You’ve just signed up for your free trial with Bearable and we want to make sure that you know about the most useful features that you now have access to.
🤔1. Discover what’s impacting individual health outcomes.
Factor Effect Reports show you the correlation between your factors and your health outcomes. This helps you to identify the habits, activities, and treatments that are improving or worsening your Mood, Symptoms, Sleep and Energy levels.
📊 2. See how your choices and habits impact multiple health outcomes at a glance.
The Favourite Correlations chart at the top of the Insights page shows you how a Factor (e.g. Caffeine) correlates with multiple different health outcomes. This helps you to quickly find the activities, habits, or treatments that have the biggest net positive or net negative on your health.
💡3. Identify trends and patterns in your symptoms.
AdvancedSymptom reports show you a breakdown of the frequency, trend, average occurrence and the average severity of individual symptoms. You can also view symptom-specific Factor Effect Reports and a list of commonly occurring symptoms.
🚀 4. Track anything!
The Custom Ratings section lets you create your own metrics to rate on a 1 to 5 scale, from productivity and focus to anything else you can think of. Get creative!
✏️ 5. Keep track of other useful things.
Need to keep notes to share with a Doctor or Therapist? Want to keep a private digital Journal or write daily Affirmations? Have something to track that doesn’t fit anywhere else in the app? Just need to keep a to-do list because of brain fog? Extra notes has you covered!
🚑 6. Understand the impact of one-off events on your health.
Bearable Premium gives you the option to track an unlimited number of Significant Events so that you can analyse their impact using the landscape graph. For example, the Significant Events feature can be used to track:
Appointments with your Doctor.
Birthdays and Anniversaries.
Changes in relationship status.
Changes in employment.
Acute illnesses.
👋 Still have questions about your free trial?
Let us know by contacting support@bearable.app and a member of the Bearable team can help with anything you need.
You might have seen the long list of features that you get with a Premium subscription in the app, but at its core, Bearable Premium helps you to achieve the following things:
⚡ Find correlations faster.
Subscribing to Bearable gives you access to Advanced Insights reports for Mood, Symptom Score, Symptoms, Sleep, Energy Levels, and Factors. These reports help you to visualise your data in a number of ways including showing you how your Factors correlate with changes in your health so that you no longer have to find these correlations manually.
🔭 View health trends over longer periods of time.
Bearable Premium allows you to compare your health data over different periods of time, including 30, 60, 90, and 365-day comparisons. This means that longer-term users can understand not only how their health is trending and changing month vs. month but also quarter vs. quarter and year vs. year.
📉 Identify short-term health trends.
Weekly Reports show you how your health has changed in the last 7 days vs. the previous 7 days and can be especially helpful for identifying health problems before they become too severe. Bearable subscribers can add up to 20 metrics to their report, including custom ratings, symptoms, and health measurements.
💡 Understand non-health outcomes.
If you’re someone that wants to understand changes in their productivity, concentration, work-life balance, or any metrics that aren’t directly related to your health, then custom ratings are for you. You can create as many custom ratings as you like, track them using a 1-5 scale, and view how they change week to week using the Weekly Report.
🔍 Track your health in more detail.
Bearable Premium members have access to the Extra Notes feature. This can be used for writing therapy, a place to keep affirmations, notes to share with your doctor, to-do lists, or even just to keep a regular diary.
✊ Take more control of your health.
Favourite Correlations make it possible for Bearable subscribers to view the impact of Factors across an array of health metrics. This is particularly helpful when you want to identify the broader impact of a Factor on your health. For example, a Factor that improves Sleep might not also improve Symptoms, Mood, or Energy Levels. Favourite Correlations make it possible to identify Factors with the greatest net positive outcome.
🤝 Help other people to manage their health.
Bearable was launched in 2020 by our founder James after he used an early version of Bearable to manage chronic Migraines. We’re a purpose-driven team whose primary aim is to help people to manage their symptoms better and to give people more control over their health. By subscribing to Bearable, you help us to create new features, maintain and improve the app, and find even more ways to support and advocate for the wider community of people with health issues.
👋 Still have questions about Bearable Premium?
You can contact the Bearable team for support by emailing us on support@bearable.app with any questions you have about the app, interpreting your results, or even just understanding what to track.
