As someone who really struggled with words at school, I loved maths (not algebra though, because letters and numbers… argh)
So here are some big numbers. Numbers about our menstrual cycle.
I hope that when you see them, you’ll think, ‘WOW, we are just epic creatures!’
One thing before we start. All of these are averages, so you might feel very differently, and that’s all good. In fact, if your experience doesn’t match the maths, I’d love to hear about it.
Right. Let’s do some menstrual cycle maths.
You’ll have around 450 to 500 cycles in your lifetime
Roughly speaking, from your first bleed to your last, you’ll cycle around 450 to 500 times.
That’s a lot of chances to understand yourself better. And most of us go through the whole lot without ever really being told what’s happening.
That’s about 39 to 45 years of cycling
Think about that for a second. Four decades. Most of your adult life.
It’s not a phase. It’s not a thing that happens occasionally. It’s the backdrop to almost everything you’ll ever do.
And be on your period for about 7 to 10 of those years
Out of forty-odd years of cycling, seven to ten of them are actually spent bleeding. That’s about 2,555 to 3,650 days.
Which sounds like a lot until you realise what it means. Your period is not your cycle. It’s one part of it. One phase out of four.
But what I’ve noticed is that when I talk about our menstrual cycle, people think I’m only talking about our periods. I guess because it’s the visible bit. The bit that is most stigmatised and the bit that costs us the most. (That’s for another day… we all know menstrual products should be free. They would be if men had periods.)
The other thirty-odd years? Nobody mentions those.
You’ll have that rising post-bleed energy for around 9 to 11 years
That bit after your bleed when things start to lift. Ideas come easier. You feel like doing things. Red School call this your inner spring, and it’s a beautiful way to think about it.
Nine to eleven years of your life in that energy. And most of us have never even had a name for it.
You’ll spend just over 1 year of your life ovulating
So this little number really got me thinking.
Ovulation itself is a single day per cycle. Across a whole lifetime, that adds up to just over a year.
One year.
And listen up, because this gets my goat. Your inner summer, that ovulatory, outward, confident, up-for-anything version of you, is the version we’re all told to be all the time. Bright. Energetic. Available. On.
It’s the rarest phase you have. And we’ve built an entire culture around pretending it’s the default.
No wonder we are all exhausted and feel like we are failing!
Now one thing to note here is that your inner summer does straddle either side of the 1 ovulation day, so you probably get your most outward energy for longer than a day a month. But it is still worth noting
For each cycle you’ll be in your luteal phase between 10 and 17 days
Your inner autumn. The phase where energy starts to draw down, where your intuition gets louder, where you might feel a bit ragey and quite done with everyone.
Ten to seventeen days. Every single cycle. It’s the part you’ll be in for the longest.
Which works out at around 5,850 days, or 16 years, in your inner autumn
Sixteen years. More than double the time you’ll spend bleeding.
And I would bet good money that nobody has ever sat you down and explained what that phase is, or what it needs from you.
This is the phase where women tell me they feel like a different person. Where they feel too much, too irritable, too sensitive, too everything. Where the shame creeps in and the self-criticism starts.
Sixteen years of feeling like that, with no language for it and no map.
You’ll journey through perimenopause for between 4 and 10 years
Perimenopause usually starts in your mid-forties, though for some women it begins in their thirties, I’m one of those, and for some it’s much earlier. It typically lasts four to eight years, and for plenty of women it stretches closer to a decade.
Here’s the bit that surprises people most: it’s the hormone fluctuations during perimenopause, not menopause itself, that cause most of the disruptive symptoms. So all that stuff you might associate with “the menopause” is often happening years before your last bleed.
Red School call perimenopause The Quickening. Less medicalised, more focused on your initiation into the next incredible phase of your journey.
Like ovulation, menopause is just 1 day
Menopause is a single point in time. It’s the day that marks twelve months since your last period. That’s it.
Everything before it is perimenopause. Everything after it is postmenopause.
We talk about “going through the menopause” like it’s a decade-long event. Technically it’s one day.
And you’ll spend around a third of your life in the wisdom of postmenopause
The average age of menopause in the UK is 51. Average life expectancy for women is around 83.
So that’s roughly 32 years afterwards. About a third of your life.
A hundred years ago, menopause came at around 57 and women lived to about 77. Now it comes at 51 and we live far longer. Which means the postmenopausal stretch of a woman’s life has expanded enormously in a single century.
And yet. Research suggests around 90% of postmenopausal women were never taught about menopause at school.
So what would you have done differently?
That’s the question I keep coming back to.
If someone had sat you down at school and shown you this maths, what would have changed?
Would you have stopped calling yourself and your friends crazy, moody, lazy? Would you have rested when your body asked you to instead of pushing through? Would you have understood that the version of you who wants to hide is just as valid as the version who wants to dance?
Would you have been kinder to yourself?
I think about teenage me a lot. She started her period at ten. She spent twenty years on the pill trying to fix something that was never broken. She hated her body for doing exactly what it was designed to do.
I am forever grateful that I found a way to reconnect, and that I get to offer that to you as well.
So, where do you start?
You don’t need to understand all of it at once. You really don’t. You just need to start noticing.
That’s exactly what The Breath & Cycle Check-In is for. It’s a ten minute daily audio practice that guides you through checking in with your breath, your body, and where you are in your cycle right now. Three simple questions. A monthly calendar to track what you notice. That’s it.
It’s £7, and it’s the beginning of the whole thing.
Because your cycle has been talking to you for a while now. This is where you start listening.