What should you write down about a symptom?

What are the five things worth recording?

Five facts sounds like a lot. In practice the first three are two taps each on a well-designed sheet, and the last two are often already there because sleep and medication have their own trackers.

What should you leave out?

Interpretation. “Headache because I was stressed” mixes an observation with a theory, and the theory will colour every later entry. Record the stress as its own fact. If the two travel together over months, the record will show it; if they do not, you will have learnt something you could not have learnt from a diary that had already decided.

Essays. Long notes feel thorough and are rarely read again, by you or by anyone else. Reserve notes for the exceptional: a new location, a new quality, something that happened for the first time.

Precision you don’t have. A pain that lasted “about the afternoon” should be logged as roughly 13:00 to 18:00, not as 13:07 to 17:52. False precision looks like data and is not.

How do you rate “how bad” consistently?

Use the same scale with the same anchor words every time. The 11-point numerical rating scale (0 = no pain, 10 = the worst imaginable) is the most widely used and has good evidence behind it for adults (Hawker et al., 2011). What makes it consistent is not the numbers but the anchors: if “moderate” sits under 4–6 on your scale, it should sit there every time. There is a separate guide on using the scale well.

For symptoms that are not pain (fatigue, nausea, itch, brain fog) the same scale works, with anchors you choose once and keep: “can work through it”, “have to stop”, “cannot function”.

How should you record where it is?

Name the area, name the side, and say whether it moves. “Shoulder” is less useful than “left shoulder, spreading to the neck by evening”. Pain that radiates, pain that switches sides and pain that stays put are different stories. A body map, where you mark the area rather than describe it, makes this fast and makes it comparable from one entry to the next. The guide on describing where it hurts goes into the vocabulary.

What counts as useful context?

Context is anything a clinician might reasonably ask about, recorded as a fact rather than a suspicion. The usual candidates:

• Sleep: hours, and a one-word quality. A standardised sleep diary exists for a reason (Carney et al., 2012).
• Medication: what, how much, when. Especially anything taken for the symptom itself.
• Cycle: the day, where relevant.
• Food, caffeine, alcohol: as counts, not judgements.
• Weather, stress, activity: if you suspect them, log them neutrally and let the record decide.

How does Longnote structure an entry?

Each Longnote tracker comes with measures already attached: a 0–10 intensity with the anchors mild, moderate and severe; a duration; a location on the body atlas; and, where it fits, a list of choices for triggers or qualities. Context such as sleep, medication and cycle has its own trackers, so it is recorded as fact and compared later rather than guessed at in the moment.