Focus on Today
My son spent months curled in bed, shaking with pain. We designed 1step2life to be the tool we needed then to help him focus on taking his life back.
The Daily Check In is the core of the 1step2life app.
The Weekly Check In grounds you by helping you reflect on where you are now and what you want to do next.
The Daily Check In is where you record your emotions, pain, and activities.
It serves three primary purposes:
- To remind you of all you are doing.
- To prompt you to reflect on how you might expand your activities.
- To create a record so you can visualize the links between your mood, activities, and pain.
The Daily Check In is the app’s foundation – the ‘step’ in one step to life.
Why log emotions?
Physical and emotional healh are reciprocally related. Happiness dampens the perception of pain and pain makes it harder to engage in the kinds of activities that foster happiness.
For all of those reasons, the 1step2life app lets you log both your positive and negative emotions as well as overall happiness.
Why positive and negative emotions? Because people are complicated. We can be excited and proud, scared and guilty all on the same day. It’s important to recognize your negative feelings as well as the good.
Should you log pain?
It depends on what helps you the most.
Some clinicians believe that asking about pain makes you more aware of discomfort, increasing pain over time. They argue that you should ignore pain and try to focus on other things.
Other people find it helpful to keep a record of pain to look at its patterning, to identify triggers, and to log progress. I know that when I carefully analyzed a pain log I kept for my son, we found that there was a strong relationship between his pain and exercise. His migraines were half as frequent during semesters he exercised five days a week. And he could almost guarantee a migraine on the second day of being sedentary. We never would have know that without a pain log.
On the other hand, if your pain is constant, logging every day is not informative.
1step2life gives you the option. You can log pain every day, every few days, every week, or never. If you are a caregiver and your child is in pain, they may choose never to log pain, but you can keep a record for them.
It’s up to you.
Logging activities
Mindfully choosing where to use your energy and how to spend your time helps you gain autonomy and control over your life.
You can log several classes of activities:
- Self care, like showering and tidying up.
- Social and fun activities, like texting, making music, or reading.
- Caring for self and others – pets, chores, exercising, and reducing stress.
- Meeting the goals you set for yourself.
Each activity contributes to your overall GO (Getting Out) score and will become part of what is graphed in the Visualization function.
Should I try to do as much as possible?
NO! No one can do everything every day.
Instead, use the Daily Check In to prioritize what is important to YOU and to inspire you to think about your own goals.
We suggest prioritizing those things that will have the biggest positive impact on your life.
The Daily Check In can tell you if you’re spending a lot of energy doing things that aren’t important to you, so you don’t have enough left for the ones that are.
Use the Daily Check In to mindfully review activities and find a balance that is healthy for you today. Over time, you may find that balance changes.
Remember – relaxing, sleeping, and stress reduction are important aspects of healthy functioning. Doing more is not always doing better.
Check out the 1step2life app!
Start where you are. Set your own goals. Take back your life. A tool for tracking goals, emotions, and success, not just logging pain. And the only app that has a mode specifically for parents, partners, and other carers that supports effective coaching and strong relationships.
1step2life 