How to track your menstrual cycle (and actually learn something useful from it)
If your idea of cycle tracking is opening an app once a month, realising you've forgotten when your last period started and trying to work backwards from whatever you were doing three Saturdays ago, you're definitely not alone. Most of us were never taught how to track our menstrual cycles beyond making a note of when we bleed, and while knowing when your period is due is obviously useful, it's only a tiny part of what tracking your cycle can actually tell you.
When you start paying attention to what happens throughout your whole menstrual cycle, rather than just counting down the days until your next period, you can begin noticing patterns in your mood, energy, confidence, relationships, work, appetite, libido, social energy and ability to deal with other people's bullshit. That's when cycle tracking stops being about predicting when you need to have a tampon in your bag and starts becoming a genuinely useful way of understanding yourself.
What should you actually track throughout your menstrual cycle?
You don't need a complicated spreadsheet, seventeen different apps or a colour-coded chart that becomes another thing on your to-do list. The best method of cycle tracking is the one you'll actually keep doing, so start with a few things that matter to your life and spend a couple of minutes checking in with yourself each day.
You might want to track:
Mood: happy, anxious, low, irritable, emotional, confident
Energy: exhausted, steady, energetic, restless
Physical symptoms: bloating, headaches, breast tenderness, cramps, appetite, sleep
Brain: focused, creative, scattered, overwhelmed, decisive
Relationships: connected, affectionate, irritated, needy, withdrawn
Life: motivation, social energy, work satisfaction, desire for rest
Thoughts: anything that keeps coming up about yourself, your relationships, your work or your life
That last one is particularly important to me because cycle tracking can tell us so much more than whether we felt “good” or “bad” on a particular day. Maybe you suddenly want to cancel every plan you've ever made, maybe you become convinced your relationship is wrong, maybe you start fantasising about leaving your job, or maybe you realise you're absolutely fucking furious that you're doing everything for everyone else. Write it down without immediately deciding whether it's true, false, rational, hormonal or something you need to act on, because at this stage you're simply gathering information.
Track every day, not just when you feel awful
This is one of the most important parts of menstrual cycle tracking, because if you only pay attention when PMS hits, you don't have anything to compare those days with. It's much harder to recognise a cyclical pattern if your notes consist of three entries saying “feel horrendous” followed by 25 completely blank days.
Instead, try making a tiny daily note throughout your whole cycle. It could be as simple as “Cycle day 8 — loads of energy, sociable, confident, productive” and then later in the month, “Cycle day 25 — exhausted, overwhelmed, don't want anyone touching me, furious about the housework.” You're gradually creating a record of you across your entire menstrual cycle, and after a couple of months those patterns can become much easier to spot.
The point isn't to analyse every mood change or assume that everything you experience is caused by your hormones. Life still happens, stressful weeks are stressful regardless of where you are in your cycle and sometimes you're annoyed because somebody is genuinely being annoying. What tracking gives you is enough information to start asking whether something is a one-off experience or whether you've seen a similar pattern before.
Learn the four phases of your menstrual cycle
Your menstrual cycle can broadly be understood through four phases: menstruation, the follicular phase, ovulation and the luteal phase. Your hormones change throughout these phases, and you may notice changes in how you feel physically and emotionally alongside them, although there is no rule saying you should feel a particular way on a particular cycle day.
This is an important distinction because cycle awareness shouldn't become another set of rules women are expected to perform correctly. You don't need to be wildly productive around ovulation, introverted during your period or schedule your entire business according to your hormones because somebody on Instagram told you that's how your cycle works. You're trying to learn your own patterns, not squeeze yourself into somebody else's version of what a menstrual cycle is supposed to look like.
Over time, you might discover that certain tendencies do repeat for you. Perhaps you naturally want to be more social at one point in your cycle and need much more time alone at another, or your confidence, concentration, appetite, libido or tolerance for stress noticeably changes. The useful part isn't whether those patterns match a textbook; it's that once you know what tends to happen for you, you can start working with that information.
Look for patterns, not individual bad days
One awful Tuesday doesn't necessarily mean anything, but when the same thought, feeling or need appears at roughly the same point in your cycle again and again, that's when it becomes interesting.