Thanks for subscribing to Bearable, we want to let you know about a few features that are especially useful to longer-term Bearable users.
🗓️ View health data over longer periods of time.
Once you’ve been using Bearable for longer than 30 days it can be helpful to view your data over longer periods of time. Use the 60-day, 90-day, and 12-month options on the insights tab to view to get an even bigger picture of your health.
🆘 Get support from the Bearable team.
From time to time you might run into trouble with Bearable. If something goes wrong with your account, if you have any questions or concerns, or just need a hand using one of the features, you can contact support@bearable.app and a member of our team will be available to help.
👋 Get advice and share your thoughts on Reddit.
Many of our longest-standing users are active on our subreddit r/BearableApp, which is where everything began just over 2 years ago. It’s mostly a community for chatting about the app and we also use it to get feedback and ideas about new features. If you want to be involved in shaping the future of Bearable then come and join us on Reddit.
💬 Chat with other Bearable users on Discord.
If you’re looking for support or advice from other people with health issues, or even just want a friendly person to chat to, our Discord community exists to cover a broad array of non-Bearable topics. We also share updates about beta testing here if you want to be the first to try out new features.
✋Suggest and vote on new features.
After a few weeks of using Bearable, you probably have some excellent ideas about how we could improve the app and we want to hear them! One of the main ways that we make decisions about features for the app is by reviewing user submissions, votes, and comments on our Public Roadmap.
👋 Still have some questions about your subscription?
Factor is a term that we use to group together habits, events, and actions that happen in your life. For example, drinking a cup of coffee, going to work, meditating, arguing with your partner, and spending time outdoors are all Factors. You can think of them as anything that happens in your life but that doesn’t belong to one of the other categories in the app such as Mood, Emotions, Sleep, Symptoms, or Energy. Bearable analyses your Factor data to show you how different Factors correlate with changes in your health. You can access these reports in the Insights tab.
📈 2. What are Custom Ratings?
Custom Ratings were introduced to help users track health outcomes that don’t fall under the categories of Mood, Sleep, Symptoms, or Energy and that aren’t a Factor. For example, Productivity and Focus are interesting measures of performance and well-being that don’t naturally fit anywhere else in the app. It’s important that you don’t feel like you have to use them, but if you’re interested in correlations that aren’t directly related to your health, Custom Ratings is a helpful tool.
🔍 3. What should I track?
To start with, try to focus on tracking as few things as possible. This makes it easier to stay on top of logging your factors. We’ve written a short article about what to track and if you’d still like some help getting set up you can also contact support@bearable.app or visit one of our online communities for the advice of other Bearable users.
🔭 4. How do I find correlations?
There are a few different ways to do this, so we wrote a short article to help you find useful correlations. In short, if you visit your Insights tab and rotate your phone, you’ll be shown a graph where you can compare your factors to your health metrics. Premium users can also click into any report from the Insights tab to find Factor Effect reports.
✋ 5. How do I get support?
If you need help with anything in Bearable we have a support team that you can contact via email on support@bearable.app. Our support desk is managed by Eoghan a real human person and member of the Bearable team, so you’re in good hands. You can also get support from other Bearable users by joining one of our online communities on Reddit, Facebook, or Discord.
Very occasionally, some users find that they open Bearable and for some reason, they no longer have access to their premium features.
The easiest way to restore your subscription.
Navigate to your Profile page in the top left-hand corner of your home screen.
Click the ‘Restore Premium Purchase’ link.
If this doesn’t work, scroll to the bottom of the page and click ‘log out’.
Close the app.
Re-open the app.
Log into your Bearable account using the same method as when you signed up e.g. Email, Facebook, Google, Apple, etc.
Make sure to use the same email address that’s associated with your Bearable Premium subscription (if you’re not sure you can contact support@bearable.app for help).
Another way to restore your subscription.
Visit your ‘Profile & Settings’ page and tap on the ‘Upgrade for all features’ button.
Scroll down to the bottom of the subscription screen.
Under the section titled I have already paid for Bearable Premium click the ‘tap here’ button to restore your purchase. If you don’t see this option, there may also be a ‘Restore’ button below the pricing options on this screen.
Some other things that might help.
If your subscription has still not been restored after following the steps above, there are a few other things that you can try:
Make sure that you’re logged in with the correct email address.
