9 Easy Ways To Remember To Take Your Medications
According to the American Medical Association, people don’t take medicine as prescribed about half of the time.
Not taking your medication is often a matter of simply forgetting. Whether you forget because you’re dealing with brain fog from cancer treatment, a busy schedule, or you’re just juggling a lot on top of your treatment, it’s normal (and very common) to forget to take your pills.
And if you’re taking more than one medication, it can be difficult to keep track of them all. To make things more challenging, some breast cancer medications have complicated dosing schedules.
Fortunately, there are ways to get into a good routine with your meds so you can remove some of the stress of remembering and stay on schedule.
1. Use a pill organizer
If you take several medications at different times, try using a pill organizer that has different time compartments for each day — or, use separate AM and PM organizers. You can get them at your local pharmacy, department store, or online. Some pill organizers even light up, chime, or vibrate when you need to take your meds.
You might also find it helpful to use an online pharmacy that bundles medications in small packs and labels them with the date and time they should be taken.
2. Use visual cues
A visual cue can mean leaving your medication bottle(s) on the bathroom sink, bedside table, kitchen counter, or wherever you routinely take your medicine. You also can post a reminder sign wherever you take your daily dose and add one or two signs in places where you look every day (such as your bathroom mirror, your computer, your back or front door, or your refrigerator).
For Community member ChelseaSculler, the visual reminder is a cookie tin: “I keep a cookie tin of bottles by my bed and take them at night. The cookie tin is because I hate looking at all the bottles; they make me feel like a sick person when they’re sitting on the counter or in the daily plastic pill boxes.”
Some people find it helpful to turn the bottle over after they’ve taken their daily dose, and then place it upright later in the evening before bed or the next morning after waking up.
3. Use a medication diary
Use a calendar, notebook, or spreadsheet to keep track of what medications you take at what time each day. If you can't remember whether or not you've taken your pills, you can always go back and check. (The diary can even double as a side effects tracker.)
4. Try habit stacking
Habit stacking is a practice where you attach a new (or easily forgotten) behavior to something you already do every single day without fail — like brushing your teeth or letting your dog outside.
It’s especially helpful if you attach the habit of taking your meds to something you do at the same time each day since, typically, breast cancer medications should be taken at the same time day after day.
Community member Scrafgal suggests: “Take them at a time of day where you have the most control. For me that’s the morning, before I get all engaged with work. At night, I’m tired and would forget or fall fast asleep before remembering.”
So a morning habit stack might look like:
After I pour my coffee [existing habit], I’ll take my medications [new habit].
For Community member Traii, evening is a better time: “Morning didn’t work for me [due to] the rush of getting ready for work and my son for school. The side effects weren’t working for me during the day either, so I took control and found that nighttime before bed is what works best for me.”
5. Set an alarm
Using your phone, computer, or voice assistant device, set an alarm that alerts you when it’s time to take your medication.
Scrafgal sets two phone alarms just to be sure: “I set an initial reminder in the morning and another one just before noon, in case I [miss the first one]. This comes in handy on vacations where your routine is thrown off.”
“I use a Fitbit alarm as my nightly reminder,” writes Community member Illimae, “and now it’s just a habit: take pills, brush teeth, do lymph-related stretches, go to sleep.”
ChelseaSculler adds, “I have ‘take pills’ in my habit tracking app, called Strides, so I have a visual reminder of how I’m doing.”
6. Try a pill reminder app
Pill reminder apps are a modern solution to help remember to take your meds. A 2024 study found that a pill reminder app called Medisafe helped many women remember to take their breast cancer medications during the 12 weeks of the study.
Helpful features of many pill reminder apps include:
unlimited number of medication reminders
information about your medications, drug interactions, and side effects
prescription refill notifications
snooze feature that continues to remind you to take a medicine until you turn it off
symptom tracking
ability to have multiple people on one account, with a caregiver notification if a dose is missed
Many of the apps offer a free basic version, with a monthly charge for premium or pro versions.
Before you download an app, look to see which data, if any, the developer collects from the app, and whether it complies with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to ensure the privacy of your medical information
You can also read the reviews on your device’s app store to see what people who are using it have to say about it.
7. See if you’re eligible for auto refills
With auto refills of your meds, you can avoid things like forgetting to call in a refill or having to go to a pharmacy to pick up your prescription. Many major pharmacies even offer online ordering and delivery.
Pajim found it incredibly helpful: “Every 90 days the new pill bottle just showed up. I didn’t have to order or fetch it. Those were hurdles for me.”
8. Ask a trusted person to be your medication buddy
A friend, family member, spouse, or someone you’ve met in a breast cancer support group can remind you about what meds you need to take and check to make sure you've taken them. It can be as simple as a daily text or phone call. If they’re in breast cancer treatment, too, you can be “accountabilibuddies.”
Community member gb2115 says “I take my tamoxifen while getting ready for work. I’m very routine with it, take it right before blow-drying my hair. I take it with a full glass of water and then leave the tumbler on my nightstand. So when I get anxious and can’t remember if I took it, I text my husband to find out if there’s a slightly damp cup on the nightstand. He works from home, so he can check for me.
9. Plan ahead
If you know you’ll be out when your next dose is due, throw a brightly colored pillbox in your purse so you’ll remember. PurpleCat uses a pill organizer but says she always carries an extra dose in her purse as a backup: “Every now and then I get to work and remember I forgot to take it. So I carry an extra dose so I can take it at work.”
If you'll be away, take plenty of medication in the original container and bring along your pill organizer, diary, or whatever tools you're using. Consider taking along an extra prescription for each medication just in case. If you’re traveling by air, keep medication with you in your carry-on bag in case your luggage gets lost.
If you’re changing time zones, you might need to take extra steps to stay on track, says Ciaci, who uses a daily alarm on her phone as a reminder to take her pills: “When I went to Europe a few months ago. I set my phone to keep Eastern Standard Time so I didn’t have to adjust for time zones — I always took them 24 hours apart.”
Don’t worry if you still forget
You can’t remember if you took your meds today. Now what?
First thing’s first: Don’t panic. It happens to everyone. You can always call your doctor’s office and ask them what you should do.
No matter how perfect your system is, it might still happen — and that’s OK! The important thing is to keep experimenting till you find a system that feels sustainable and easy for you.