May is Mental Health Awareness Month. This month and every month, it’s important to remember to be kind to your mind and take ample time to focus and reflect on your mental health as it’s essential to your overall well-being. In fact, prioritizing your mental health can lead to increased creativity, innovation, and productivity! Wondering how you can prioritize your mental health and organize your life in bold, beautiful color? Continue reading to learn more about some of the ways you can express yourself and improve your everyday routines centered around mental health with the help of creative Zebra Pen products. Be sure to also enter our Self-Care Giveaway with Elyse Burns and Better Day Books! 

Planning and Bullet Journaling 

Planning and bullet journaling both offer a unique space where creativity meets productivity. From to-do lists and shopping lists to tracking daily schedules and deadlines, utilizing a written planner or bullet journal helps you organize and prioritize tasks, manage your time better, and keep all your important information in one place. The process of transferring your thoughts to pen and paper not only keeps you more organized but also serves as a therapeutic tool that helps you declutter your mind! 

MILDLINER is a fan-favorite essential in the planning and bullet journaling community and helps make planning fun, colorful, and effective. Use the chisel tip of the MILDLINER Dual-Tip Creative Highlighter to highlight, create borders, or shade in areas. For smaller detail work, or to create monoline hand lettering and faux calligraphy, reach for the fine point tip. There are currently 36 colors available in the MILDLINER Dual-Tip Creative Highlighter and the pre-packaged 5 color MILDLINER packs are perfect for creating specialized monthly themes or filling in mood and habit trackers. 

 

Planner by @julies_plans on Instagram 

 

Mood and Habit Tracking 

Tracking your emotional patterns through colorful mood tracking is another powerful way to prioritize and take care of your mental health. Keeping a written mood tracker gives you a visual representation of your moods and can help you learn what’s affecting how you feel. Over time, your mood tracker insights will help give you a better understanding of what may be bringing your mood down so you can work to create a positive environment every day. To complement mood trackers, habit trackers can help you identify patterns and reasons for changes in mood and help you improve the progress of other tasks you want to stick to or avoid.  

The flexible, paint brush-like tip of our MILDLINER Dual-Tip Brush Pens is perfect for filling in mood trackers and the progress of your habits. They feature the same soft, mild MILDLINER ink that you love, don’t bleed through, and are excellent for layering. The brush tip is like an artist’s brush, allowing for thick or thin strokes while the bullet tip provides more consistent lines. 

Examples of MILDLINER colors you can use to represent different moods in your mood tracker: 

  • RED = Angry, Irritated, Annoyed 
  • ORANGE = Hopeful, Confident, Determined 
  • YELLOW = Happy, Excited, Positive 
  • GREEN = Peaceful, Calm, Relaxed 
  • BLUE = Sad, Upset, Hurt 
  • PURPLE = Worried, Stressed, Nervous 

Examples of things you may want to track in your habit tracker: 

  • Sleep 
  • Exercise 
  • Reading 
  • Journaling 
  • Bills/spending 
  • Household chores 
  • Water consumption

 

Mood Tracker by @mashaplans on Instagram 

 
Drawing and Coloring 

Art through drawing and coloring is a healthy way to promote self-expression, relax your brain, and relieve unwanted stress. Engaging in these creative activities takes your attention away from yourself and things that may be stressing you out and helps you focus on the present moment. When you draw or color before bed, you are also giving yourself an electronic-free routine that can help your body unwind for the night and improve your quality of sleep. 

Our MILDLINER Dual-Tip Creative Highlighters and Brush Pens are a great option for adding pops of vibrant color to your drawings and coloring book pages. For those who like to doodle, we recommend our CLiCKART Retractable Felt Tip Markers. With CLiCKART, you’ll never have to worry about missing marker caps or dried out ink again. These unique, capless markers feature new ink technology that absorbs moisture from the air, keeping the ink from drying out. Simply click and get right to creating vibrant doodles and creative expressions with the 36 beautiful colors in the CLiCKART collection.  

Doodles by @ashistudy on Instagram 


Reflective Journaling 

Reflective journaling is a process of writing down and analyzing your personal experiences, thoughts, and feelings within the journal to gain better insight into your life and give you different perspectives to look at things. You can write about any experience whether it be positive or negative, what that experience means or meant to you, and what you may have learned from it. Reflective journaling offers many benefits from stress relief, self-awareness, personal growth, and more.  

At Zebra Pen, we offer a wide variety of pens that are perfect for everyday writing and journaling. Featuring Zebra’s Rapid Dry Ink Technology, and a weighted metal barrel, the SARASA Grand Gel Retractable has quickly become a fan-favorite for planners and journalists. This pen is available in several barrel colors to match your personal style and is also refillable with our LV-Refill, so you never have to throw away your favorite pen again. If you like to highlight your writing, reach for our SARASA Mark ON Gel Retractable. This gel pen features a smudge-proof, water-resistant ink that dries in five seconds and doesn’t smear or smudge when used with your favorite highlighter like MILDLINER.  

 

Journal by @planninginfaith on Instagram 


Enter Our Self-Care Giveaway 

In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, we’re partnering with author Elyse Burns and publisher Better Day Books to give you the chance to win a prize pack that is sure to help you promote and facilitate self-care and better mental health. Two lucky winners will receive a copy of the On the Bright Side Coloring Book and On the Bright Side Sticker Journal by Elyse Burns (published by Better Day Books) in addition to a variety of creative Zebra Pen products to use with the books. Click the link to enter now: https://www.zebrapen.com/pages/mental-health-awareness-month-giveaway 

 

The Sticker Journal aids in wellness by providing over 100 planner pages, lists, grids, and trackers to help readers stay organized and set priorities while the Coloring Book facilitates relaxation to help you focus on the bright side! Add color and function to all your pages by pairing with the included fan-favorite Zebra Pen products. 

Two lucky winners will be chosen at random and win the following prizes: 

  • On the Bright Side Coloring Book by Elyse Burns (1) 
  • On the Bright Side Sticker Journal by Elyse Burns (1) 
  • MILDLINER Dual-Tip Brush Pen 25ct (1) 
  • Creative Note Taking 12ct Set that includes MILDLINER Dual-Tip Creative Highlighters, CLiCKART Retractable Felt Tip Markers, and a SARASA Mark ON Gel Retractable (1) 
  • Gold SARASA Grand Gel Retractable (1) 
  • Zebra Desktop Stand (1) 

Follow Elyse Burns and Better Day Books on Instagram: @elyssebreannedesign @better_day_books! 

 *Must be 18 years or older and US based in order to win. Giveaway is subject to official terms and conditions. Entry period ends 5/10/24 at 11:59 PM EST. Winner will be contacted via our official Zebra Pen email account. Please be mindful of accounts or websites that may try to impersonate Zebra Pen to solicit your personal information. Good luck! 

 

For more creative Zebra Pen tips and inspiration, be sure to check out our other blogs and follow us on our official Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok accounts.