Tracking Your Flare Symptoms in Your Bullet Journal

Normally, I try to journal a little about how I feel each day during a flare, but pain and swelling in my hands can make that pretty difficult, especially after typing all day at work. So, a few years ago I created a simple flare tracker for my bullet journal that lets me easily keep an eye on the most important stuff when writing in paragraph format just feels too overwhelming. I hope this kind of tracker is helpful for you, too!

If you’d like a printable flare symptom tracker to add to your bullet journal or planner, head over to the and join the newsletter to get access, or sign up below!

This flare tracker is meant to be very easy to use, and I’ve left some room on the printable version for you to add additional symptoms, events or activities that you want to keep track of. A tracker like this is a great tool to reflect on how you’re feeling and it’s also helpful to share with my doctor.

Flare Tracker Elements

Pain and Fatigue plotter

• Keep track of pain and fatigue on a scale of 0-3 with 0 being none/very little and 3 very high. You’ll probably have different levels throughout the day, but this is an overall score for the entire day. If you find yourself having a lot of ups and downs every day, consider tracking morning and afternoon/night with two different colors on the plotter.

Medications

• Enter the number of times you take symptom relief medications that day that are not part of your daily medication regimen, like over-the-counter pain relievers or meds your doctor has prescribed for temporary use.
• Check off or write a “y” (for yes) on each day that you take your regular medications. This can be crucial in showing how missing medications can affect your symptoms.
• IDEA: You could also denote days when you have increased your regular medication (like steroids, DMARDs or anti-seizure medication) during the flare with an “up arrow”, a circle or other marker

Daily Symptoms & Feelings

• I’ve played with different ways to rate things here, but found simple y/n and 0-3 to be easiest to understand and to use to compare everything. You can certainly use different words and ratings, but it’s a good idea to place a key somewhere on your page, especially if you are making copies for your doctor.
• Think back over your last few flares and add symptoms or other important things you want to track. It could be anything from your menstrual cycle to a specific activity such as physical therapy appointments. The important thing to keep in mind is that you don’t need to track everything. If you find that you have the same answer to everything every month, consider eliminating that row from your flare tracker. That being said, I personally would never eliminate my medication row, and I also would keep any activity I’m trying to build into a habit so I can see consistent progress and feel great about it (such as “going to bed on time”).
• The section under “How I feel Today” captures emotional well-being and cognitive symptoms or “fog” that many of us get directly from our chronic illness, from medications, or from pain or other symptoms. If you notice a lot of consistently high numbers here, you might want to talk to your health care provider about how to get your emotional health in a better state. For me, I notice that I have a lot of anxiety when my pain is high. This means keeping my pain under control is a top priority not just to make my body feel better, but to help my emotional well-being.

Taking Care of Yourself

This is the new section of the flare symptom tracker that I added for 2019. I really wanted to focus on self-care habits and put each activity in the front of my mind every day. I’ll be honest, there are times when I am not doing so well with taking care of myself and I feel guilty. But, the whole point of a tracker like this is not to make you feel bad — but to help you feel empowered to make the changes you need to feel better! If you’re finding you aren’t drinking enough water, for example, start a new page in your journal to jot down ideas on how to change that! Most importantly, cut yourself some slack if you fall off the self-care wagon a little bit. WE ALL DO.

Creating the Flare Tracker by Hand

I started by counting how many columns my journal has on the page. This could be different depending on the journal, so be sure to count out 31 columns for days from the right-side so you have enough days! Next, I added the main dividers for the left-side tracking labels and the two main plotters. Finally, I added the labels and the monthly header. I really recommend downloading the printable to use as a guide if you’re planning to draw this every month by hand.

Sometimes I like to use color to plot and show highs and lows throughout my day. Sometimes I color things on the day I record it, other times (during the flare, especially), I just leave coloring for another time. And sometimes I don’t color anything at all. The important thing is that I tracked, not that I colored the square. 🙂

Here’s a sample tracker I created just as an example of how it looks all filled in for the month.

One thing I like to do is show where a flare started. This can be hard to tell right away, but the tracker helps you see the patterns after a few days have gone by. Here’s an example of an easy way to show the beginning of a flare, especially if it continues into the next month.

I’ve also created a video showing how to draw the flare symptom tracker and I go into each section in a bit more detail. You can check it out here!

I hope this flare tracker helps you as much as it’s helped me and I’d love to hear from you by email at jess@pineconepapers.com!