How to find correlations.
✏️ Collect enough data.
You’ll begin to see correlations in Bearable after you:
- Have at least 3 days with a factor.
- 3 at least days without the same factor.
- Mood, Symptom, Sleep, or Energy scores on each of these days.
Bearable is then able to compare your scores for days when the factor occurred vs. the days it didn’t occur and show you a correlation. However, the more data you collect, the more accurate and less noisy the results will be. Remember, Bearable will take timing into account, so if you had e.g. caffeine in the evening and your symptoms were in the morning, it wouldn’t associate the two together.
For the best results, we recommend tracking a factor over a 30-day period.
🗓️ Stay up to date on your health metrics.
To ensure that Bearable can show you the most accurate correlations, it’s important to keep track of at least one of your Mood, Symptom, Sleep, or Energy scores every day. If you’re only interested in how a factor correlates with one of these health metrics, it’s okay to only track that metric every day instead of all of them.
For example, if you want to know how caffeine correlates with changes in your sleep quality, you can just track your sleep every day without tracking Mood, Symptoms, or Energy.
📈 Use the Comparison Graph.
For Bearable users with a free account, the best way to look for correlations is using the Comparison Graph. When you visit the Insights tab, rotate your phone to be shown a graph where you can compare your Factors to changes in Mood, Symptoms, Sleep, Energy and more.
To find correlations on the comparison graph:
- Select Mood, Symptom Score, Individual Symptoms, Sleep Quality, Sleep Quantity, or Energy Levels in one of the drop-down menus at the bottom of the screen. This will appear as either a bar or line on the graph.
- Select a Factor in the top right-hand corner of the screen and this will appear as a gradient in the background of the graph on the days when the factor was tracked.
- With these two things selected, you can now determine if days when the factor occurred had a positive, negative, or neutral impact on the health metric that you’ve selected.
Note. You can hide the bar and/or line graph using the eye icons at the bottom of the screen.
📊 Use Factor Effect Reports.
Bearable users on a free trial or premium subscription can access a number of different Factor Effect reports from the Insights tab. These reports automate the process of finding correlations so that you don’t have to look for them yourself.
Factor Effect reports can be found by clicking into any of the following reports in the insights tab:
- The advanced Mood report
- The advanced Symptom report
- Individual Symptom reports
- The advanced Sleep report
- Individual Factor reports
- The advanced Energy report.
You can scroll through Factor effect reports to view how different categories of factors impact your health as well as view the 1day to 7day impact of a factor on your health.
✋ Limit the factors you track.
Instead of tracking lots of Factors, try tracking only the factors that you suspect are most impacting your health, and that you’re most interested in gaining insights for. For example, if you want to understand how caffeine affects your health, just track the days when you have caffeine vs. the days you don’t have caffeine.
If you try to track too many things at once it can become too much to keep on top of.
🤔 Reflect on your results.
Your correlations might not always make sense at first so it’s important to take the time to think about why this is. For example, ‘acts of kindness’ might correlate with lower ‘sleep quality’, which doesn’t make a lot of sense until you take into account the fact that ‘acts of kindness’ are often tracked on days when ‘junk food’, ‘high stress’ and ‘caffeine’ are also being tracked. So it’s likely that ‘junk food’ and ‘caffeine’ are impacting ‘sleep quality’ rather than ‘acts of kindness’.
The Favorite Correlations chart is a great tool for helping you to think about the relationship between your different correlations.
🔬 Create more granular Factors.
Many Bearable users begin tracking quite broad Factors such as ‘socialised a lot’ and to get more useful results about how socialising really impacts your health it can help to break this Factor down into smaller Factors. For example, who you socialise with might impact your health and you can track this in a number of more granular ways:
- By social group such as ‘socialised with Family’, ‘Socialised with Colleagues’ or ‘Socialised with Friends’.
- By individual people such as ‘socialised with Chad’, ‘socialised with Dad’, or ‘socialised with Girlfriend’.
- By the type of socialising such as ‘socialised at party’, ‘socialised at bar’, ‘socialised outdoors’,‘socialised with big group’, ‘socialised with small group’, or ‘socialised with one person’.
Breaking down your Factors into more specific behaviours and/or events will help you to discover more specific correlations so that you can make more specific decisions about your health.
👋 Still have questions about your correlations?
Let us know by contacting support@bearable.app and a member of the Bearable team can help you with anything you need.
