How to use Bearable to discover what’s improving and worsening your health.
Some members of the Bearable community want to identify triggers, effective self-management strategies, or helpful new habits to help them to better manage their health. If this is you, it can be useful to think about tracking these things one at a time, over shorter periods of time (e.g. 7 to 30 days). This way, you can determine the impact of one thing on your health before moving on to testing something new, as opposed to trying to track everything all at once.
✅ What you should track.
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- Make a decision about what aspect of health your want to learn more about. This could be a specific Symptom, your Mood, Sleep, or Energy levels.
- Once you’ve made a decision about the main aspect of your health that you’d like to learn more about, use the Add/Edit button in the navigation menu in the top right corner of each section on your homepage to track that metric (if it’s not already visible on your home screen).
- Next, you want to determine the things that might be impacting your chosen metric. If you’re not sure where to begin, you can track some common factors such as caffeine, alcohol, hydration, sugar, level of physical activity, time spent outdoors, time spent looking at screens, time on social media, time spent socialising.
- Once you have a shortlist of things you think might be impacting your health, you can add them to your Factors section using the Add/Edit button in the navigation menu in the top right hand corner of the Factor section on your home screen.
- Another useful metric to track that can have a big impact on your health is Sleep, so it can also be helpful to also track this alongside any other health metric you’d like to learn more about.
Now you can begin to track your health metrics daily, and the things impacting your health as they occur throughout the week. After 7 to 14 days you should begin to see some results.
Note. To track the impact of a factor on a Custom rating (e.g. Productivity, Concentration, Work-life balance), Health measurement (e.g. Steps, Blood pressure, HRV, etc.), or to track the impact of a specific element of your diet or nutrition, create a custom experiment instead.
💡 How to use your data to discover what improves and worsens your health.
- Once you’ve collected 6 days of health metric data and also have three days with and three days without any of your factors, you’ll be able to begin to see correlations between them.
- Visit the Insights page and then the advanced report for your selected health metric. For Symptoms, scroll to the Prevalence section and tap the relevant symptom to be taken to an advanced report.
- Within each advanced report is a section titled Effect on and this shows you the correlation between each factor and your chosen health metric.
- You can also use the Correlations section at the top of the insights page to view the impact of multiple factors on multiple health metrics.
- Or, on the insights page, rotate your phone 90 degrees to manually identify trends and correlations between health metrics (buttons under the graph) and factors (button in the top-right corner).
- Once you’ve collected 6 days of health metric data and also have three days with and three days without any of your factors, you’ll be able to begin to see correlations between them.
🧪 How to use experiments to simplify this process.
Our custom experiments tool on the Experiments page makes it especially easy to determine the correlation between one Factor and one health metric. This can remove a lot of the complexity of tracking multiple factors at once and is especially useful for understanding the impact of a new habit or lifestyle change on your health.
- Visit the experiments page, scroll down to create custom experiment, and complete the set-up process.
- Then, complete the experiment on as many days as possible for your selected duration.
- At the end of the experiment period, you’ll be shown a breakdown of how the factor correlated with positive and negative changes in your chosen health metrics.
- Visit the experiments page, scroll down to create custom experiment, and complete the set-up process.
👋 Still need some help
- Read the Bearable Starter Pack.
- View our video tutorial on Youtube.
- Visit our support blog.
- Get in touch with our support team.
