5 Minutes, 3 Bullets, 1 Lighter Heart

Or: How I stopped spiralling and started noticing the okay things

Let me tell you something the world doesn't want you to know: you don't need a

an hour of yoga poses or meditation, or a vision board the size of a garage door (although those things are great and I support them!), or even a personality transplant to feel more hopeful.

You need five minutes and a pen.

I know. It sounds like the kind of thing someone says right before they hand you a smoothie recipe with seventeen ingredients you don't own. But I promise you—this is simpler than that. And it works. Not in a "I've achieved enlightenment and no longer care about traffic" way. In a "huh, today wasn't a total loss" way.

Here's the practice...

Every evening, before you scroll yourself into worrying about things you cannot control, write down three bullet points:

• One good thing that happened. 

It does not have to be a winning lottery ticket. It can be that your coffee was actually the right temperature. It can be that a friend texted you a photo of their dog wearing a tiny hat. It can be that you remembered to buy more paper towels before you ran out, which, frankly, is a level of adulting that deserves applause.

• One thing you did right. 

Not what you should have done. What you did do. You got out of bed. You listened to someone who needed to be heard. You didn't say that thing in the meeting that you really wanted to say but would have regretted. You drank water. That counts. We're not grading on perfection here; we're grading on showing up.

• One thing you're looking forward to. 

Tomorrow morning's coffee. The show you're watching where the main character finally needs to figure out their life. A walk. Absolutely nothing. Looking forward to nothing is underrated.

Here's the sneaky part: your brain is not neutral territory.

Your brain has a hard-wired-in negative bias. It wants to scan for threats. It wants to replay that awkward thing you said in 2014. It wants to look at the news and conclude that the world is a dumpster fire wearing a fake tan that looks orange, pretending to be fine.

You can counter that unfortunate hard-wired-in negative bias with this practice I just shared. AND, it's toxic positivity (I seriously loathe positivity on steroids. I need to write another blog post on that). This practice is not "good vibes only" while the roof leaks. This is recalibration.

When you write these three bullets, you are not pretending the hard things don't exist. You are simply telling your brain: Yes, and also this happened. And also this mattered. And also tomorrow holds something.

Five minutes. Three lines. A pen that feels good in your hand.

If you do this for one week, you will start to notice something strange. You'll find yourself walking through your day looking for your bullet points. You'll think, Oh, that moment—I'm putting that in tonight. And suddenly, you're not just surviving the day. You're curating it.

A quick word on format because I know you're busy:

Bullet journaling gets a reputation for being an art project that requires calligraphy skills and a ruler. That's not what this is.

This is messy. This is scratched onto the back of a receipt if that's what you have. This is three dots on a page, no special notebook required.

The bullet points are not demanding. They're not judging your handwriting. They're just there, waiting for you to fill them with small, true things.

To the woman reading this who feels heavy:

I know. The world is worrisome. You are not imagining it. Hope doesn't always feel available. Sometimes it feels like a luxury you can't afford.

But hope is not actually a feeling. Hope is a practice. And practices are built in small moments. Five minutes. Three bullets. One day at a time.

You don't have to be optimistic about the whole world. Just optimistic enough to write down that your soup was good and that you handled something with grace and that tomorrow you might sit in the sun for a few minutes.

That's enough. That's genuinely enough.

Your turn. Tonight. Find a scrap of paper. Write three bullets. See what happens.

With ink and hope,

Jill