Why do I need to create an account?

Currently, we require you to create an account so that we can do the following things:

    1. Restore your data in a rare case of data loss
    2. Allow you to change or update your email address
    3. Allow you to change the device you use to access your Bearable account

If you have concerns about data privacy, you can view our privacy policy, which outlines all of the ways in which we protect you and your data. This includes the fact that we don’t sell data and are not required to comply with US criminal subpoenas for the disclosure of data.

https://bearable.app/privacy-policy/

Note. Many Bearable community members use ‘burner’ or ‘throwaway’ accounts, and we have no problem with you doing the same. 

👋 Still have questions?

Let us know by contacting support@bearable.app and a member of the Bearable team can help you with anything you need.

Bearable Free vs Premium Features

The main features that can be used for free in Bearable are:

    • Unlimited custom Symptom tracking
    • Unlimited Other Factors tracking
    • Unlimited Mood, Energy, and Sleep tracking
    • Unlimited custom emotions/feelings in the Mood section
    • Unlimited Bowel Movements tracking
    • Unlimited Nutrition tracking
    • Unlimited Medication tracking
    • Unlimited Reminders
    • Unlimited Significant Events tracking
    • Default Health Measurement tracking
    • Default Custom Ratings (Productivity & Motivation)
    • Limited number of Goals
    • Limited number of Experiments
    • Unlimited Symptom & Mood Notes
    • Trends reports for the past 30 days
    • Comparison graph for the past 30 days (to find correlations & patterns)
    • Calendar and Timeline view
    • Widgets
    • Export all of your data to .csv for manual analysis (e.g. in Excel) or using AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT)

 

The main features of Bearable Premium are:

    • The Impacts tab (to view correlation reports)
    • Correlations grid (to compare factor correlations across multiple health outcomes)
    • The option to view 60, 90, and 365 days of data in your reports
    • Unlimited custom Goals
    • Unlimited custom Experiments
    • Unlimited Extra Notes
    • Unlimited Gratitudes
    • Custom Health Measurements (useful for custom scales and metrics)

 

👋 Still have questions?

Let us know by contacting support@bearable.app and a member of the Bearable team can help you with anything you need.

Track multiple times per day in the health check-in.

If the health check-in currently only lets you enter a single symptom or factor entry for the entire day, you can change this by:

    1. Going to the Symptoms and/or Other Factors section on your home screen
    2. Then tap on the … icon to open the menu for either section
    3. Then tap on ‘time periods OFF’ 
    4. It should now show you ‘time periods ON’
    5. Tap in the darkened area around the menu to return to the home screen
    6. Open the daily check-in
    7. You should now see Symptom and/or Factor time periods (pre, am, mid, and pm)

👋 Still have questions?

Let us know by contacting support@bearable.app and a member of the Bearable team can help you with anything you need.

Customise medication reminders

Currently, medication scheduling options are based on taking the medication on specific days of the week every week, e.g. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. 

However, for people who take their meds less frequently or, for example, every 3 days, there’s a workaround solution using the Goals feature.

For specific meds that require a more nuanced schedule:

    1. Turn on the Goals section by tapping the ‘customise homepage’ button and then toggling the switch next to the Goals option.

    2. Tap the + icon in the Goals section of your homescreen.

    3. Tap the ‘create custom goal’ button.

    4. Name your medication reminder.

    5. Tap on ‘everyday’ to select one of the following options:

      1. Every x days, e.g. every 3 days
      2. Specific day,s e.g. Monday, Tuesday, and Friday
      3. Just today
      4. Just tomorrow
      5. Just a future date

    6. Set the time of day you take your medication.

    7. Set the time you’d like to be reminded to take the medication.

    8. Tap the ‘confirm’ button.

    9. This will now appear at the top of your home screen.

Note. We are hoping to integrate similar tools for reminders into the medication section in the near future.

👋 Still have questions?

Let us know by contacting support@bearable.app and a member of the Bearable team can help you with anything you need.

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. 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. 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.

👋 Still have questions?

Let us know by contacting support@bearable.app and a member of the Bearable team can help you with anything you need.

Is there a Browser or Desktop version of Bearable?

No. Currently, Bearable is only available on mobile and tablet devices. 

