Written by Samantha Sanabria

If you’re a person who menstruates, you’ve probably learned the very basic reason for your menstrual cycle: to prepare your uterus for pregnancy by shedding its lining.

But, did you know that a normal cycle length can range anywhere from 21 to 35 days long?

Or, did you know that not every menstruator ovulates on day 14 (thanks for nothing, OB)?

Did you also know that despite what your high school health teacher taught you, you can’t get pregnant on any given day during your cycle?

There’s so much to learn about the menstrual cycle that we should’ve been taught during our formative years, including the practice of living cyclically. But thankfully, it’s never too late to learn!

What does it mean to live cyclically?

In a nutshell, living cyclically means embracing and honoring where you’re at, each day of your cycle. As menstruators, our hormones are constantly fluctuating. This fluctuation is what contributes to pretty much everything you experience — from mood swings to PMS to cravings.

By learning more about your cycle and what’s happening with your hormones, you can make informed decisions on things like what you eat, how you exercise and how (and when) you choose to socialize.

One way to live cyclically is to start tracking your cycle. Cycle-tracking is the act of monitoring your primary fertility signs on a daily basis. There are various methods out there, but most of them encourage tracking some combination of your waking body temperature, your cervical fluid and the position of your cervix.

Want to really be a pro at it? Add in some information about your daily symptoms and emotions, and you’ll be an expert at predicting patterns before they even arrive!

Tracking your cycle can help you in so many different ways, but here are the three areas that I find most valuable.

Enhance your life by tracking your cycle.

Enhance my whole life? Yes!

When you track your cycle, you learn more about the different phases of your cycle — the menstrual phase, ovulatory phase, follicular phase and luteal phase. Only heard of one or two of these? Same here, before I started tracking my cycle!

As people who menstruate, we’re constantly asked things like “Are you PMSing?” or “Is it that time of the month?” whenever we let those “bitchy” emotions like anger or frustration show.

By learning more about the phases of your cycle, you’ll soon realize that those emotions and behaviors that you so often are criticized for are completely normal. De-stigmatizing human emotions, FTW!

So let’s get back to the “optimize your life” bit.

When you normalize your emotions, you can say goodbye to the people-pleasing and hello to the ability to set your own boundaries and hold people accountable for abiding by them.

Maybe you’re currently menstruating and all you want to do is lie in bed with a hot water bottle and some sad tunes in your earbuds. But you feel baaaad because you told that one friend you’d go bar-hopping with them.

Maybe it’s the week after your period — your estrogen is at a high, and you’re feeling ready to conquer the world and take on what you didn’t feel you could while you were menstruating.

Knowing where you are in your cycle will allow you to make decisions based on the information your body is giving you. It’ll allow you to say yes when you really mean yes and no when you really mean no.

Optimize your fertility.

Even if you aren’t planning on having any of those cookie-crumb-covered gremlins any time soon, keep reading.

For those who are looking to conceive, tracking the three fertility signs mentioned above might be the ticket to saving you thousands of dollars in IVF treatments if you’ve been having trouble getting pregnant.

Unfortunately, many traditional doctors are still telling women that they should have intercourse on days 10–14 of their cycle because women typically ovulate on day 14.

Are they wrong? Well, a RESOUNDING yes, and a small no.

Many women do ovulate around that time, but many women also don’t. By tracking your cycle, you won’t need a doctor to tell you when you ovulate because you’ll be able to tell that yourself.

To believe that you ovulate on day 14 every month of your cycle is like saying your mail arrives at exactly the same time, every day. Maybe it does for some of you, but depending on a variety of factors, my mail can arrive anywhere from mid-morning to early evening.

Full disclaimer here: it can take a few months to really get the hang of tracking those fertility signs.

The good news is that there are a variety of resources, social media groups, and fertility awareness instructors that you can reach out to to get your questions answered.

Another disclaimer: tracking your cycle may not be the ultimate solution to getting pregnant. If you’ve been tracking your cycle and are still having trouble conceiving, you should definitely have a chat with your doctor. There could be underlying issues you may not be able to see.

And if you aren’t trying to conceive? Tracking your cycle will tell you when your fertile window is so you can avoid intercourse during those days, or use a barrier method.

You can say goodbye to all of the hormonal birth control methods you’ve tried — the ones that throw your hormones out of whack and can end up leaving a long list of short and long-term side effects.

Again, it can take a while for you to truly feel confident in using this method, so please look into fertility awareness classes if you’re serious about using it and don’t want to conceive.

Be a participant in your health journey.

We all know the song and dance — you go to a doctor’s appointment with a list of ailments, and they throw some pills at you and rush out the door to their next patient.

What if you could bring them some data that might help determine the root cause of said ailments? Instead of the doctor being the end-all-be-all in your health journey, you can very well be the person to figure out what’s going on too.

Now, I’m not telling you to start tracking your cycle and diagnose yourself. However, there are some patterns you might be able to see that may tell you what’s going on.

For example, according to Toni Weschler in Taking Charge of Your Fertility, low waking body temperatures (before ovulation) accompanied by symptoms such as long or irregular cycles, low libido or PMS may indicate hypothyroidism.

A short luteal phase may indicate a lack of progesterone, which is absolutely necessary to sustain a baby.

Tracking your cycle tells you all of this and more. This is the data you can bring to your doctor so that instead of being a spectator in your own health journey, you can be a participant.

There are so many wonderful reasons to begin tracking your cycle. Feeling in tune with our bodies can make for a happier and healthier life.

Knowing where we’re at in our cycles can give us the opportunity to make informed decisions, so we can be the experts of our own bodies.

There’s so much out there that we can’t control. By focusing on what we can, you’ll be taking the first step towards feeling more in tune with your beautiful body.

Where do I start?

There’s a lot of information out there on how to begin tracking your cycle. Here’s a list of resources I’ve found extremely valuable in my menstrual health journey.

For the readers:

• Taking Charge of Your Fertility: The Definitive Guide to Natural Birth Control, Pregnancy Achievement, and Reproductive Health by Toni Weschler, MPH
• Period Power by Maisie Hill
• Womancode: Perfect Your Cycle, Amplify Your Fertility, Supercharge Your Sex Drive, and Become a Power Source by Alisa Vitti
• Beyond the Pill: A 30-Day Program to Balance Your Hormones, Reclaim Your Body, and Reverse the Dangerous Side Effects of the Birth Control Pill by Dr. Jolene Brighten
• The Fifth Vital Sign: Master Your Cycles & Optimize Your Fertility by Lisa Hendrickson-Jack

For the listeners:

Whether you’re looking to conceive or avoid conceiving, here are a few great podcasts on all things female and fertility.

• Period Power
• The Well Woman Podcast
• Fertility Friday Radio l Fertility Awareness for Pregnancy and Hormone-free birth control
• Fertility Awareness Project
• Natural MD Radio l Feel better, Live better
• Mediatrix Wellness Podcast

For the doers:

Ready to get started? Since this is the age of technology, here are some apps that will help you get your feet wet with cycle-tracking.

• Read Your Body
• Kindara: Fertility and Ovulation Tracker
• Clue Period and Ovulation Tracker
• Flo Period and Ovulation Tracker
• GLOW. Ovulation and Period Tracker

A quick heads-up: some apps make predictions based on your previous cycles, which is called the rhythm method. This isn’t entirely accurate since we don’t always ovulate on the same day each month. Watch out for these so-called “predictions.”

Prefer the ol’ fashioned way? Just do a Google search for “BBT chart template,” print it out and get started!

There you have it. You have the ability to take control of your health, your fertility and your life by tracking your cycle.