Recent women’s health research has made it clear that menstrual cycles influence our health far more than we previously thought. We’re all familiar with typical period symptoms, like cramping and mood swings, but for many people who menstruate, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. For those with underlying health issues or chronic illnesses, irregular periods can be a part of everyday life. To get a full picture of your health, it's crucial for both patients and healthcare providers to understand the relationship between flare-ups, cycle irregularities, and menstrual phases.
Consider rheumatoid arthritis: you may notice increased joint pain at the beginning of your cycle. Likewise, if you have irritable bowel syndrome, you may experience noticeably worse symptoms during your period. These are just two examples–many chronic conditions are affected by menstrual cycles.
If you suffer from a chronic illness, it’s worth investigating whether your cycle could be behind your unexplained flare-ups. Recognizing your cycle as a trigger can help you predict and prepare for flare-ups in the future.
Cycle Tracking in Guava
Guava's cycle feature offers comprehensive menstrual tracking. You can monitor your cycle, receive fertility and menstruation predictions, see symptom patterns insights based on cycle phase, and learn about how your cyclical hormonal fluctuations affect your health.
How to Use Guava for Cycle and Symptom Tracking
1. Logging your Period and Symptoms
To see cycle insights and predictions for your period and ovulation windows in Guava, you'll first need to log your period and symptoms. At any point during your cycle, Guava allows you to log:
- Whether you're on your period
- Your flow
- Discharge consistency and color
- Mood
- Sexual activity
- Symptoms (whether they're related to your period or not)
If you want to see how your period and cycle phases affect chronic illness symptoms, logging symptoms in Guava is crucial. You can log:
- Symptom type
- Severity
- Time
- Duration
- Location on the body map
- Photos
Logging this information makes it easy for you to pull up the onset data of symptoms or the date of your last menstrual cycle for doctor's appointments.
2. Cycle Predictions
Once you've logged your period, Guava can predict:
- Your next period
- Ovulation day
- When you will be most fertile
Knowing your fertility window and ovulation can help you if you are trying to conceive or avoid pregnancy. You can also log sexual activity to keep track of your chances of getting pregnant.
Guava can help you connect the dots between your cycle and condition flare-ups. These predictions can help you prepare for any painful or inconvenient symptoms you know may be coming.
3. Cycle Reminders
Once you have logged your period and can see a variety of cycle predictions, you can set up cycle reminders. Guava offers several options, including reminders for:
- When your period is coming
- If your period is late
- When you are ovulating
- When you are fertile
Using these reminders allows you to remember when important cycle events are happening without constantly referring back to the app.
4. Cycle Insights and Trends
After logging your symptoms and period for at least a few cycles, you’ll begin to see trends in your average period and cycle length over the past months.
Guava uses your cycle history to estimate your fertility window, ovulation date, and period length. By aligning these phases with the symptoms you log, you can visualize how symptoms vary over the course of the menstrual cycle. For instance, you might see that your bloating gets worse during your luteal phase, or that your fatigue peaks between your period and ovulation.
Depending on what phase you’re in, you can select “Hormone levels” to see what to expect based on the hormonal fluctuations of your menstrual cycle.
If you’re on the premium plan, Guava will proactively find the patterns in how your symptoms and other health metrics change throughout your cycle. That way, you can know what to expect during each phase, or even day of your cycle, whether that’s changes in sleep, energy mood, or flare-ups.
Guava also pulls in the data you’ve logged to automatically find statistically significant correlations between certain aspects of your health, like energy, food, activity, blood pressure, and much more.
Without Premium, you can gain insights into different aspects of your health (including your period phases and symptoms) by manually entering the two data categories. With Insights, you can test whether your cycle phase affects the presence or severity of a symptom. You can also see if symptoms are related to period flow intensity or if a certain discharge color or consistency correlates with a symptom.
In Summary
Regardless of your cycle's patterns, you deserve to understand how it influences your symptoms and flare-ups. Guava enables you to track your cycle, fertility, and symptoms while providing insights and predictions to help you anticipate what's coming. This comprehensive view of your health empowers you to manage your condition more effectively and communicate clearly with healthcare providers, paving the way for improved outcomes.
