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How do I enter lifestyle information?
How do I enter lifestyle information?

Get meaningful insights by entering lifestyle information in the right way and at the right time. Here are some tips to get started.

Mike Battista avatar
Written by Mike Battista
Updated over a week ago

Want to get meaningful insights that you can be confident in? Follow these quick tips to consistently enter accurate lifestyle info.

Sleep

  • Enter the time you got into bed, and the time you started your day. You may not get to sleep right away, and may be awake before getting out of bed, but enter these moments so that you can get a consistent estimate of the time you spent intending to sleep.

  • Enter how you felt when you woke up—a measure of sleep quality. It may be subjective at first, but you will get an idea of how "good" feels and how "poor" feels as you start paying attention to how you are doing each morning.

  • Did you get broken, interrupted, or inconsistent sleep? Keep track of the disruption of imperfect sleep by adjusting your sleep quality entry.

  • Taking naps or breaking up your sleep schedule? Enter your most recent or most impactful sleep session, and be consistent in which type of sleep you track.

  • Use your daily journal to capture nuances of your sleep. Did a thunderstorm break up your sleep? Wake up with memories of a pleasant dream? Record the details in your journal.

Exercise

  • Track the short-term relationship between exercise and cognition by entering information about your most recent significant exercise session from the same day as your challenge.

  • Exercise is entered on a 12-hour clock. Check that you've correctly entered AM or PM as intended.

  • Tracking how much you sweat is a quick measure of exercise intensity. Factors like heat and hydration can affect how much you literally sweat, but try to ignore these factors—think of it as how much you'd normally sweat in response to the exercise session. Feel free to use factors like how out of breath you feel and your heart rate to better estimate intensity. The key is consistency.

  • Exercise after playing your BrainLabs challenge? Great job—exercise is sure to have a long-term impact on your brain health. However, you'll only see short-term effects if you do a challenge after exercising. Try taking challenges at different times of the day, before and after exercising, so that you can get insight into which schedule suits your brain best.

  • No exercise yet today? Simply hit the "skip" button for now.

  • Use your daily journal to add details about your exercise. Trying a new exercise regime? Get more than one exercise session in? Make some notes now and you may discover patterns later.

Stress

  • Stress takes a bit more time to exert its effects, so the stress entry refers to stress over the past 24 hours.

  • Some guidance is provided to help you choose a stress level—stress that affected your day is likely to be more severe. As with other lifestyle entries, consistency is key. It can help to review past data and judge today's stress by whether it is higher or lower than previous days.

  • Stress is not always negative. A variety of challenges and time pressures can cause stress, even if you sought them out. The effects of stress are also not always negative; a bit of stress can be a good thing. 

  • Mood is separate from stress—being happy or energetic doesn't mean you're not stressed too. We are planning to add mood tracking as an additional lifestyle factor in the future.

  • Your daily journal can record the reasons for a stressful day, or how you managed to feel more relaxed. No "dear diary" necessary, but a few hints can help you put your data in context.

If you accidentally create a lifestyle entry that is inaccurate, or inconsistent with how you entered it in the past, don't worry—you can edit lifestyle factors at any time during the day you entered them. If past days are incorrect, that's okay too; just try to be consistent and accurate in your entries moving forward.

Read more about lifestyle information, and how it is linked to your cognition scores, in these lifestyle tracking FAQs.

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