Or why we wish we’d known about tracking your menstrual cycle sooner!
We started this project out of frustration that our healthcare providers didn’t acknowledge our new symptoms in our early 40s as possibly tied to hormonal changes. However, we now know that we shouldered some of the blame.
When our healthcare providers asked if our cycles were regular, we said yes. We were, in fact, getting periods about every month but, we weren’t tracking our menstrual cycles — marking down day one of each cycle and calculating how many days were in between the first day of bleeding each month. Had we been doing that, we would have been able to say our cycles were shortening. And if we’d had providers that were really in the know about the menopause transition, it might have occurred to them that these new symptoms of disrupted sleep, irritability, and anxiety that we were reporting might be caused by changing hormonal patterns.
The charts below represent our personal data
After realizing the importance of tracking your menstrual cycle, we got serious about collecting good data. So for the past three years, we’ve captured all day one data points for each cycle. For the years prior, our tracking was haphazard and was mostly focused on trying to conceive. Our children were born during those years of spotty data, so the number of data points in each yearly average varies.
We share these graphs with you to show two real-life examples of
For those that want to try it, we are fans of the Clue and MyFlo apps.
