Is Cyclical Living Just Adding to our Mental Load as Women?

Cyclical living – the idea of living in accordance with the phases of your menstrual cycle – has become quite trendy of late. Have you noticed? On TikTok, #CycleSyncing has garnered more than 5 million views and Instagram is bursting with ideas of different foods for different phases, along with tips on how to adapt your training according to when you might ovulate. 

But is this really helping women? Or is it just another thing to add to our already full plates and feel guilty about? 

If you’re juggling a career, kids, complicated family dynamics all whilst trying to stay slim and sane and maintain a social life, do you really have time to think about incorporating more beetroot during menstruation? 

For those of you who are new to cyclical living and have no idea what I’m talking about, let me explain! 

The female menstrual cycle is anywhere between 24 and 34 days, or 29 days on average. During these, let’s say 29, days our reproductive hormones rise and fall in order to stimulate ovulation and prepare the body for a potential pregnancy. 

We typically talk about the cycle in four phases: menstruation is the 3-7 days when you are bleeding and your hormones are at their lowest levels. The follicular phase is the week or so between menstruation and ovulation when estrogen and testosterone are rising, peaking at the third phase: the ovulatory phase. Then progesterone makes its big appearance after ovulation and estrogen has another mini surge, resulting in the highest hormone phase for around two weeks: aka the luteal phase. 

Each of these hormones – estrogen, testosterone and progesterone – has a full body impact and comes with its own vibe, if you will. Meaning they don’t just play a role inside your uterus as you may have been led to believe. Your cognition, mood, muscles, breathing, sleep, temperature, digestion are ALL impacted by these hormones in slightly different ways. 

When estrogen and testosterone are rising in the follicular phase, you may notice an increase in energy, libido and motivation. When you enter the high hormone luteal phase, where progesterone takes center stage, your body is under more pressure and is exerting more energy at rest. So the same task will take more energy than it would have the week before. You may also feel slightly more emotional and experience more cravings.

This is the basic idea behind cyclical living: when you understand the shifts that are happening to your mind and body, you can harness them to your benefit.

(One quick thing to mention: if you’re on the pill or you’re in menopause or you’re not getting a period, then these fluctuations aren’t happening and you should feel more or less the same way every day. Plus many women who have irregular cycles due to stress, contraception, PCOS or perimenopause may find this neat four phase model harder to follow – check out our free cycle tracking guide for help).

In case you think this all sounds a bit woo woo, or you suspect I’m just making this up, let me reassure you that there is a significant body of research that demonstrates the impact of our hormonal fluctuations on how we perform. 

I’ll share just a handful of examples: 

When it comes to how we think, research shows that changing hormone levels in the follicular phase can increase motor learning performance gains, and rising estrogen has been shown to correlate with increased verbal fluency.

On the physical side, increases in muscle diameter and muscle strength have been shown to occur more in the follicular phase and we see a reduction in spatial awareness in the luteal phase (bad news for tennis players like me). Studies also show that  prolonged exercise performance becomes more challenging in the run up to our period. 

All of these studies help explain that these shifts between cycle phases are meaningful and worth paying attention to.

I’m personally a big advocate of cyclical living. When I started building FUTURE WOMAN and first learned about all the benefits of our hormones (rather than just vilifying them as being responsible for my painful periods), I slowly started to shift my working patterns in accordance with my menstrual phases. I wasn’t going so far as to cancel meetings that occurred outside of my ovulatory window, but I would push harder when I had more natural energy and motivation in my follicular phase, and pull back when my body was craving more rest in the luteal phase. 

I noticed two really important shifts when I did this. 

The first is that I actually became more productive. I became protective of my follicular phase and would use it to really push the business forward with more substantial, complex projects like working out how to improve website conversion or planning out deeper partnership integrations. By contrast in my luteal phase I would focus more on mundane admin and detailed work – things like VAT returns(!), analysing our funnels and reviewing blog articles. By matching my tasks to my energy levels, more stuff got done. And better.

The second shift I noticed was that I was much kinder to myself. And I think this is important as a founder (and woman!) when there are literally endless ways to beat yourself up and think you’re useless. Rather than feeling a bit off, pushing through, failing and feeling bad about it, I would anticipate lower energy days and plan accordingly. 