Maybe you consistently need more time alone before your period, your confidence drops or certain relationship dynamics suddenly become much harder to ignore. Maybe your workload feels completely manageable earlier in your cycle and unbearable later, or perhaps you notice that you have far less tolerance for saying yes to things you don't actually want to do once you reach your luteal phase.
This doesn't mean your cycle has magically given you the correct answer or that every premenstrual thought should be acted upon immediately. It means you now have a pattern to explore, and that is much more useful than spending the week before every period wondering why you've suddenly lost your mind only to forget about the whole thing as soon as you feel better.
What do you do once you've tracked your cycle?
This is where I think a lot of menstrual cycle advice falls a bit flat. We're often told to track our symptoms for two or three cycles, particularly if we're struggling with PMS or possible PMDD, but there's much less conversation about what we're actually supposed to do with all that information once we've collected it.
After you've tracked for a couple of cycles, go back through your notes and start asking yourself:
What keeps repeating?
What gets easier and what gets harder?
What do I repeatedly need?
What am I repeatedly angry or resentful about?
Are there particular thoughts that appear at the same point every month?
When do I feel most confident or capable?
When do I need more rest, space or support?
Is there anything I keep dismissing that comes back again the following month?
You aren't looking for a perfect menstrual cycle or trying to eliminate every difficult feeling. You're looking for information that helps you understand yourself better, because once you've spotted a pattern you can start deciding whether you need to change something, support yourself differently, have a conversation, set a boundary or simply remember that certain days tend to feel harder for you.
Cycle tracking isn't the same as “cycle syncing”
I don't believe you need to organise your entire existence around your menstrual cycle, cancel meetings because you're luteal or completely restructure your life according to four neat hormonal phases. Most of us have jobs, families, appointments, responsibilities and lives that don't disappear because we've reached cycle day 24.
For me, the goal is awareness rather than restriction. When you know certain days tend to be harder, you can give yourself a little more support where possible. When you understand how your energy tends to change, you can take that into account when you're planning things. When you recognise a recurring emotional pattern, you can explore it rather than immediately dismissing yourself as “just hormonal”.
Tracking can also give you useful information to take to a healthcare professional if your symptoms are particularly difficult. If you experience severe cyclical mood changes, symptoms that significantly affect your work or relationships, or you suspect you may have PMDD, keeping a daily record of your symptoms across multiple cycles can help you communicate what's been happening and when.
The point of cycle tracking is to understand YOU
The biggest shift for me happened when cycle tracking stopped being about knowing when my period was coming and started becoming a way of understanding how I moved through the month. I could see things on paper that were almost impossible to recognise when I was experiencing each day in isolation, and instead of feeling blindsided by the same thoughts and emotions every month, I could start asking why they were there and what I wanted to do with them.
Your cycle isn't a set of instructions telling you exactly how to live your life, and tracking it won't mean you never have a shit premenstrual day again. What it can give you is context, because when you understand your own patterns you have far more choice about how you respond to them.
So if you're starting today, don't overcomplicate it. Write down your cycle day, make a few notes about how you feel physically and emotionally, include anything that feels particularly loud or important that day and keep going even when absolutely nothing interesting seems to be happening. Give yourself a couple of cycles and then look backwards rather than trying to analyse every entry as you go, because that's when you start seeing the bigger picture.
And that's where cycle tracking becomes cycle awareness.
Want to understand what your cycle is actually telling you?
If you're completely new to this, my free PMS Survival Guide is a brilliant place to start understanding what's happening before your period and how you can begin working with your cycle rather than being blindsided by it every month.
GET THE FREE PMS SURVIVAL GUIDE
If you're ready to go further, my Unf*ck Your PMS masterclass is a one-hour introduction to understanding your menstrual cycle, the four phases, cycle tracking and the patterns that show up before your period, so you can start turning your premenstrual phase into a genuinely useful personal compass.
About Laurie
Laurie Jones is a certified menstrual cycle coach and premenstrual coach who helps people understand PMS, PMDD and the recurring patterns that show up throughout their menstrual cycle. Her work combines menstrual cycle awareness, practical cycle tracking and coaching to help people understand themselves and their lives better.