What Is Your Period Trying To Tell You?
If someone asked you what exactly happens during your menstrual cycle how much would you be able to explain?
Would you be able to elaborate on the happenings of your body? I mean do you remember even learning that in school, shocker, I don’t!
Although I can speak on the general happenings of my body it has never once occurred to me that maybe I should be paying more attention than I was.
After my conversation with Season and Cycle Founder, Nicole a Holistic Menstrual Educator, your girl is seriously thinking I should start charting my menstrual cycle to figure out what my body is communicating to me.
So how do I go about doing that? Isn’t there an app for this? Well turns out that charting your period is a little more than “tracking” your period.
According to Nicole, “charting itself is like a deeper practice and it's a daily practice of connecting with our cycles.”
Okay so how do I do this?
Track from day one, so the first day you start bleeding, like having a full period and not spotting, a full period. Then keep going around the cycle until you get to our next the first day of our next period. You'll see like for me, for example, my average is 25 days. So I know that around day 25 or 26 I'm going to start my period again. But within that cycle, there's four phases and they can be equated to the seasons in nature from kind of an energy standpoint.
Four phases? What four phases? And what am I supposed to be noticing?
For the first phase, you might hear it called your inner “winter” that’s more of an inward time in us. We're also, obviously bleeding, and potentially experiencing symptoms. This is also a time when we want to really focus on rest and how are we allowing our bodies to rest because it’s a major job and process that your body's going through when you're on your period. During our period, our hormone levels are at their lowest during the month so that also is why you might just be tired or feel funky because your hormones are low.
Next is the innerspring phase or what would be called your follicular phase, which is where you're done bleeding and heading towards ovulation that's also when estrogen starts rising which comes with it typically more energy, more feelings of wanting to be outward and social. It's an interesting time transitioning because a lot of us are just like, “hello, I'm back.”
Then ovulation continues to rise until it peaks this begins the third phase which is the ovulatory phase. This typically happens a couple of days before and after you ovulate. Your hormones are at peak level so your energy is probably going to be at its highest. You're going to want to be outward and social. These kinds of things can be normal, but this is also where turning to communities is helpful because you may not be experiencing these feelings and if you're not, that could actually be a symptom that something is imbalanced in your hormones or in your cycle.
From there, we go into everybody's favorite phase, which is the fourth phase, our premenstrual phase. So what's happening there as our hormones have peaked they start to fall but also progesterone is doing it’s thing because it's there to sustain the pregnancy, but if you’re not pregnant, those levels are still there. Which is nice because it's actually a calming hormone. That’s also where we may start to just feel more inwards, we may not have as much energy and we're naturally being calmed by our hormones. But then eventually progesterone also goes down which means all our hormones are kind of bottoming out before we get into our period. This is something I really like to point out. This particular thing changed my life, I used to be in therapy quite often and have a lot of fears around anxiety and depression. My therapist at the time was also a mindfulness coach and she started having me track my daily mood and energy this was before I even got into the menstrual cycle. What I came to realize is that when I felt out of control and like I was having these unpredictable depressive episodes it was always the same two to three days every single month. Fast forward to my menstrual training learn about the menstrual void. My mentor describes it as like you’re planning a party you have the egg, and you invite the sperm. Then nothing happens, right? You don't conceive, and that is the equivalent of nobody showing up to the party. So you're hormones dip so that can be what some feel like and for me, it felt like this.
We dive into more about all the ways your body is speaking to you in our full podcast interview with Nicole. If you’re wanting to know more about your own personal journey check out Season and Cycle on Instagram where you can get access to menstrual cycle coaching, food recipes to help you during your cycle, and more.