Make sure you’ve logged in using the same method you signed up with. For example, if you originally signed up with Facebook, you’ll need to make sure that you’re currently logged in using Facebook.
Make sure that you have an internet connection.
Make sure that you have no firewalls, restrictions, or settings preventing Bearable from accessing the internet.
Still can’t restore your subscription?
If you’re still having problems restoring your subscription, our support team can help. You can contact them on support@bearable.app
Note. The more info you share with the support team, including which of the above steps you’ve attempted, the faster they’ll be able to help you to restore your subscription.
💡 Note. We’ve recently introduced a dedicated period tracking feature to Bearable and Period-related Factors – such as the phase of your cycle – can now be tracked as part of this feature. You can learn more about our Period Tracking tools here.
A significant number of Bearable users have requested, upvoted, and given feedback on menstrual cycle features for the app. We’ve heard you and are beginning to work on designing these features. BUT – until they’re released – here are a few workarounds for understanding how your cycle affects your health outcomes like symptoms, mood, sleep, and energy.An example of how tracking by day or by phase might look as factors.
👉 Using the existing period tracking section.
Bearable already has the basics covered with a default period tracking group in the Factors section of the app. You can turn this on by clicking the ‘add/edit’ button in the menu in the top right corner and then toggling the “reproductive” section to on.
📅 Tracking phases of your cycle.
This essentially already exists in the default period tracking section. However, you might want to edit the names of the phases to suit your needs. For example:
Phase: Menstruating
Phase: Follicular
Phase: Ovulating
Phase: Luteal
Phase: Pre-Menstrual
You can then tap these factors depending on where you are in your cycle to see how they correlate with other health outcomes. Tracking your phases might also help you to track any correlation with the hormones produced during each phase.
🕰️ Tracking days of your cycle.
Tracking the day of your cycle might be a good idea if you want a more granular look at how your health outcomes are affected by your period.To track days of your cycle, click the Add/Edit button in the menu in the top right corner of Factors and add a custom factor for each day of your cycle. It’s a bit tedious to input these factors but it should only take minutes at most.It might also be useful to track factors such as “late period” so as to be able to keep track of any irregularities in your cycle.Note. You’ll need to track 3 cycles before you’ll see insights for day-of-cycle factors.An example of how your menstrual cycle symptoms might look.
🤒 Tracking Menstrual Cycle Symptoms
Each phase comes with its own symptoms and you can either track these under a single symptom group OR as phase-specific symptom groups. To do this, open the symptoms section on your home page, click the ‘add/edit’ button in the menu in the top right corner, then click add symptom group, andname your new symptom group “Menstrual Cycle Symptoms” or begin by adding a phase such as “Menstrual Phase Symptoms”. Menstrual & Follicular Phase symptoms can include:
cramps
tender breasts
bloating
mood swings
irritability
headaches
tiredness
low back pain
Ovulation phase symptoms can include:
a slight rise in basal body temperature
thicker discharge
The Luteal phase which is when you’re likely to experience symptoms of PMS can include:
bloating
breast swelling, pain, or tenderness
mood changes
headache
weight gain
changes in sexual desire
food cravings
trouble sleeping
🤔 Tracking Menstrual Cycle Related Factors.
You may also want to track the impact of menstrual cycle-related factors on your health outcomes. These might include things like:
Contraception type
Contraception use
Flow
Sexual activity
Pregnancy and pregnancy tests
You can add these to the Period section of Factors on your homepage using the +Add/Edit button at the bottom of the section.
📊 Viewing menstrual cycle insights.
To view correlations between menstrual cycle factors you can:
Visit the insights tab, rotate your phone, click the button in the top right corner to highlight factors on the graph, and plot health outcomes along the x-axis using the buttons below the graph.
Visit the insights tab and scroll down to the factor count (days) section. Tap to open the menstrual cycle or period section and click on any factor to see how it correlates with mood, sleep, symptoms, and energy scores.
At Bearable we’re big fans of helping people to find what habits work best for their health and that’s going to be different from person to person.
Keeping track of “bad” habits like caffeine, sugar, alcohol, tobacco, etc. Is a great way to understand how each of these things impacts your mood, sleep, energy, and symptoms.
To get a good understanding of the effect they have it’s important to track how often the habits occur (frequency) as well as how much you consume (quantity).
