Your wearable is good at measuring your body and blind to your life. It knows your HRV dropped. It does not know you had three glasses of wine, argued with someone, or started a new medication.
The Journal is where that context goes. It is the difference between NOYU telling you your recovery is down and NOYU telling you why.
What you can log
Around a hundred built-in items across ten areas: Nutrition, Sleep, Recovery, Mental Health, Health and Symptoms, Hormonal Health, Lifestyle, Medication, Supplements, and your own items.
Most are a simple yes or no: did you drink alcohol, take caffeine, eat late, stretch. Some ask a follow-up, so alcohol can carry how many drinks and caffeine can carry the time you had your last one. Others are a rating, like mood, energy and stress.
The short list
Logging a hundred things daily is not a real proposal, so you keep a short list of the items you track.
If you have never changed it, you start with eight: caffeine, alcohol, mood, energy, feeling anxious, screens in bed, late meals and stretching. That is a sensible spread across sleep, mood and the two substances that move the numbers most.
Change it whenever. If you clear it entirely, NOYU takes that as a deliberate choice rather than resetting you to the defaults.
One entry per item per day
Most items hold one value per day, and logging again updates it rather than adding a second entry.
Some items accept times as well, so you can note that your last coffee was at 4pm, which is often the useful part.
A few items are moments and can be logged several times a day when you log for today. Filling in a past day writes a single daily entry.
Backfilling
You can log any past day, and NOYU never locks a date.
Do note that anything already calculated from that day, such as a score or an insight, reflects the data as it stood when it ran. Filling in last Tuesday will not retroactively rewrite last Tuesday's analysis.
Custom items
You can add your own, and they are always a plain yes or no with no follow-up.
Good ones are specific and repeatable: "physio exercises", "sauna", "worked from office", "took antihistamine".
Deleting a custom item removes it from your list but keeps everything you already logged, so your history stays intact.
How much to log
Fewer items, logged consistently, beat many items logged sporadically. This is not encouragement, it is a technical constraint.
To find whether something affects you, NOYU needs at least five days where you did it and five where you did not. An item logged twice a week for a month is worth less than one logged daily for a fortnight, and an item you always answer the same way can never show a pattern because there is nothing to compare.
Pick three or four things you suspect matter, log them for a month, and you will have something real. Then change the list.
Your streak
The summary view shows a year-long grid of logged days and your current run.
It is there because a picture of your consistency is useful, but it is not a game and there is nothing to lose. Missing a day costs you nothing beyond that day's data, and NOYU will not scold you about it.
