Chronic pain — pain lasting more than three months — affects roughly three to five in every ten people (NICE NG193, information for the public). Most of them have been told at some point to keep a diary. Far fewer have been told how to keep one that they will still be filling in a month later, or that a clinician can use.
What a pain diary is for
A diary does three jobs. It replaces recall — which is biased toward the last few days and the worst ones — with a record. It lets you and a clinician see direction over weeks rather than a snapshot. And it puts pain next to the things that were true around it, which is where a possible pattern can become visible.
It does not find the cause of your pain. Pain is defined by the International Association for the Study of Pain as an experience, influenced by biological, psychological and social factors (IASP); a diary records the experience and its context. Whether two things that move together in your record are connected is a question for a clinician.
The minimum entry
Numbers first, because numbers can be compared. Words only when something changed.
| Field | Format | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Pain | 0–10, for the day overall or at a fixed time | The core signal — but only comparable if you rate the same thing each day |
| Where | Body region(s), from a map or a short list | Location changes are often more informative than intensity changes |
| Stiffness | 0–10, separately from pain | They behave differently and are asked about differently |
| Sleep | Hours and quality | The context most often found beside worse days |
| Energy and mood | One number each | Cheap to record, frequently relevant |
| Activity | One line | What you did, and whether you scaled it |
| Medication | Changes only | What was taken differently from usual, and when |
| Note | One line, optional | Anything unusual: travel, illness, a bad chair |
Scoring pain consistently
The 0–10 numerical rating scale is quick and widely used, and its main weakness is drift over time. Two habits keep it honest:
- Anchor the ends in writing once. Describe your 0 and your 10 in a sentence each, and reread the note every few weeks.
- Rate the same thing every day. Either the day as a whole or a fixed moment (waking, bedtime). Switching between them makes the numbers incomparable.
If you have an inflammatory condition such as ankylosing spondylitis, record stiffness separately and by duration as well as severity; the pain tracking for AS guide explains why.
Using a body map
Describing where pain is in words is slow and inconsistent — "lower back, left side, sort of into the hip" is hard to compare with last Tuesday’s "left lower back". A body map, where you tap or shade the region, is faster and produces something that can be counted: how often a region appeared, and whether new regions are joining. HAVYT’s check-in records pain by body region for exactly this reason.
Paper or app
Paper is quick and private; the printable chronic pain diary template is laid out for it. Its weakness is reading back: a stack of pages cannot be charted, and looking for what sat beside the worst days means flipping.
An app makes the read-back the easy part — charts, date ranges, the worst stretch highlighted, a summary for an appointment. HAVYT’s chronic pain tracker records the fields above as a daily check-in, keeps training and medication beside them, and can pull in sleep and heart-rate data from Apple Health if you have it.
Reading it back
Once a month, or before an appointment, look at the whole period. Three questions:
- Direction: is the pain score drifting up, down or flat across the period?
- Worst stretches: when were they and how long did they last?
- Context: what was different in the days before those stretches — sleep, activity, medication timing, stress, illness?
The third question produces associations, not causes. Bring them to your clinician as observations; the how to track pain patterns guide goes into what a pattern in a record can and cannot show.