What should you track with your cycle?
Image: Kelly Sikkema via Unsplash
One of the questions I get asked the most when people want to learn about tracking their cycle, is what should I track? The answer is pretty simple: whatever you want!
But it’s not a very helpful one and with endless measurable things in life, it can be hard to choose. And while my advice is usually to start with the things you already feel need attention, you can go a little deeper to make the tracking more meaningful and something you’re more likely to actually do.
If you’re looking to track your cycle, there’ll probably be something that you already feel is an issue. It might be migraines, bloating, fatigue or moodiness for example - things which can be fairly easy to track and understand. But what about things like productivity or creativity, which can be less to do with what we want to be doing, and more to do with what we think we should be doing?
I came to think about this after a recent 1:1 coaching session with a client. It was our very first call together, and we were working through what she wanted to track. When it came to creativity, she said it was something she felt she should be tracking, but the idea of it felt silly.
For her, creativity was what she’d seen in the media, like throwing paint on a white canvas with wild abandon. Femininity is often linked to creativity (the cycle being a literal vehicle for creativity) or the potent, untamed version of the Wild Woman.
Likewise, with productivity. It can be easy to think we should be getting up at 4:30am to journal, yoga, meditate and juice before working all day, picking up the kids, making them dinner and still having the time (and brains) to spend the evening with a partner or friends.
How do you measure yourself against that? And more importantly, is it even something you want to be measured against?
The first thing we talked through was the word, should.
The word, ‘should’ rarely comes before something we truly want to be doing.
Should, is an obligation. I should make time for this, I should return that call, I should go do this practice everyone else seems to be doing on Instagram.
As a coach, the word should is almost always a red flag. So we dug a little deeper into what creativity meant for my client, and it turned out that what she needed in order to feel that spark, was time alone where she could replenish her energy. And as a busy, working mum who wants to do it all, the idea of taking time alone brought up strong emotions of guilt for needing that time in the first place.
And likewise, with productivity, the question was, what does being productive mean? If it meant doing work, laundry, housework and all the rest, sure, she could track and measure that, but there was no pleasure in it. It wasn’t being productive by choice, but productive from necessity.
The question of whether to track creativity and productivity for her boiled down to this:
What is at the root of the things you want to track? Because that it is what will make it worthwhile or not.
For her, it was quality time alone. It might only be thirty minutes or a whole day, but tracking how often she’s able to get time alone means we have something to tangibly measure against when it comes to how often (if it all) she feels a creative urge in her cycle, or when she feels productive by choice, or when she feels so claustrophobic that it comes out as rage.
When it comes to tracking your cycle, it’s important to consider why you want to track in the first place, to get an idea of what to track (bearing in mind that the factors will likely change over time). Otherwise, it becomes another tickbox exercise that looks pretty on paper but won’t yield much when it comes to actually making the kind of change you want in your life,
Curious about how coaching can help with your cycle? Schedule a free 30min call with me or check out my coaching space.