The Bearable App – Track Your Health the Easy Way (Review)

I’ve often blogged about the benefits of tracking pain in order to find triggers or patterns. Until now, I have kept a pain diary just by keeping notes on a file on my computer. But I have recently started using an app on my phone and I love it. It’s called the Bearable App and it can be used to track health data and, I’m sure, it could be extremely beneficial to anyone living with a chronic health condition.

Disclosure: I like the Bearable app and believe it could be useful to my readers. The app has a free and a subscription version and the company has provided me with the subscription version free of charge so that I could write a full and honest review about their product.

The Bearable App is an Easy Way to Track Your Health

The Bearable App is classed as a symptom and mood tracker. However, you can track so much more than symptoms and mood. You can also track your sleep, diet, activity, energy levels, medication, weather and so much more. You can customise the app, so it is totally unique to your needs. The app also allows users to set reminders so you don’t forget to take your meds or miss appointments.

Although the Bearable App is aimed at patients, it can also be used to suit the needs of medical professionals. The company is able to shape the App around specific conditions so that it can be used for research institutions and disease foundations.

Why Should People Track Their Symptoms?

Tracking symptoms is helpful for anyone living with a chronic illness or chronic pain. However, tracking is extremely beneficial if you:

• are trying to identify triggers or patterns
• are in the process of trying to get a diagnosis
• have developed new symptoms
• are starting, stopping or changing medication or treatments
• are seeing a new doctor

Tracking symptoms can give people some control over their condition. If people find patterns or identify triggers that may be contributing to their pain or health condition, they may be able to reduce their symptoms by making changes.

People will notice whether or not medication is making an impact. Tracking can also help patients give a more accurate picture to their doctors. This means that doctors might find it easier to diagnose or treat them.

Tracking everything daily ensures that you note all the details so that nothing slips your mind. It’s often easy to forget things or even ignore symptoms that may seem insignificant to you. But those insignificant symptoms could be important to a doctor.

The following articles have more information about tracking symptoms:
Ways to Find Out What Triggers or Worsens Your Condition
Triggers for Trigeminal Neuralgia
How to Help Doctors Help You

Bearable App Review

Using the Bearable App to Track Your Health – How Easy is it?

My first thought about Bearable was that it was simple to use. The app guides you through each step clearly and simply. It gives you the opportunity to use either the free version, the premium version or to use a free one week trial of the premium version.

Before using the subscription version, I used the free version for a couple of weeks so that I would know exactly what people get with this. Some apps give a fairly basic free version. But the Bearable App’s free version is very extensive. I will explain more about the differences and the prices later in this post.

I use the app three or four times a day to record everything I want to track. Doing it this way, rather than once at the end of the day, means that I don’t forget anything. At the end of the day, I forget what my name is, never mind what I had for breakfast or how severe any of my symptoms were first thing in the morning.

It probably takes me under a minute at a time to record everything because for most sections, I simply need to click a box. It is so quick to track your health using the Bearable App and, in my opinion, much easier to use than writing a journal or maintaining a symptom diary on a spreadsheet.

How the Bearable App Works

Once you’ve signed up, you then decide what you would like to track.

You can track:

• Symptoms – The Bearable app offers a selection of symptoms (physical or mental health symptoms) which you can track. You can also add extra conditions to the list. You can track your symptoms throughout the course of the day – midnight to six in the morning, then 6am – 12 midday, 12 until 6pm then 6pm to midnight. For each symptom during each time period, you can click either ‘none’, ‘mild’, ‘moderate’, ‘severe’ or ‘unbearable’. You can also add a note to each section and add a new symptom at any point.
  
• Mood – You give your mood a score of between 1 and 10, then the app asks you how you are feeling and offers suggestions like depressed, angry, overwhelmed, hopeful etc. You can click as many descriptions as you want and add more words if necessary.
  
• Energy levels – Living with a chronic health problem can be tiring so tracking energy levels is important. Using the Bearable App will let you see if there is a specific reason for your fatigue. Perhaps you’ve had a busy few days, so your body is telling you to rest. However, if you notice that it’s a chronic problem and without good reason, it’s worth mentioning to your doctor.
  
• Sleep – It’s important to get good quality sleep every night, but many of us don’t. Our health can have an impact on our sleep and poor quality sleep can have an impact on our health. Tracking our sleep patterns can be very insightful.
  
• Medication and supplements – Tracking these can let you see if they are helping enough (or at all). This is especially useful if you are prescribed a new medication. Tracking will help to show whether or not the meds are helping or if the side effects are to difficult to put up with. This allows you to give vital feedback to your doctor. It could also allow you to track any effects if you change the time you take medication.
  
