Potential Downsides To Using Period
Some privacy advocates have raised concerns about all the data you input in a period tracker and the potential for that data to be misused.
Consumer Reports notes that period-tracking apps gather a lot of intimate information about your sex life, whether you are trying to have a baby, if you engage in unprotected sex, have experienced a miscarriage, are approaching menopause that could potentially be sold to third parties for marketing or other purposes.
Having your personal health information out there may have serious repercussions, Consumer Reports cautions, such as whether and how much you pay for life insurance, or whether your employer discriminates against you.
If an app lets you opt out of sharing your data , always do so, Consumer Reports says.
How To Track Your Period
To track your period you can use a variety of methods both old-school and digital. No method is necessarily better than the other as long as it works for you.
- Use a calendar to mark the start and end dates of your period
- Write the dates down in a notebook or post-it note
- Keep a record in the notes app of your phone
- Use a period tracking app
In addition to tracking the start and end dates of your period, you may also want to take note of other symptoms and when they occur, including:
- Physical symptoms, like fatigue, headaches, cramping, and bloating
- Mood swings, which affect 30% to 80% of people who menstruate
- Consistency of your vaginal discharge, like if it’s watery, thick, or sticky
After about three or four months of tracking your period and symptoms, you may start to notice patterns that can help you predict the timing of your next menstruation, says Sophia Yen, MD, CEO and co-founder of Pandia Health, a birth control delivery service.
Noticing Early Symptoms And Physical Changes
Many women notice physical or emotional changes which typically align with the arrival of their period, from bloating or breast soreness to irritability or fatigue . Some survey respondents paid close attention to these changes, using them to predict the arrival of their period. For S146, the physical changes tell her to be prepared: from the onset of soreness I give myself a few days, and then I’m on high alert. S639 mentioned she has an irregular period, and noticed I get depressed and moody a few days before I start I am able to recognize these emotions as a period coming.
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Spot On Period Tracker
Spot On comes from the experts at Planned Parenthood, and it offers tons of features that can help you get a better sense of whats going on during your period. You can keep track of symptoms like acne, cramps and fatigue as well as manage birth control methods and where youre at in your cycle. You can also find resources and health information from Planned Parenthood.
Download Spot On for free from iTunes and .
Period Tracking And Pregnancy
For many women, a missed period is the first indication of pregnancy. That fact alone is reason enough for sexually active women to keep track of their monthly cycles. Most forms of birth control don’t quite hit the 100% effectiveness mark, and an unplanned pregnancy is the last thing you need.
In addition to birth control, following the ârhythm methodâ â in which a woman avoids sex during her most fertile days to prevent pregnancy â relies on accurate period tracking.
On the other end of the spectrum, women trying to conceive can use period tracking to learn when they are the most fertile. This may boost the chances of conception significantly.
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How To Use Menstrual Period Calculator
It is quite simple 3 step process to calculate your next period and your menstrual cycle using MomJunction period calculator. Also, download customised menstrual calender for year.
- Enter the first day of your last menstrual period.
- Enter the average length of the menstrual cycle.
- Average duration of the last period.
Once you share all the above information,period calculator will share your following menstrual date for a year, fertility calendar, ovulation phase, fertile phase and estimated due date.
How Women Track Their Cycles
We surfaced six methods and tools women use to track their cycle. Women use phone apps, use digital calendars, write in paper diaries, follow cues in their birth control, notice symptoms, or simply remember. We also report on women who do not track. Similar to tracking in other domains , women sometimes use multiple methods simultaneously and switch between methods. Table 2 shows the relative prevalence of each method in our survey participants. We again note that our recruitment approach led to a sample that over-represents women who track their menstrual cycle, especially women using technology to do so.
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Gendered Design And Nonconformity
Similar to a trend noticed by Peyton et al. in the context of pregnancy apps , the menstrual tracking apps we reviewed tended to use stereotypically feminine attributes, such as the interface being predominantly pink or using flower and heart images . S98 found the design of her app insulting: they have tried to make it feminine by adding flowers It makes me feel like you are trying to dumb it down for me. Why can’t keeping track of my menstruation be a professional and organized task? . I09 tried a couple of different apps, finding: a lot of them just felt kind of condescending or like they were designed by dudes who were designing what they thought a woman would like.
Period tracking apps often employ feminine, flowery, pink aesthetics. is Period Diary, is P. Tracker Lite.
Our sampled app reviews often mentioned the femininity of apps. 13 reviews appreciated the femininity, including A194 I love the way it includes necessary info in a fashionable girly way. 🙂. However, 44 app reviews considered femininity a more negative design trait, and valued when they found more gender-neutral designs: I spent quite a while trying to find that wasn’t pink and/or flowery, but I finally did and I’m impressed .4b). 38 of these reviews were for the Clue app, which was described as a gender neutral alternative .
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How To Calculate A Menstrual Cycle And Menstrual Period
The menstrual cycle begins on the first day of your period. In other words, day one of the cycle is the day one of your period, cycle day two is the second day of your period and so on. In general, bleeding is there for three to five days and differs from one woman to another.
An important point to note is that the cycle begins from the day of your regular bleeding but not spotting. For instance, you started spotting on March 3, but the actual bleeding began a day later. So the first day of your menstrual cycle is March 4. Let’s say you bleed for five days, so, the duration of your menstrual period is five days for the month of March.
Now, if your next period started on April 2, then your menstrual cycle length is the number of days from March 4 to April 1 , which is 29 days. You should not count the first day of your next period because that day will fall under the next menstrual cycle.
