Glossary
Adherence
Updated February 22, 2026
Adherence is how consistently your real routine matches your intended stack, not how perfect your calendar labels appear.
In practice, adherence is the signal behind trend stability across sleep, training, and stress days.
What adherence means in Unfair
Unfair treats adherence as behavioral consistency, not perfection.
- Green zone: the dose lands within your planned window plus or minus 2 hours.
- Amber zone: the dose lands between 2 and 4 hours off target.
- Red zone: more than 4 hours off target, or fully missed until the next planned time.
This keeps the system usable for real life and avoids false risk spikes from one late event.
Practical scoring interpretation
- Streaks: 1 to 2 days show re-entry, 3 to 5 days show habit rebuilding, and 7+ days usually stabilize trend quality.
- Recovery windows: one miss can be recovered by taking the next planned dose on time and logging context.
- Two or more misses in 7 days usually shift the same-day confidence band and trigger a review prompt for that schedule block.
After one miss, do not double-dose. If the miss is under 6 hours, take the skipped dose once and log the context. If it is later or causes a stacking overlap, skip and resume at the next scheduled point with a note.
How adherence is tracked in Unfair
Unfair uses three in-app sources for adherence state:
- The journal in the dose log for timestamped entries and notes.
- Reminder behavior for expected windows, snoozes, and ignored prompts.
- Dose windows from stack planning to classify green/amber/red timing.
Concrete action before changing this behavior: enable reminders for your highest-risk window and force yourself to add a context note for any miss within 24 hours.
Why this matters for outcomes
A practical benchmark is 80% adherence over 14 days. In that range, pattern analysis is typically usable. Around 50% or below, it is usually too noisy to infer meaningful dose-response changes.
Cross-site references
Uncertainty
- Evidence is limited for exact adherence thresholds across mixed-stack protocols.
- Evidence is limited on how quickly behavior drift becomes a meaningful confounder for long-tail outcomes.
How this appears in Unfair
- Adherence is calculated from journal logs first, then adjusted by reminder state and window tolerance.
- A miss does not immediately disable recommendations; it lowers confidence and increases recovery recommendations.
- Repeated misses in safety-sensitive cycles can reduce recommendation confidence and add pause prompts.
Clinical safety note
If missed-dose patterns are paired with severe palpitations, syncope, or confusion, pause related stacks and consult a clinician. Do not self-escalate to “catch up.”