And I’m not alone in banging this particular drum. 

Many women’s football teams are now crediting their success to cycle syncing. The lionesses apparently tracked their phases via an app during the 2022 Euros and were encouraged by their coaches to take more rest days in the weeks leading up to their periods to support performance and reduce injury risk. And the US women’s soccer team credited cycle tracking as a key component of their success when they won the world cup back in 2019.

So should you organise your life around your cycle phases like me and the Lionesses? Or is it too much work and additional mental load? 

There are four key areas in our lives that I believe we can switch up according to our cycle. Let’s take a look at each one in turn and then evaluate whether it’s worth it.

1. Exercise and training according to your cycle

This is probably the area where we know the most and have the most tangible real life examples of women using this successfully. Stacy Sims, author of the amazing book Roar, was recently featured on the Diary of a CEO podcast and has done women a huge service in moving this discussion forward. 

The basic approach is to focus more on high intensity workouts in your menstrual and follicular phases and to lift heavier weights with fewer reps. Then the luteal phase, where you’re burning more energy at rest and more injury-prone, is a time for gentler resistance training (maybe yoga and pilates) and weights sessions that include lighter, more frequent reps. Building in more recovery days in the luteal phase is also important. 

Based on 3 years’ worth of data at FUTURE WOMAN, I strongly believe that this is one of the most impactful changes you can make for your health. Overexercising without proper rest days is consistently shown to negatively impact cortisol levels, and lead to ovulatory disturbances at best (hello low progesterone) and missing periods at worst.

2. Work and productivity by cycle phase

From the most talked about to the least… And as someone who started their career in investment banking, I get why. If you’re a woman working in a large corporation like a bank, you are extremely unlikely to be shouting about your menstrual phases! If anything, you want to pretend to everyone you work with that it isn’t happening. 

However, there is some strong research pointing to better cognitive performance in our follicular phases as well as experiencing more natural motivation and energy. A fascinating study in Australia showed that naturally cycling women experienced 6 times more motivation around ovulation compared to women on the pill. That’s huge! 

Obviously I recognise the more junior you are, or the bigger your organisation, the less control you have over your tasks and schedule. As a friend recently told me, ‘my boss doesn’t give a shit when I’m ovulating.’ 

But having workshopped cyclical living with a number of women’s networks inside companies, you’d be surprised by how much within your working week IS adjustable. You might start with prioritising your most difficult tasks for your follicular phase and scheduling difficult conversations around promotions and raises for ovulation. And if you are self-employed or a founder like me, then you have even more scope to play around. 

3. Sleep, rest and recovery

Along with exercise, I believe this one is high impact, high reward. It also supports better performance both at work and in the gym. 

It’s pretty simple: just rest more during your luteal phase! That can look like going to bed earlier to get more (and better quality) sleep, investing more in your wind down routine and even scheduling personal days or holidays. I sometimes like to plan long weekends away during my luteal phase. Why not?!

4. And finally, do you really need to switch up your diet according to your cycle?

This is the area I’m least on board with when it comes to making adjustments! Partly because the science shows the impact is quite negligible. And partly because I do believe this adds unnecessary pressure to the mental load of being a woman. Telling a woman to eat more iron-rich foods during her period when she’s also feeding a family and managing a busy career. There’s just no way!

As our lead nutritionist Francesa Lyon recently told me, “The reality is the increased metabolic demands of the luteal phase are only slightly more – about 100-300 calories which isn’t really worth writing home about.”

“Much more important than eating according to cycle phases is to eat based on your overall needs as a woman. I see too many women in clinic losing their periods or with low cortisol or low progesterone levels as a result of eating too few calories, cutting carbs or aggressive fasting regimes. Eating three balanced and nutrient dense meals a day, with limited to no snacks, will serve you well every day of your cycle.”

So is cyclical living adding to our mental load? It depends how you approach it. When it becomes rigid rules and complicated shopping lists, then yes it is just more pressure. But when it is used as a gentle framework to help you honour what your body needs and when to rest, it can reduce guilt and increase productivity. 

If you’re a fan of cyclical living, or you’re excited to start, I’d love to hear from you! Give me a follow on LinkedIn here.