Make Bearable less overwhelming.

As a community of people with multiple chronic conditions, we’re more likely than anyone to become overwhelmed. Because of this, we’re not only prioritising making the app less overwhelming, but we’ve also reached out to the community for their advice about making Bearable easier to use.

A member of our Reddit community r/BearableApp shared this advice:

I pared it down to the most important things to me to track based on my goals for the app. A few suggestions:

1. 1. You don’t have to use all the options! If you scroll all the way to the bottom (at least on Android) and hit “customize homepage,” you can remove the things you don’t need/want.
      
      
   2. In the symptoms and factors section, you can turn on/off the symptoms you want to track. Just pick the ones most relevant to you and turn off the rest.
      
      
   3. I also find it easier/quicker to mark the severity of a symptom, rather than the time of day, even if that makes my correlations less useful.

A member of our team suggested that they’d found it helpful to:

1. 1. Determine which of my symptoms are most interfering with my life i.e. my ability to work, socialise, function, do chores, get out of bed, etc. and then only focus on tracking these until I’ve found a way to make them more manageable.
      
      
   2. Decide what the outcome for these symptoms needs to be i.e. self-management, diagnosis, identifying triggers, etc. as this will determine what factors I need to track e.g. Meds, Notes & Questions, Lifestyle changes, Allergens, Common triggers, etc.
      
      
   3. Once I’ve identified my priority symptoms, my desired outcome, and my factors, then I just hide everything else until these symptoms are more manageable. At which point, I’ll run through these steps again.

Essentially, it’s important to only track what’s most useful or important to you. Everything else can be hidden until you need it.