Therapy can be a transformative and valuable experience helping you to break old patterns, achieve your goals and learn self-care. Whether you are seeking help for your mental health, physical complaints, or personal growth one thing you will typically be asked to do is to keep track of your complaints, symptoms or daily routine. In this blog we will look at why this simple, often underestimated exercise is so powerful and important for both you and your therapist, enhancing your therapeutic process. 

Self-awareness

Keeping track of your symptoms allows you to develop greater self awareness and a deeper understanding of yourself. By paying attention to your symptoms, thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations, you can become more attuned to the patterns and triggers that influence your well-being. For example you may become more conscious of unhelpful thoughts that have an impact on your mood or specific behaviours you do and the negative consequences of this behaviour. Self-awareness is a crucial first step to make the changes we want to make in our lives. It will empower you to break free from autopilot and make conscious decisions about how you want to behave in various situations.

Identifying signals, triggers and patterns

Symptoms and complaints are often context specific. Specific emotions, symptoms or complaints may only occur in specific settings, with certain triggers or people. For example you may only feel anxious when in big groups or about heights. By keeping track of your complaints it can help both you and your therapist to uncover previously unnoticed triggers, signals and patterns that play a role in your complaints. This can play an important role in making effective changes in your therapy and the prevention of future complaints.

Optimising your treatment

Describing symptoms and remembering what exactly happened can sometimes be challenging. It’s not uncommon to forget or overlook important details when recalling symptoms or events during therapy sessions. By keeping track of your symptoms your therapist can use this information to get enhanced insight into the factors that play a role in your complaints and further personalise your treatment to your needs. Keeping a record of complaints will also help you and your therapist to objectively measure your progress during the treatment and evaluate the effectiveness of the interventions, making sure you are both on the right track.

Becoming your own therapist

As mentioned above, keeping track of your symptoms can help to get enhanced insight into your complaints and develop self-awareness. It will help you to identify activities, coping strategies, or lifestyle adjustments that alleviate symptoms, helping you to become your own therapist and make a plan to prevent future complaints.

Keeping track in NiceDay

Keeping track of your symptoms is an invaluable practice that can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your therapeutic journey. Using the NiceDay app you can easily keep track of your mood and various symptoms and complaints using our trackers and check-in feature. Using the check in feature on the homepage you can record your mood, give a reason and indicate what emotions you are experiencing. Using the trackers you can keep track of certain symptoms, signals, occurrences or complaints. The results of registrations are then made available for both you and your therapist to support your treatment process.