel really specific to me and really directly helpful. 

For this type of journal, you can use either affirmations from online or ones you write yourself. 

Reframe, rewrite, rework

A huge part of why you might choose to use a bullet journal is to take care of your mental health. So, for me, one way to do that is to pair my nightly gratitude log with minute or two writing my own affirmations. I am the first to admit that it isn’t always easy to write affirmations yourself! But after you’ve spent a few months reading various positive affirmations and checking out the way that other people write them, it becomes easier. 

Part of what I keep working on is reframing negative thoughts. I can be very self-critical, and taking a minute at the end of busy daily life to focus on identifying those negative thoughts and reframing them as a positive has helped me a lot. 

So, if I have a day where I am beating myself up over a mistake, thinking “I’m so careless”, or “I’m so sloppy” or “I’m the worst” or whatever, it can be really productive at the end of that day to sit down and think about the mistake and what traits I want to cultivate in myself or what perspective might have helped me to cope better with the error.

So if I was thinking something like, “I’m so careless”, I might write an affirmation for myself that flips that. Something like, “I take care with everything that matters to me” or “I manage my priorities with care and thought.” I’ve taken a bad thing that happened during my day and reframed it to help me grow into a better person. 

Other times, when I beat myself up for something that wasn’t within my control, I might instead try to frame it as, “I handle setbacks with grace”. 

The idea with affirmations is similar to the law of attraction. Our behavior often comes from the rules or assumptions that we have about ourselves. When we have a positive mindset about ourselves, we act accordingly. To tell you the truth, at times I really can be quite careless with my things. But saying, “Ugh, I hate how careless I am, I hate the way I always ruin my stuff, I hate how I always make a mess” just makes that belief stronger and more convincing. 

On the other hand, when I am working in my positive thinking journal regularly and writing these affirmations, I am telling myself a different story. This is changing the perspective that I have on myself, and that helps to change the behavior as well and helps me get closer to doing the things that I would really prefer to be doing. 

It’s a lot more effective to change your self-concept than to try to change a lot of different behaviors at once through willpower alone. And while it may feel like it’s going to take a long time—it actually goes faster than you think!

Writing prompts for affirmation bullet journal

If you’re having trouble getting started with affirmations for your affirmations bullet journal, here are some ideas:

• When (situation or event), I always (desired behavior).
• I’ve always been the kind of person who (desired trait or behavior).
• People always talk about how (desired trait) I am. 
• Being (desired trait) comes so naturally to me. 
• I’m grateful for the way I always (desired behavior). 
• My (desired trait) is always used to care for myself and others. 
• Because of my (desired trait), I always (desired behavior). 

I don’t use a bullet journal but I want to do this! How?

I’m biased but maybe you’d like a bullet journal! It’s a super fun way to be creative and center your focus where you want it to be, not wherever it gets pulled. Some people even do a manifestation bullet journal where they’re focusing on what they’re looking to manifest in their lives, and affirmations are a big part of that. 

But if you’re sure that the bullet journal isn’t for you, you could do a project like this in a regular notebook and use it like a self-esteem journal or self-development plan. 

Or — and I saw this on tiktok – make affirmation cards where you write them at night and then pull a card every morning to focus you and guide you for that day. I really like this idea and I want to try it. I think my personal spin on this would be to use the previous month’s affirmations to pull cards from while I’m writing this month’s…so like during March, I’m pulling the affirmations I wrote during February to incorporate them more deeply and build them up in my mind. 

And finally — you can do this as a more freeform artwork with a single piece of paper or even a canvas where you are adding affirmations daily, as they come up for you, or as you need them.

Writing affirmations that you can use all week and all month is as good for your mental health as bullet journaling itself! The opportunity to get in touch with how you’re feeling, be creative, and to come back to a meaningful goal repeatedly over the month is such a great way to focus in on the person you want to be. 

Got a plan for your affirmation bullet journal? Tell me in the comments below!

If you liked this post, you might also like:

• How to Use Acts of Self-Love to Improve Your Days and Your Life
• 10 Best Tips for Self-Care When You’re Struggling
• Self-Care Checklist for Your First or Best Self-Care Day Ever