Mental Health: How to Build Cyclical Resilience

Can cycle awareness and the skill of cycle syncing make you and your relationships more resilient? The short answer is yes.

I used to confuse resilience with the ability to push through, no matter what phase of the cycle I was in. In time, this only led to the opposite: exhaustion, poor health, broken communication, and a deep sense of isolation.

But resilience in a context of women's cyclicity is not a single trait or a single act, and from phase to phase, resilience looks different too - all five pillars of it.

• Self-awareness.

  For women and people assigned female at birth, awareness of the timing is an essential part of self-awareness. As estrogen levels rise or fall, my self-perception changes too, depending on whether I am in ovulation or in the premenstrual phase. Questions like “Where am I in my cycle?” and “What does my normal look like today?” are important ones to ask.

  Self-awareness not only includes "Who am I?" but also "When am I?"

• Mindfulness.

  Mindfulness, or being reflective rather than reactive, also changes from one phase to another. There is a natural dip in mindfulness around the premenstrual phase, and I used to worry that something was wrong with me. Now I recognize that mindfulness can not be the same all the time, and I am not trying to fix that.

• Self-care.

  The way we care for ourselves is expected to change, too, because our needs shift across the cycle. Physical energy, self-confidence, and social capacity fluctuate, and self-care routines should reflect that.

  With the cycle in mind, self-care is less about keeping a fixed routine and more about adjusting to honor each phase and its needs.

• Positive relationships.

  For greater resilience, it is important to understand what positive relationships look like at each phase of the cycle, with ourselves and with others. During the premenstrual phase, instead of silently pushing through to meet other people’s expectations, it helps to guide them toward realistic expectations of you.

  A shame-free, judgment-free relationship with yourself is one of the most important factors in staying resilient.

• Finally, resilience needs purpose — a direction and a sense of meaning behind why we move through each day. And while each life stage purpose can look very different for all of us and sometimes takes years to complete, there is also a short-lived purpose of each phase, and honoring it brings a sense of wholeness and gives energy to keep going further.

Other options, anyone? A repairing approach to mental health.

If cycle awareness does not appeal to you yet, we can still take a repair approach to what gets broken after a long period of pushing through and living out of sync. We can reach for healing practices and techniques that help us in the moment, just enough to keep going. We can seek repair in a glass of wine, meditations, rigorous workouts, a round of therapy that probably will not take our cyclicity into account, or perhaps aloneness, pharmaceuticals, Tarot, crystals, or a combination of them all to feel in control. This approach, lengthy and costly, may bring temporary relief, especially around the follicular phase, when estrogen highs ensure a sense of temporary well-being. But it can also keep us in a cycle of “fixing” ourselves just enough to keep going until the next breakage.

Building cyclical resilience, on the other hand, is sustainable.

Here, there is little to fix as we learn to live with awareness of the cycle’s phases and become capable of anticipating the natural flow of our physical and emotional needs. We learn to match our expectations of ourselves to our upcoming energy levels and place the right mental and physical load at the right time, rather than loading up first and seeing whether we break. We commit to getting the best from each phase.

Which one to choose? I was born in 1987, and I have about 170 menstrual cycles left until menopause. I would rather meet each one with grace. I won’t always have access to repair kits and treatments, and I won’t always want to use them. I won’t always have the money or time to lean on therapy, retreats, or costly routines to repair my mental health. But I will always have the muscle memory to anticipate my patterns—physical and emotional—throughout my cycle.

This, to me, is the only path to resilient and sustainable mental health and emotional well-being for women and estrogen-living selves. And it’s the path I choose.

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