DizzyLog › Guides
A consultation is short. If what you can offer is "it just spins sometimes, maybe a few times a month?", the appointment is spent reconstructing your history from memory — and memory is exactly what dizziness is bad for. A diary moves that work out of the consultation room. Here is what's worth recording, and why each item matters.
| Record | Why the doctor cares |
|---|---|
| When it started | Date and time of day. Spells that cluster in the morning, on waking, or during stressful weeks are a pattern — one you can't see from memory alone. |
| How long it lasted | Seconds, minutes, or hours — measured, not guessed. Duration is one of the first things clinicians use to narrow down causes, and guessed durations inflate badly ("it felt like forever" is usually much shorter). |
| What it actually felt like | Spinning (the room moves), rocking or swaying, lightheaded/about to faint, or unsteady on your feet. These point in different directions. "Dizzy" alone doesn't narrow anything. |
| What you were doing | Rolling over in bed, standing up, looking up, coughing, nothing at all. A trigger that reliably precedes spells is exactly the kind of detail that gets lost by the time you're in the consultation. |
| Ear symptoms | Ringing (tinnitus), fullness or pressure, muffled hearing — same side each time or not. Whether ear symptoms come with the spells matters. |
| Other symptoms | Headache, light sensitivity, nausea and vomiting, palpitations, visual aura. Also note what medication you took, and whether it helped. |
| Conditions around you | Weather changes, poor sleep, alcohol, salty meals, menstrual cycle. You don't need to interpret these — recording them is enough; patterns emerge over weeks. |
Swipe the table sideways →
The single biggest problem with dizziness diaries is that they get written at the end of the day, or the end of the week. By then, the details that matter — exact duration, what you were doing the moment it started — are gone, and what remains is an impression. Impressions are biased: after a bad week you remember everything as worse.
This has a practical consequence: whatever you use to record has to work while you are dizzy. If logging a spell takes typing sentences into a notes app, it will not happen mid-spell. Prepare a format where the moment-of-attack entry is two or three taps — start time, kind of dizziness, done — and the details (triggers, ear symptoms) can be added after it passes.
A stack of daily entries is data, not an answer. What a doctor can use in a minute is the summary on top: how many spells in the last month, the typical duration, the kind of dizziness, the triggers that repeat, and which ear the symptoms favor. Bring the raw entries too — but lead with the summary page.
DizzyLog is an iOS diary for dizzy spells: logging an attack is 3 taps with a built-in duration timer, details can be filled in after the spell passes, and the record exports as a doctor-ready PDF summary. Barometric pressure is logged alongside automatically. Recording is free; Pro is a monthly plan with a 14-day free trial, a yearly plan, or a one-time purchase.
This article is general information about record-keeping, not medical advice. Dizziness has many possible causes, some of which need prompt attention — if you are experiencing dizziness, especially with sudden hearing loss, double vision, weakness, or trouble speaking, seek medical care rather than a diary.