Our menstrual cycles influence our health more than we think. We all know periods come with cramping, mood swings, and more. But, did you also know irregular periods can alert providers to underlying health issues like cancers or hormone irregularities? Your period may even be behind chronic condition flare-ups. For example, if you have rheumatoid arthritis, you may notice increased joint pain depending on where you are in your menstrual cycle. Likewise, if you have irritable bowel syndrome, you may experience noticeably worse symptoms during your period.
Many more chronic conditions are affected by a woman's menstrual cycle. Therefore, if you suffer from a chronic illness, it may be worth your time to see if your cycle could be behind your mysterious flare-ups. Spotting your cycle as a trigger can help you predict pesky flare-ups in the future.
With Guava, you can track your cycle, see predictions, get reminders, track discharge consistency, and learn more about how aspects of your cycle are connected to your health.
Cycle and Symptom Tracking
To see period predictions or period insights, start logging your period and symptoms in Guava. Guava allows you to log when you are on your period, your period flow level, discharge consistency and color, symptoms, and mood.
In order to see how your symptoms relate to your cycle, it's also important to keep track of your symptoms. Guava allows you to log symptoms, their severity, the time they occurred, and where on the body they occurred. Logging is a good way to see how your cycle and symptoms progress over time. Logging this information also makes it easy for you to pull up the onset date of symptoms or the date of your last menstrual cycle for something like a doctor's appointment.
Once you've logged your period, Guava can now predict your next period, ovulation, and when you will be most fertile. Knowing when your fertility window and ovulation are can help you if you are trying to conceive or avoid pregnancy.
Additionally, if you have connected the dots between your cycle and condition flare-ups, having these predictions can help you prepare for any painful or inconvenient symptoms you know may be coming.
Cycle Reminders
Once you have logged your period and can see a variety of cycle predictions, you can also set up cycle reminders. Guava has several cycle reminder options, including reminders for when your period is coming, if it's late, when you are ovulating, and when you are fertile. Using these reminders allows you to remember when important cycle events are happening without constantly referring back to the app.
Cycle Insights
Once you've logged your symptoms and cycle a couple times or have imported data from another cycle tracking app like Flo or Apple Health, you can begin to see trends and correlations between your flare-ups and your cycle. Guava can find correlations between certain categories of data, including symptoms, cycle, food, activity, blood pressure, and much more. If you have the premium plan, Guava will even provide you with automatic insights that constantly update without any additional work from you! You can test whether your period affects the presence of a symptom or the 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.
Guava also provides easy-to-understand charts under symptom tracking on the Today Tab so you can easily spot trends.
