Download The Mighty's Self-Care Advent Calendar

I’ve always loved advent calendars, but I appreciate them 100 times more as an adult. Yes, getting chocolate — or whatever comes in your advent calendar — every single day is great, but what I love more is how it forces me to “treat” my self on a daily basis.

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Like many others, I’m not great at putting myself or my needs first. Having something I can look forward to, like an advent calendar, helps me prioritize treating myself kindly. And that’s what inspired December’s My Mighty Month challenge: daily acts of self-care and kindness.

When we started My Mighty Month in January, we dubbed 2017 the year of self-care, and what a year it’s been. Over the past 11 months, we’ve tackled self-care topics like mindfulness, happiness, and journaling. This month we’re asking you to tie together everything you’ve learned for the ultimate self-care challenge.

Like every month, we have tools to help guide you along on your self-care journey. This month, we designed an advent calendar that gives you a new self-care task per day based on one of the previous 11 My Mighty Month challenges. For those of you who’ve forgotten, didn’t start at the beginning or are just joining us, here are the previous challenges.

• January: Journaling
• February: Cultivating Happiness
• March: Self-Confidence
• April: Kindness
• May: Mindfulness
• June: Boring Self-Care
• July: Staying Hydrated
• August: Building Healthy Sleep Habits
• September: Staying Active
• October: Realistic Apologies
• November: Gratitude  

Starting December 1, we’ll be giving you one self-care task per day based on these 11 challenges. You can follow along either one of two ways. For those who like a hands-on project, you can download and make our advent calendar. Or, if you prefer something more digital, you can follow My Mighty Month on Facebook, where we’ll be posting the prompt for that day.

To make your advent calendar, you’ll need to download both an advent calendar front and advent calendar back. Once you’ve printed those pages, you’ll need to cut out each door on the advent calendar front page. Don’t cut the whole door off, just cut along the top, bottom and right sides. This way, when you reach that day, all you have to do is open the door. Once you’ve cut all of the doors, glue or tape the front page to the back page.

If this is difficult for you, ask a friend or family member to help you assemble your calendar. Alternatively, you can just cut out each of the task boxes on the advent calendar back page, fold them in half and pick a new item every day out of a jar or hat.

If you don’t want to make a calendar, you can also save the pdf to your phone or follow along on Facebook.

To the thousands of people who’ve joined our challenges, we hope they have helped you prioritize self-care. Thanks for joining us this year. We hope to see you back in 2018 for January’s challenge.