• Food and drink – You can measure your water intake, all meals and any snacks you eat. By tracking your diet, you might discover some foods that are triggering or making your problems worse. Or you might find that you’re not drinking nearly enough (or too much) water. You might discover that you are consuming more chocolate, coffee or coke than you realised.
  
• Bowel movements – Bowel habits can be related to our general health, medication or diet. But they can also indicate health issues that we should never ignore. Tracking makes people less likely to ignore a problem.
  
• Health Measurements – You can record step count, weight, heart rate and blood pressure. You can add the data manually or you can sync it with FitBit, Garmin, Samsung Health or Oura.
  
• Factors – This is such an important section. It includes everything which could possibly have an impact on your condition including periods, weather, chores, appointments, hobbies and personal care. There are ten categories, but you can add more. And each category opens to reveal more choices. For example, if you click on chores, you could then click on shopping, vaccuming, dusting etc.

You can track all the categories or just those you feel apply and you can also add a note with relevant information on each section. If a new symptom develops, you can add it at any time.

Writing all this information in a journal or on your computer is helpful, but it can be tedious and take too long out of our day. But the Bearable App is easy and very quick to use because, for most sections, all you need to do is click a box.

Bearable Isn’t Just About Tracking Health Symptoms

Sometimes keeping a pain journal can be depressing because you’re focusing only on symptoms so I was very happy to find that the Bearable App also suggests tracking some more positive aspects in our lives too. It’s geared towards relationships and self-care. Having a check box on the app might help you to remember that spending some time on yourself is important.

• Self-improvement – This covers productivity, hygiene, mindfulness, relaxation, social life, family life and love life and, of course, you can add more categories should you wish.
  
  This section gives us a reminder that life isn’t just about our pain or illness. It would also be the ideal spot to include any achievements. Living with a health condition can be extremely challenging, therefore we need to celebrate all achievements no matter how big or small. It can be morale boosting to look back on achievements or improvements.
  
  
• Gratitude – I am also glad that Bearable have included this section because it’s always helpful to think about things we’re grateful for. But sometimes we need to be prompted to do that.

Every time I use the symptom tracker, I finish by completing the self-improvement and gratitude sections. It helps to bring me out of that ‘focusing on my pain’ frame of mind into having more positive thoughts.

Bearable App Insights

The Bearable App Insights is what brings everything together and will give you a wealth of information. It can show you if a medication has made an impact or if a complementary or alternative therapy has helped or not. It will help you to see if something has been triggering your pain or made you feel worse. You’ll see if there’s a correlation between your mood or sleeping habits and your pain or illness.

With the information from insights, you will hopefully be able to take back some control of your life. You might be able to change certain things yourself so that your life is easier or you’d be able to discuss the results with your doctor.

Track Your Health With the Bearable App ~ Free or Premium Version?

The Bearable App comes with what I consider to be a good free version. The subscription version costs £26.49 annually in the UK or $28.99 in the USA. It can be paid as a one off annually or paid monthly, however, the annual price is sometimes discounted.

You can try the subscription version for a week to see the difference yourself and then decide whether or not to continue with that or revert to the free version.

James, the app’s creator, wanted to ensure that even the free version would help people. And I think he’s been successful at that. When I used the free version, I very happy with it. On a couple of occasions, I came up against the little blue diamond which indicated that I’d need to have the premium version to use a function. One was inputting food details. If you have a meal regularly, you can mark it as a favourite, so that you won’t have to type it every time. With the free version, the number of favourites is limited. On the subscription version, that’s unlimited.

But the biggest difference would be with the Insights section. On the subscription version, the insights sections are a little more detailed meaning its easier to correlate information. However, the data provided on the free version is still informative. But, if you can afford it, using the subscription version might be more beneficial.

Bearable App Review – My Final Thoughts

Since Bearable contacted me, I have been emailing back and forth about my review for the app. They said they are looking at ways to improve it so that it will be even more helpful for people. I think it’s already a helpful and beneficial app. But this company is determined to make the app even better. On Reddit, they have set up a page so that members can give their input and suggestions for changes and improvements. They care what their users think and are prepared to listen. This is what they say,

“Here’s where we’re building Bearable in public. We want to keep our great community as involved as possible as we have strived to do from the start on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/BearableApp/.
We have created this roadmap to keep you up to date on how we’re doing, but also take your feedback on what would be most valuable for us to add next. Feel free to vote for 👍 and suggest 💬 new features and improvements within the suggestions list.”

In my opinion, The Bearable App is excellent and the perfect way to track health issues. If you are looking for an app to track your health, I would 100% recommend the Bearable App.

For more information, please take a look at the Bearable App website.