How to Set Up a Self-Care Routine
Javier, a 29-year-old former software engineer, exercises consistently. He's always been good at that part. What he's less good at is noticing the other things — whether he's eating, whether he's called anyone, whether he's spent any time outside. He doesn't need a health app. He needs something that quietly tracks whether he's doing the basics, without turning it into another thing to optimize.
Self-care tracking in Grief Companion is intentionally simple. Three states per day per category. A weekly summary that observes without judging. No streaks, no achievement badges, no notifications about what you missed.
Steps
1. Find the self-care section on your dashboard
The self-care section appears on your dashboard as a card, below your check-in summary and coping prompt. On your first visit, it invites you to set up your tracking preferences. Tap Set Up Self-Care.
You can also reach it from Settings → Self-Care Tracking.
2. See the predefined categories and enable the ones you want
You'll see six self-care categories:
- Sleep — tracking whether you got rest
- Nutrition — whether you ate something, cared for your body that way
- Movement — any physical activity, at any intensity
- Social connection — contact with another person, even briefly
- Creative expression — making something: writing, cooking, music, drawing, anything
- Nature — time outside, even a few minutes
Toggle on the categories you want to track. You don't have to enable all of them. Start with whatever feels manageable — you can add or remove categories at any time.
There is no "optimal" set of categories to track. Choose the ones that feel meaningful to your life right now.
3. Each day, use the simple 3-state check for each category
Once you've set up your categories, a simple check-in card appears on your dashboard each day alongside your emotional check-in. For each enabled category, tap one of three states:
- Did — yes, I did this today
- Partial — sort of, or a little
- Didn't — not today
That's it. No logging minutes, no quantities, no details required. The simplicity is the point — this should take fifteen seconds, not fifteen minutes.
4. After a week, see a summary of your patterns
After seven days of any tracking, the self-care section on your dashboard shows a weekly summary card. Tap it to open.
The summary shows a simple grid of which categories you tracked as "Did," "Partial," or "Didn't" across the week. Patterns are surfaced gently — for example:
"You tend to mark Movement more often on days you also mark Social Connection."
The summary does not say you failed at categories where you marked "Didn't" repeatedly. It does not suggest you need to do better. It shows you what happened and, occasionally, what might be connected.
5. On a hard day
If you open the app on a day when everything is heavy — you didn't sleep, didn't eat well, didn't see anyone — and you mark every category as "Didn't," the app responds with:
"Hard days happen. You're still here."
That's all. No encouragement to do better tomorrow. No reminder of your last good week. Just acknowledgment that today was hard, and you showed up anyway.
What to Expect
Self-care tracking does not sync with other health apps and does not import data from your step counter or fitness tracker. The tracking is manual and private.
Weekly summaries are stored in your history — you can look back at any previous week by tapping Past Weeks in the self-care section. Seeing a month of summaries side by side can reveal patterns that day-to-day tracking obscures.
You can disable self-care tracking entirely at any time in Settings. All existing data is preserved — it simply won't prompt you for new entries.
Self-care tracking is available on all plan tiers, including Free.
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