This will give you better quality insights that help you to find the right balance for you.
📈 Tracking “bad” habits by quantity and frequency:
There are two main ways to do this:
One: Tracking habits as factors.
The easiest way to track a “bad” habit is to create a custom factor group called something like “bad habits”. You’ll then be able to add customer factors to that group that track a range of behaviours e.g.
Drank Alcohol: Lots
Drank Alcohol: Moderate
Drank Alcohol: Little
An example of how your “bad” habits might look as Factors.
Two: Tracking habits as Health Measurements.
The more detailed way to track a “bad” habit is using the Health Measurements section (add it to your homepage using the Edit button at the bottom of your homepage). You can create a custom measurement by clicking “add/edit” in the menu in the top right corner of the Health Measurements section and then clicking “Create Custom Measurement” on the next screen. This will allow you to more specifically track your habit by units, millilitres, grams, etc. For example:
The number of units OR number of bottles of alcohol that you drank
The weight of tobacco OR number of cigarettes you smoked
The amount of coffee in ml OR the number of cups you drank
An example of how your “bad” habits might look as Health Measurements.
🔎 Where can you view the effect of these habits on your health?
There are a few different ways to view how your habits correlate with your health outcomes. The main ways include:
The Factor Effect Report
If you have a Premium Subscription you can click into ANY of the advanced insights reports for mood, symptoms, sleep, and energy. Then scroll down to the factor effect on report and click the arrows at the top of the section to view the “bad habits” factors. You’ll be shown the percentage change in your health outcomes that correlate with your “bad habits”.
An example of the Factor Effect of “bad” habits on Symptom Score.
The Comparison Graph
If you use Bearable for free, you can look for correlations between factors and health outcomes using the comparison graph. To access this, go to the Insights tab, wait for the screen to load, and then rotate your phone by 90 degrees. A new chart will appear where you can plot and compare:
Health measurements using the buttons below the chart
Mood, Energy, Sleep, and Symptoms using the buttons below the chart
Factors such as “Drank Alcohol: Lots” using the button in the top right of the screen
An example of how to plot Health Measurements, Factors, and Moods.
On Your Timeline
You can also view your factors and health measurements (and any notes you take relating to them) by using the timeline report on your homepage. Just click the timeline icon in the top right-hand corner of the app and sort the list using the buttons at the top of the timeline.
An example of how “bad” habits Health Measurements would appear in your timeline.
We recently reached out to our users that live with a variety of Mental Health Conditions to ask them how they use Bearable. The advice in this article is adapted from their recommendations as well as some useful tips of our own.
🛠️ Customise your symptoms and factors
One user simply recommends that you “Personalize EVERYTHING”.What they mean by this, is that you should create symptoms and factors that are unique to your mental health conditions.
To customize your symptoms:
Open the symptoms section on your home screen
Click the ‘add/edit’ button in the menu in the top right corner of the symptoms section.
In this section, you can show, hide, edit, and delete existing symptom groups
You can also add your own symptom groups using the Add Symptom Group button.
Name your group (e.g. Anxiety, Depression, BPD, etc.) and it’ll appear at the top of the Symptom Groups.
Click into your Symptom Group to add your symptoms to it
These will appear on your homepage in the Symptoms section where you can rate each symptom by severity
❗ Track the effect of significant events
“Use the significant events feature for anything that might have a big impact.”
You can track one-off or infrequent events that you feel might impact your health using the Significant events feature. You could use it to track an appointment with a medical professional or getting a new job.
To use Significant events:
Go to your Profile page
Click on the significant events section (at the top of the list)
Click the Add Event button
Enter the name of the event, the date, and the expected impact (good, neutral, or bad)
You can also add a note with extra details at the bottom
Significant events appear in your insights tab on the comparison graph, which you can access by rotating your phone.
⏰ Set reminders for yourself
“Set reminders for yourself so you don’t have to remember to input everything at the end of the day.”
Reminders can be used for a host of different reasons but this user recommends setting reminders for the times of day that you want to track your symptoms. Their recommendation is to track at least in the morning and evening.
To set reminders:
Go to your Profile page
Click on Reminders at the top of the Preferences section
You can edit your existing reminders by changing the times, adding new times, and changing the name of the reminder
You can also add new reminders for different things. For example, you may want separate reminders for tracking your Symptoms and your Sleep.
