#hormonal cycle

So I started tallying my word count by the totals I hit for each day, using Google Spreadsheets. (I already track my word count there, so it was easy enough to just add a new sheet.) Then I made a column for the words written each day. I made a graph and started looking at it, and there was something about the two dips in word count that caught my eye.

Then I remembered this video that I’ve watched a couple times in the past few years. It’s a Ted Talk called Loving Your Lady Parts as a Path to Success, Power and Global Change. In it, Alisa Vitti touches on the four phases in a woman’s hormonal cycle, and how she can take advantage of the way her brain works during those phases. 

Here’s a general breakdown for the four phases:

Week One (Day 1-7)

Starts the first day of your period

After the achy, fatigue-y part, there’s a boost in energy, mood, optimism and brain skills

Week Two (Day 8-14)

Amps up the positive effects from Week One

Sharper memory, thinking faster on your feet

More impulsive, daring,competitive, and confident

Week Three (Day 15-22)

The first half is the Pre-PMS phase

Irritability, fatigue, and more cautious

Can be forgetful, foggy and less eloquent

Week Four (Day 23-28)

Moodiness, muscle aches, insomnia, headaches, and fatigue

Pretty much the sucky part

Good for organizing and paying attention to details

I found this fascinating, and it’s something that I’ve revisited every once in a while. I’ve always wanted to look into scheduling my work and life around these phases. So I looked at the period tracker that I have on my phone (I use Clue). I started highlighting my fertile windows, periods and PMS days on my spreadsheet. 

That’s when I realized that the two days when I cut a good chunk of my writing happened right after I started PMS-ing. Weird, but it makes sense.

So naturally, I made a new calendar, with the dates organized according to the weeks of my hormonal phases. Then I recorded my daily word counts, and added up my word counts for the week. After I looked at it as a whole, I realized some pretty awesome things.

1. The first week of my hormonal cycle is my most prolific time of the month (no pun intended). I write nearly three times more that week than the rest of the time during that cycle.

2. Weeks Two and Three are my slower weeks for writing. It’s when I struggle the most in figuring out where the story should head. I only end up writing about three days each week during that time. 

3. Week Four is when I go into Editor Mode. I’ve cut nearly half of what I’ve written during the second and third week of my cycle. So if I don’t want to end up doing that every month, I need to really look at what I’m writing during those two weeks.

4. During my Fertile Window (which starts in the middle of Week Two and ends at the beginning of Week Three), no writing gets done. I don’t get back into the saddle until the last day of that window.

5. The last day of my period isn’t a good writing day for me. If I get any writing down at all, it’s not very much.

Realizing this pattern makes me very happy. For one, it tells me that not writing everyday really doesn’t mean I’m a sucky failure. And that switching into Editor Mode in the middle of my draft isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Because in both of the previous instances, cutting those chunks of words has resulted in my story being better than it could have possibly been if I’d continued down that path.

And now that I can see this pattern, I have a major heads-up for the future. So when I start slowing down in my writing this week, I’ll know why. And I won’t beat myself up about it (nearly as much).