Thyroid Journal: a private place to track how you’re really doing

“How have you been feeling?”

Your doctor asks it, you’ve got about ninety seconds, and the same foggy, worn-out brain you came in to talk about goes completely blank. So you say “okay, I guess.” You forget the three rough weeks in the middle. You forget that you actually felt a little sharper after the last dose change. You remember all of it in the car on the way home.

I’ve lived that more times than I can count, and after eight years of writing about thyroid health and listening in our thyroid group, I know I’m not the only one. So I built something to help, and today it’s ready for you to use.

Open Thyroid Journal →

It’s called Thyroid Journal. It’s free, it lives right here on my site, and it does one quiet thing well: it gives you a private place to write down how you’re actually doing, day to day, and then it helps you see the pattern later, when it counts.

First, the part I care about most: it’s yours, and it stays yours

Your journal lives on your own device. If you’d like it on your phone and your computer both, you can create a free account to sync it, but here’s the part that matters: it’s encrypted on your device, with a passphrase only you know, before it ever leaves. I can’t read it. The server only ever holds a scrambled version of your words. Even in the worst case (someone breaking into the server) there’d be nothing there but gibberish.

That’s not a slogan. It’s how the tool is actually built, on purpose. The honest trade-off: because only you hold the key, if you forget your passphrase, I genuinely can’t recover your entries for you. So when you sign up you get a one-time recovery key: save it the way you’d save a spare house key, and you’ll always have a way back in.

And to be perfectly clear: there are no ads, no trackers, and nothing for sale in here. I am not monetizing your symptoms.

Built for the days when writing is hard

The first thing it asks is simple: how’s your energy right now: High, Baseline, or Crashing?

On a good day, you get a blank page and room to write freely. On a crash day, it doesn’t hand you an intimidating empty page to feel guilty about. It gives you three tiny prompts instead: one word for how your body feels, one sentence about your focus, and it tells you the truth: that still counts. Showing up for thirty seconds on your worst day is worth more than a perfect entry you never write.

There’s also an optional quick symptom check (a handful of sliders, about thirty seconds) for the days you want to note how the usual suspects are behaving.

It reads how you’re really doing

As you write, off to the side you’ll see something I call your read.

Here’s what it honestly is. There’s a long line of research, going back to James Pennebaker’s work on expressive writing, showing that how we write shifts with how we’re actually doing: the range of words we reach for, how complex our sentences get, how much we’re connecting ideas together. On a foggy, depleted day, our writing tends to flatten out. Thyroid Journal measures that in your own words and tracks it against your personal baseline.

It is a signal, not a verdict. It is not reading your mind, and it is not a diagnosis. Think of it as one more honest data point: a way to put a number next to “I just feel off today” so it’s a little harder for anyone, including you, to wave it away.

The part that makes it genuinely useful: it remembers, so you don’t have to

This is the piece I’m most excited about. Open the Insights tab and you can see your last two weeks, your last month, three months, or your whole history at a glance:

• a simple chart of how your read has moved over time,
• the mix of High / Baseline / Crashing days you’ve had,
• and which symptoms have been easing or getting heavier.

That’s the thing to bring to your next appointment. Not a vague “I’ve been tired,” but the actual shape of your last three months, in front of you, on a screen, instead of trapped in a foggy memory.

And your old entries are easy to find. You can search your own words, filter by the kind of day it was, and everything’s grouped by month. Nothing gets buried.

A few honest boundaries

You deserve these spelled out plainly:

• This is a self-tracking tool, not medical advice, and not a diagnosis. It can help you notice patterns. It can’t tell you what they mean. That conversation belongs with your doctor.
• Your privacy is the default, not a setting. Your words are yours: encrypted, on your device.
• If you’re really struggling, there’s a Support link in the corner with real crisis resources. Please use it.

Give it a try

I built this for the same reason I started my thyroid site and group all those years ago: living with a thyroid or autoimmune condition is a long game, and the people playing it deserve tools that are genuinely on their side: honest, private, and free.

It’s brand new, so try it and tell me what’s missing. I’m already working on adding lab values (TSH, Free T4, Free T3) and medication changes, so you’ll be able to lay those right over how you’ve been feeling and finally see how they line up.

Open Thyroid Journal →

Take care of yourselves.
Jamie