You can also set reminders for medication in the medication tab at the top of the screen
Reminders will appear as push notifications on your phone
Remember to make sure you adjust your push notification settings for Bearable so that you receive your reminders.
💭 Track negative thoughts as Symptoms
“Use the symptoms tracker to keep track of the intensity of negative emotions or thoughts”
If a symptom of your mental health condition is that you have negative thoughts you can track the severity of them in the Symptoms section.
You can either track them collectively as “negative thoughts” or if you have specific thoughts such as catastrophic thoughts, self-doubt, etc. You can track them individually.
To track your negative thoughts as symptoms:
Visit the relevant symptom group in the symptoms section on your homepage
Scroll to the bottom of the list of existing symptoms
Click the +Add/Edit button
Add your negative thoughts as symptoms in the bar at the top of the screen
These will now appear on the list of symptoms on your home screen where you can rate them by severity
You can view how the severity of your thoughts change over time by visiting insights, rotating your phone, and plotting them on the graph using the buttons at the bottom of the screen (where they’ll be listed under symptoms).
🤔 Take your time and reflect on how you’re feeling
“Be completely honest and spend the time to track your feelings morning, afternoon and evening.”
This user recommends tracking your feelings consistently throughout the day. Which will give you more data to reflect on and help you to spot patterns in changes in your feelings, moods, emotions, and overall mental health.
They also make the point that you should “spend time” and “be honest” about how you feel. This is a common recommendation we see from a number of Bearable users, especially those that have been using the app for a long time.
We find that this is because users that take time to reflect on how they’re feeling each day get more useful insights. The quality of the data they put in is better so the quality they get out is better.
📊 Use the Factor Effect on Symptoms Report
“The factor reports really help. It’s a really helpful feature to assess what helps improve my mood”
Factor Effect reports show users which of their Factor groups such as “medication”, “food”, “sleep”, etc. are correlating with positive and negative changes in the symptoms.
If you want to know what might be making your symptoms worse, this is the report for you!
To view the Factor effect report:
Visit the insights screen
Scroll to the symptom breakdown section
Click on any of your symptoms to be taken to the advanced report screen
Scroll past the average severity section and you’ll see a chart named Effect on X
Scroll left and right through the different factor groups
Sort the list by best and worst
View the average effect over a one day to a seven day period
Click the magnifying glass to compare any factor in more depth
It’s really important to question the correlations you see in this report.
You might find contradictory results such as your symptoms being worse with more exercise and also less exercise. This just means that exercise probably didn’t really have any effect on the symptom.
Findings like this can also be the result of inconsistent tracking or a lack of data. Some useful tips to help with this are:
Mark your Symptoms as none on days they didn’t occur
Track Factors on days they don’t occur by using a custom didn’t do y factor e.g. didn’t take meds
Good luck and don’t forget you can look for more inspiration on our subreddit.
—
If you’re a Bearable user that’s living with symptoms of mental health conditions and want to submit your own recommendations for other users, we’d love to hear from you. You can submit your advice here.
Track the impact of the covid vaccine on your Mood, Symptoms, Energy, and Sleep.
🤒 How to record the Covid vaccine:
Visit your Profile page
Click on Significant Events
Click on the Add Event button
In the description box, type the name of the vaccine you were given
Add the date that you received the vaccine
Click the checkmark in the top right corner once you’re done
📈 How to see the effect of the Covid vaccine:
Visit the Insights tab
Rotate your phone 90 degrees (make sure your screen lock is off)
Significant events like your vaccine appear as an exclamation point in a speech bubble at the top of the chart
You can select health outcomes such as Mood, Symptoms, Energy, and Sleep using the buttons at the bottom of the chart.
You can view how the vaccine impacted you factors such as habits and activities using the Select Factor button in the top right-hand corner of your screen
Once you’ve plotted your Health Outcomes and/or Factors on the chart, you can look for correlations with changes in your health that occurred after the date of your vaccine.
You can also view your average mood over a 30 day and 60 day period following the significant event, by visiting the Significant Events page in your More tab.
🔎 Looking for more info?
We recommend that you check out this article from the CDC to learn about side effects, helpful tips, and what to expect when you get your vaccine.
