Mohit Aggarwal Flare Day Planner Skill
Relapsing conditions — autoimmune, migraine, chronic pain, bipolar and other mental health conditions, long COVID — share a cruel structure: the flare arrives when you have the least capacity to handle it, so you make bad decisions, cancel badly, eat nothing or wrong, and the shame compounds the symptom. The fix is to do the thinking before, while you're well: recognize the early signs, pre-build the stripped-down "flare mode" life, and pre-write the scripts and setup so a bad day is a plan you execute, not a crisis you improvise. Decisions are expensive in a flare; this skill front-loads them.
What This Skill Produces
- A flare early-warning list: your specific pre-flare signs (the ones that show up hours or a day before the obvious symptoms) so you can shift into flare mode early, when it's cheapest
- A flare-mode plan: the reduced version of your life — what drops, what stays, the bare-minimum routine — decided now so you don't have to decide then
- Pre-written scripts: cancel-without-a-paragraph messages for work, friends, and family; the "I need help with X" asks to your support people; the boundary lines for people who push
- A space-and-supplies setup: the flare kit and environment (easy food, meds sorted, comfort items, low-demand entertainment) staged in advance so a flare needs no shopping and no decisions
Required Inputs
Ask for (if not already provided):
- What a flare looks and feels like, and what (if anything) precedes it — the early signs, even subtle ones (mood shift, specific ache, sensory change, a craving)
- What a flare currently wrecks: the missed work, the botched cancellations, the not eating, the isolation, the spiral
- Who the user's real support people are, and what they currently do right/wrong
- Fixed obligations that can't just vanish (a job, dependents) and what flexibility exists around them
Framework
- Catch the flare early — the warning list is the prize. Most flares have a prodrome: signs hours-to-a-day before the full hit. Reconstruct them from recent flares (walk one backward). Shifting into flare mode at the first sign is far cheaper than fighting a full flare while pretending it's not happening.
- Pre-build flare mode while well. Decide now, with a clear head: what drops entirely, what shrinks to minimum, what's protected (meds, hydration, one anchor). In a flare you won't have the executive function to triage — so the triage is already done, sitting there to execute.
- Write the cancellations before you need them. Bad cancellations (over- explaining, apologizing, ghosting) come from doing it while symptomatic. Pre-write the short, warm, no-paragraph versions for each audience: work ("I'm unwell today and will be offline; I'll pick up [thing] tomorrow"), friends, family. Templates remove the guilt-spiral tax.
- Stage the support asks and boundaries. Decide in advance what help to ask for and from whom ("can you drop food?"), so the flare doesn't also require the hard work of asking. And the boundary lines for the person who says "but you were fine yesterday" — pre-written, so you don't have to defend a relapsing illness while in it.
- Set up the space so a bad day needs nothing. The flare kit: grab-and-go food that needs no cooking, meds and water within reach, comfort and low-demand entertainment, the phone chargers, whatever your specific flare craves. A flare should never send you to the shops or the stove.
Output Format
## Your early-warning signs (catch it here)
[The prodrome — signs hours/a day before the full flare, from real episodes]
## Flare mode (decided while well)
Drops entirely: … · Shrinks to minimum: … · Protected no matter what: …
## Pre-written scripts
Cancel — work: … · friends: … · family: …
Ask for help: … · Boundary for the doubter: …
## Flare kit & setup (stage this now)
[Easy food · meds/water reach · comfort · low-demand entertainment · what to prep
this week]
Quality Checks
- The early-warning list is built from real flares and includes subtle prodrome signs, not just the full-flare symptoms
- Flare mode is decided in advance with protected non-negotiables named
- Cancellation scripts are short and guilt-free, one per audience
- Support asks and a boundary line are pre-written, so asking isn't extra labor
- The flare kit means a bad day requires no shopping, cooking, or decisions
Anti-Patterns
- Do not frame flares as failures of discipline or something to push through — they're a feature of the condition, and early surrender to flare mode is the skilled move
- Do not build a plan that requires lots of in-flare decisions — the whole point is that the thinking happened while well
- Do not give medical/treatment advice — this manages life around flares; the condition's care is the clinician's
- Do not assume the user's support people are safe or available — plan around the real ones, and make the plan work solo if needed
- For mental-health flares, do not treat crisis as a planning problem — include the crisis-line pointer and the "when to reach past this plan for a human" line
Related
[[spoon-planner]] for the everyday pacing between flares; [[meltdown-map]] for the neuro-crash cousin; [[diagnosis-limbo-kit]] if the flaring condition is unnamed; [[saying-no-kindly]] for the cancellation muscle.