The WRAP Plan: Daily Maintenance Plan
Continuing our discussion about The WRAP (Wellness Recovery Action Plan), I would like to say a word or two about the second part of the plan: The Daily Maintenance Plan. Step one of The WRAP deals with the development of a Wellness Toolbox and determining what activities or things make us feel better under various situations brought about by illness. The 'Daily Maintenance Plan' helps us to dig a little deeper and narrow down just what ‘doing well’ looks like and the specific things we need to do or not do in order to stay well. And so, without further ado, ‘The Daily Maintenance Plan’.
Personalize your plan
To re-state, The WRAP plan is based around the idea that there are no limits to recovery from an illness. Anything is possible. That said, the plan itself is entirely your own and therefore 'The Daily Maintenance Plan' should follow your daily plan and has nothing to do with your responsibilities to OTHERS. This is your plan, folks; personalize it. The first question to consider when creating your Daily Maintenance Plan is what do you feel like when you are well? What is the best way to describe yourself under ideal conditions? This will help set a baseline for later, when things may not be going so well. This description of yourself can be organized in any way you like and does not need to read like poetry if ye doesn’t have the poet within ye…;-). Once you have determined what ‘well’ looks like, you can move on to the next question: ‘What do you need to do for yourself every day to keep yourself feeling as well as possible?’.
What are the things that you NEED to do to keep well? This question is positioned to find out the mandatory items for your wellness (diet, exercise, meds, hygiene etc.), because the next question for the Daily Maintenance plan is, ‘What do you need to do less often than every day to maintain overall wellness and sense of wellbeing’. We need to have just the bare facts for the NEED TO DO category. In my WRAP plan I have things like meditate, journal and listen to music for the ‘less often than every day’ question. So now we have a pretty good picture of what WELL looks like and what we need to do to maintain a picture of health. The last part is to help keep you accountable. ‘What are the things you know you NEED to do to sustain wellness, but FOR SOME REASON YOU DO NOT DO THEM?’.
Delving into our illness
As you can see, The Daily Maintenance Plan section of The WRAP program is used to help you determine what actions you do take and what actions you SHOULD take to maintain wellness. You know what your wellness looks like because this has already been determined. At this point in The WRAP Plan, we have a pretty good idea where we stand on a basic level and we are ready to delve into our illness a little more, with the hopes that this very comprehensive approach will provide some benefit to our recovery from IBS or whatever illness/problem you choose to use the plan for. We will talk about triggers in the next article about The WRAP Plan.
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