In general, menstrual period is the number of days you bleed regularly and menstrual cycle is the number of days from first day of your last period to a day before your next period starts. The average length of the menstrual cycle is 28 days but varies from person to person.
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Q How To Find The Safest Days To Have Sex Based On The Period Calculator To Avoid Pregnancy
Calculating the safe period days is very simple. You have to fill in the dates of your last period, duration of your period and the duration of the menstrual cycle. And your data is ready for the next months! The dates with white spaces in the calendar are the safe day. Generally, one to seven days of the menstrual period, and the days after ovulation are considered safe or infertile.However, remember that the calculator is purely based on the details you give, and can be inaccurate if the data is incorrect.
It Will Increase Your Awareness Of Your Overall Health And Wellness
Your menstrual cycle is a direct indicator of your overall health, and periods are your body’s way of telling you that things are working as they should. Having an extremely unpredictable or heavy period, or skipping a period, can indicate an existing underlying condition. By tracking and logging various details of your cycle, you will be able to recall things that you might otherwise forget when speaking with your healthcare provider. When you use Clue, you always have the dates of your last period at your fingertips.
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Should You Track Ovulation
The short answer: It depends on what you want and need.
“The most obvious reason someone would want to track their ovulation would be focused around the potential to become pregnant,” Nicole Telfer, naturopathic doctor and science content producer at Clue told CNET. “A person can only become pregnant if they have unprotected sex five days before ovulation, plus up to 24 hours after ovulation has occurred. It’s actually a relatively short time frame.”
And even then, a mature egg only lives 12 to 24 hours after release from the ovaries, so try to have sex within that window if conception is the goal.
Another problem is, Telfer says, ovulation does not happen at exactly the same time and can change from cycle to cycle. People who want to get pregnant often track their cycles and ovulation to help them determine when would be the ideal time to plan sex so that their chances of conception increase.
Other than pregnancy, here are a few reasons you may want to track ovulation:
Tracking ovulation may help you avoid pregnancy. On the flip side, if you’re not trying to get pregnant at the moment, tracking your ovulation can assist with contraception efforts.
“For those who are not ready for a baby, tracking ovulation is a great way to know when you should be extra careful,” Janell Sanford, Pharm.D. and Pill Club pharmacist-in-charge told CNET, “and perhaps double up on hormonal and non-hormonal contraception to avoid getting pregnant.”
Best Period Tracking Apps
If you’re someone who prefers the digital route to pen-and-paper, you may want to try a period tracking app. With so many apps available it can be overwhelming to decide which is right for you. Here is a list compiled by our Reviews team on the best period tracking apps:
- Flo, voted the best overall period tracking app by our Reviews team. It offers a variety of useful information about your cycle and overall health, features a user chat function, and includes educational input from over 80 experts.
- Natural Cycles, an FDA-approved birth control app that uses your daily temperature readings and period data to predict fertile windows and it can be a useful companion for insight into your cycle.
- MagicGirl, which is designed for teens and provides educational videos and a diary to keep track of how you feel.
- Life Period Tracker Calendar, is designed for those with irregular cycles and patterns who can then present the information to their doctors.
- Clue, which offers an extensive selection of tracking categories, has an easy-to-use interface, and is entirely gender-neutral.
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How To Best Keep Track Of Your Menstrual Cycle
The average menstrual cycle lasts about twenty-eight days, with the first day you start your period being day one. Because your cycle can tell you a lot about whats going on with you and your body, its important to keep track of it.² For example, irregular or missed periods could suggest pregnancy.³ In other cases, it could signal warnings that youre very stressed, have a hormonal imbalance or other health issues. On the opposite end, extremely heavy periods exceeding seven days might also indicate that something could be wrong.
No matter which method you use to keep track of your cycles, make sure you include information like flow, colour, odour, texture and whatever else you can, especially if you start to notice any major menstrual cycle changes.²
View Detailed Information About Your Periods And Menstrual Cycle
When your healthcare provider asks, âWhen was your last period?â you can simply grab your phone and tap on the calendar icon to show them your last periods in the calendar. You can also see a list of your past cycles, and your cycle averages by going to the Analysis screen .
On the right side of the screen, you can see a summary of how long your cycles have been. Period days for each cycle are shown in red, the estimated ovulation day is indicated with a star, and if youâve tracked PMS those days are shown in blue.
This section of the Clue app also shows your typical cycle length , your typical period length , and the typical cycle length variation
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Supporting Varied And Changing Reasons For Tracking
Apps support many of the motivations women have for tracking their menstrual cycle . Supporting many tracking motivations provides benefits, including supporting people when their goals change. S148 initially started because I was fairly irregular and wanted to find any trend I could, but now has different goals: now I track to make sure I’m not missing my period a pregnancy check, basically. S318 originally tracked for awareness: before, it was to know when it would next come, and is now trying to become pregnant: more recently, it has been to know when I’m ovulating for conception. In practice, apps for menstrual cycle tracking are not wholly successful at supporting varying goals. S127 has tracked for both health and fertility, noting some have features for health and some have features for fertility planning to make the most, I have used various apps at the same time and entered data into them twice.
One option to better support these goals is to include more information and options relating to fertility, pregnancy, and post-partum. However, some women believe apps already focus too much on these areas. S467 felt her app is clearly trying to support my getting pregnant and not just agnostically for tracking . A1936, who just started having her period, felt the ovulation information in Clue was not relevant to her: I would like it if they made a kid’s version because idc about fertile!! I’m too young!!
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