Whilst we do understand the potential benefits of a desktop or browser version of Bearable, our priority has to be focused on first making the features of the app as helpful as possible. 

As a small, essentially independent team, we make product decisions based on feedback and votes from our community and – whilst a desktop/browser version of Bearable is a popular request – it’s never the top request from within the community vs. for example, dedicated pain tracking tools, options for PDF export, improved medication and nutrition features, etc.

We do hope to be able to work on a desktop or browser-based version in the future. We’re likely to get there faster if you tell people about the app, leave positive reviews, and/or subscribe.

If you’re a MacBook user, it’s possible to download Bearable to your laptop/desktop via the Apple App Store, but this is still just the app as opposed to a dedicated desktop app. To view the app at a bigger size on your MacBook, open Bearable and then use the top navigation on your desktop to click on Window, and then click on Zoom.

👋 Still have questions?

Let us know by contacting support@bearable.app and a member of the Bearable team can help you with anything you need.

Are blank entries incorporated into insights?

If something is left blank, then it’s just not included in your correlations/reports. 

However, there is one exception to this: Binary Factors (but not variable Factors) that are left blank are assumed not to have happened, rather than being blank. That said, we are working on introducing a feature that lets you mark binary factors as either ‘blank’ or ‘none’. 

If you’re tracking over the long term, the odd missed data point also shouldn’t have too big of an impact on your correlations either.

👋 Still have questions?

Let us know by contacting support@bearable.app and a member of the Bearable team can help you with anything you need.

What does ‘marking day complete’ do?

The main goal of this feature is to improve insights by making it easier to understand when there were days where your data was incomplete. 

However, there are a couple of other reasons to use this feature, too:

    1. Sometimes you might forget to complete some information and want to know whether to go back to yesterday and fill something in, so you can quickly see on your calendar which days have missing info.

    2. You can use the Day Complete toggle to get an update on any emerging trends and new correlations.

👋 Still have questions?

Let us know by contacting support@bearable.app and a member of the Bearable team can help you with anything you need.

What are all the different scales used in Bearable?

The Mood & Energy sections use a 1 to 10 scale. Unlike the symptoms section, these are both single metrics, and so we felt it made sense to allow a greater range for them as the potential for overwhelm is much lower.

The Symptoms section uses a 0 to 4 scale (none, mild, moderate, severe, and unbearable). We chose this scale because for people with multiple health conditions, each with multiple symptoms, showing repeated 0 to 10 scales became overwhelming. 

The Health Measurements section uses customisable ratings which can incorporate anything from 0 to 20k steps, a 0 – 10 pain scale, blood pressure readings, heart rate measures, etc. 

The Bowel Movements section uses the Bristol Stool chart (type 1 to type 7), which is a widely used clinical scale that represents different types of Bowel Movement (e.g. lumpy, smooth, watery, etc.)

The Sleep Quality and Custom Ratings sections both use a 1 to 5 scale. For custom ratings, this was chosen so that, for someone with many custom ratings, the section wouldn’t become overwhelming. This is different to the severity scale used in the symptoms section, which only measures the worsening of a symptom, because custom ratings can be used for positive measures (e.g. Productivity). For sleep quality, this was chosen so as not to dominate the Sleep section with e.g. a 10-point scale or a clinical 28 question survey. 

Note. If you’d like to track Sleep Quality using a more granular scale, e.g. 0 to 10 or even 0 to 100, you can do so by creating a custom Health Measurement. Remember to select ‘next day’ in the Impacts tab if you want to view which factors correlate with changes in this metric.

Within the Other Factors section, it’s possible to create Binary factors, which you can select if the Factor happened vs. didn’t happen or Variable scales, which you can select if you want to log the amount that something happened. There are two types of Variable scale, ‘little to a lot’ and ‘low to high’. Variable scales allow you to view correlations between the amount by which a factor occurred (e.g. lots of coffee) and how it impacts changes in symptom severity. This is helpful when, for example, identifying your tolerance level for something such as the amount of caffeine you can consume before your sleep is negatively impacted.

👋 Still have questions?

Let us know by contacting support@bearable.app and a member of the Bearable team can help you with anything you need.