Understanding Your Monthly Hormone Cycle Using Charting and Journaling
Become the woman you want to be, from menarche to menopause, by maintaining your monthly cycle chart and journaling your personal insights.
Mark your symptoms and feelings for each day of your cycle.
- Watch your cyclical nature unfold.
- Fill in each category with the symptoms or behaviors that you would like to chart. See examples below.
- Menstruating women, note your changes in relation to the day of your cycle, and the lunar cycle.
- Menopausal women, note your changes in relation to the lunar cycle.
Cycle Symptom Examples:
Physical — feeling energetic, sleeping well, healthy skin tone; headaches, abdominal pain, cramping, water retention, insomnia, hot flashes, acne, vaginal/viral infections, sudden changes in weight.
Mental — clear thinking, decisive, calm, feeling capable and competent, able to recover and develop workaround for challenging situations and events, handling daily stressors well, feeling independent and in control; Fuzzy thinking, indecisive, feeing an underlying panic, feeling inept, ‘limiting’ or ‘belittling’ internal thought patterns, confusion.
Emotional — feeling social, high self-esteem, at peace, patient with others, loving, satisfied with my life, joyful; low-self-esteem, feel isolated, frustrated, angry, poor impulse control, depressed, stressed out, impatient, unloving and not lovable.
Nutritional — drinking lots of water, making good nutritional choices, eating at mealtime and skipping snacks; skipping meals, craving junk food, munching chocolate, increased alcohol use, too many diet colas.
Environmental — strong family support, nurturing work environment, respected, valued, network of mentally-healthy friends, productive, can control or negate stressors; isolated or alone, toxic family members, passive- aggressive associates, not respected, not valued, out of control stress- factors, hostile work environment.
Spiritual — Connected, in touch with self, respectful of myself and others, compassionate, feeling grateful, feeling free to forgive and let go; feeling separate, disgruntled with life, holding on to hurt, judging myself and others, out of grace.
To understand the cyclical nature of your symptoms and behaviors it is suggested that you chart your monthly hormonal/lunar changes, and journal your insights for at least three months. The authors believe that monthly charting and journaling should be a life-long practice. This is a powerful, diagnostic tool, not only offering you personal insight into your mind, mood and hormone cycle; but also providing an invaluable record of your personal cycle to share with your health care practitioner.
To download a free Personal Cycle Journal Click here:
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