Why tracking your cycle will change your life
Words Maisie Hill // @_maisiehill_
How well do you know your cycle? Understanding the nuances of our hormones and our body isn’t something we’re actively encouraged to explore, and according to women’s health expert Maisie Hill, that’s a REAL shame. “I’m convinced cycle awareness is the greatest untapped resource for improving the mental health of menstruating people,” says Maisie.
Your energy, mood, appetite, sleep, sexual desire, creativity, productivity, ability to focus, interest in socialising, and need for movement and rest are all hugely affected by where you’re at in your cycle. Life gets much easier when you get the gist of what typically goes on in each phase because you can understand what’s going on internally and go easy on yourself.
Here, Maisie Hill, women's health expert and author of Period Power (Green Tree, $29.99) reveals down the top five reasons why you need to get to know your cycle better and exactly how to get started.
1. DEEPEN YOUR CONNECTION TO YOURSELF
You are in a continuous loop of being worked by your menstrual cycle, and each one that you move through gives you a chance to grow a little, or a lot, and outgrow the shell of the previous cycle somehow. You’ll feel yourself growing outwards in the world, but also down into yourself more.
2. IMPROVE YOUR EXPERIENCE OF PERIMENOPAUSE AND BEYOND
Condensed into each and every menstrual cycle, is our experience from menarche (your first period) to menopause, so each cycle helps to prepare and refine you for menopause. It’s the inner work that comes with cycle tracking that’s vital if we want to make the psychological transition of menopause with ease, because landing in perimenopause and still not knowing what the hell is going on with your body makes for a rocky time.
“I’m convinced cycle awareness is the greatest untapped resource for improving the mental health of menstruating people.”
3. plan your life
Cycle awareness helps you to feel and respond to your changing mood and energy, which creates an inner stability and flexibility that allows you to be kind towards yourself. It gives you a way to create a menstrual map of your month and a way to plan your diary.
4. improve your relationships
As you chart your own feelings and experiences you’ll start to recognise your own strengths and struggles. With time you’ll find that there are moments in your cycle where you’re even able to predict your mood and energy down to the day. You’ll get to know when you’ll want to socialise and be out in the world, you’ll know when you need some time alone, and that predictability is good for relationships because it gives those close to you a blueprint for your unique rhythm.
5. get to know your body better
Cycle tracking improves body literacy – your ability to read your body – which has tremendous knock-on effects in terms of self-esteem and mental health, so much so that I’m convinced that cycle awareness is the greatest untapped resource for improving the mental health of menstruating people. It allows you to recognise whether you feel depressed or anxious at certain points in your cycle, or most of the time, and if you do feel that way most of the time, whether your premenstruum intensifies these feelings – a phenomenon called premenstrual magnification. But although the cycle can exacerbate mental health issues, it can also provide moments of relief, and tracking your cycle will allow you to make the most of them
How to Track your cycle …
and change your life!
Maisie splits the menstrual cycle up into four distinct phases, each corresponding to the four seasons of the year:
The time of menstruation is your winter.
Your pre-ovulation phase is your spring.
The time around ovulation is your summer.
The week or so before your period starts is your autumn.
One word to rule them all
Every day, just write down one word that encompasses how you feel. You can keep a note on your phone, or if you’re into spreadsheets, create one that will give you a neat way of comparing things month by month. Actually, one word a day on a spreadsheet is a bloody great idea.
Use an app
Phone apps such as Clue, Kindara and Natural Cycles have many benefits and come in handy – they’re very user friendly and the alerts help if you’re prone to forgetting where you are in your cycle. They do generalise experiences and it can be hard to make comparisons month by month. Do your research though, as some apps sell the data they collect to pharmaceutical companies, which is why I often recommend using Clue because they don’t sell data, instead they work with research institutes at Oxford, Columbia, and Stanford universities. I’m also a fan of Clue’s non-gendered interface.
Old fashioned pen and paper
This is my favourite method because you can write as little or as much as you like, colour code days and rate some of the things you want to keep track of, such as energy, appetite and sexual desire on your daily pages, or have a chart in the same way you’d have a habit tracker and either use ticks or rate each item out of ten when they apply. When you keep track like this, I recommend including space for your non-rateable musings because there are bound to be some.
Because the menstrual dial is an easy way of looking at the whole of your cycle at once you can glue or tape copies of the dial into your notebook or get creative and draw your own. A blank dial is available to download for free from my website
What to Track
Keeping track of how you feel physically and emotionally is a really straightforward way of treating yourself better, because it gives you a way to spot patterns and to identify what you need in order to feel nourished and resilient.
Period Power (green tree, $29.99) is available from all good bookstores.