 Hello, my name's Jackie and welcome back to my channel. If you are new here, I'm an aspiring author and in this video I am going to attempt to sync my writing with my menstrual cycle. And if that sounds a little bit out there, here is the backstory. So earlier this year I was listening to a podcast where Alyssa Vitti was being interviewed. Now Alyssa is a woman who helps women balance their hormonal health and get their periods back on track. And I've come across her a few times in the past few years but I was never really drawn to her work just because I haven't really had issues with my period or my hormones. However, this interview really resonated with me. And the reason for that is because one of the things she talked about was the fact that society runs based on male hormonal patterns. Basically, men run on a 24 hour hormonal cycle or the circadian rhythm. They wake up in the morning, their testosterone's at its highest and they're raring to go and want to grab the bull by the horns. They want to get up and get stuff done for the day. Then in the afternoon their testosterone starts to dip, their estrogen rises in comparison. And that's when they're ready to start slowing down and socialize. And coincidentally, this is when happy hour is scheduled after work. So this is when they're ready to switch off for the day and start connecting with others. Then at the very end of the day, their testosterone and energy is at its lowest and they're ready to wind down and read or watch Netflix before heading to bed. And then they go to sleep and the next day the same thing starts all over again. Now, this might sound good in theory, but the problem is women don't run on the same hormonal cycle. In fact, we have a predominant 28 day hormonal cycle rather than a 24 hour one. And the danger of this is that if you're pushing yourself to run on the male hormonal cycle day after day, it can be damaging to your health. It can drain your energy and it can even have an impact on your mental performance and creativity. Now, along with the rest of the world, my 2020 did not get off to a great start. I had a two month riding slump. My energy was incredibly low. I was feeling really unmotivated. I would go to work and get back at the end of the day feeling exhausted. And I just couldn't seem to snap out of it. And I couldn't figure out why. And because I was in the middle of this, when I listened to this interview, I thought, maybe that's my problem. Maybe it's that I've been pushing myself for so long to fit into this 24 hour pattern rather than taking the larger hormonal cycle into consideration that I'm just running on empty because I've got nothing left. So this prompted me to learn more. I bought Alissa's book In The Flow, which discusses all of this in more detail. I also signed up for her My Flow app, which helps you track your own cycle. But it makes recommendations for what you should be eating, how you should be exercising, what your mental strengths are, what sort of sex you should be having in each phase of your cycle. One of the interesting things is that beyond food and exercise, she also talks about mental and creative strengths in each phase of your cycle. And I thought, wouldn't it be interesting to try and align my writing to that and see if, one, it's more enjoyable. Two, I have more energy to do more. And three, if I'm more efficient and more effective at getting stuff done, if I align it to those phases. So what are the phases? Well, there are four different phases in your menstrual cycle. The first one is the follicular phase, which takes place after your period ends. The next one is the ovulatory phase, which is when you release an egg. The next one is the luteal phase. And then finally, there's the menstrual phase or when you have your period. And each of these do have different mental and creative strengths. So in the follicular phase, these strengths are creativity, planning, research, ideas and decision making. Alyssa says that this is when you should focus on your most difficult assignments for the month. The next phase is your ovulatory phase. And this is when communication and collaboration are at their highest. So this is when you could potentially be writing a lot or doing blog posts or writing a novel like I'm trying to do. You could be scheduling interviews and tough conversations. You could be having negotiations at this phase. The ovulatory phase for most people is also the highest energy phase in your period. So that's when you're generally the most active. That's when you'll be doing hit style workouts. That's when most women feel their best during the month. The next phase is the luteal phase. This is a time for completion, nurturing, tending more administrative tasks and more data driven tasks. From here to your menstrual phase, your energy starts to dip. So rather than focusing on like actively producing things, this is more about organizing things and getting them sorted. And the final phase is your menstrual phase. This is generally the lowest energy part of the cycle. And this is a time for evaluation and reflection. It's time when you can reflect on your life and your career, your writing, maybe and figure out whether you're heading in the right direction and take that time to course correct. And it's time when your intuition is theoretically at its strongest so you can use that to make gut decisions. So I have put my information into the My Flow app and it is now mapped out when each of those phases should be taking place for me. So from here, I'm going to attempt to include activities that would be ideal for each of those phases when it comes to my writing, when it comes to YouTube and even when it comes to work, if it's possible. Now, obviously, that isn't going to be possible 100% of the time because life will happen. There will be urgent things that need to be dealt with that might not be a fit for that phase. However, I'm going to do what I can. So the goals of this experiment are one, to see if the recommended activities for each phase do actually lead to better performance and more energy in that phase. And two, to see whether if I have to do non-phase appropriate activities, whether I do them worse, whether I'm less enthusiastic about them and whether they are more energetically draining. So now let's get into my follicular phase. So good morning. I am now in my follicular phase, which means my mental strengths this week are planning, I believe, planning and creativity. Alongside that, obviously, there are a set of foods I should be eating, like fresh, vibrant, light foods, including sauerkraut or something fermented. Exercise, fun cardio and trying something new. So this week is supposed to be that novelty and looking ahead. So in terms of writing, I think that means this will be a good week to put all of my plotting stuff together to create my plan for Capnana Rhymo. So I've, well, you'll know this because I'm probably going to have Campnana videos out before this one's out. But the project I've chosen to work on is reciprocal stalking. And I've done story grid, story clock and snowflake method for it. So I just want to put all of that together and have a complete scene list that I can tackle. I might even start doing some bullet points for the scenes. But I'm not committing to that just because in Nano last year, I really liked doing outlining for that day's scene on the day I was writing that scene. So I want to give myself that option as well. So I think I'll try outlining some individual scenes and see how it goes. If it goes well, it goes well. If it doesn't, then I can save that for the writing process. Other than that, I thought I could also plan out some videos. I haven't really thought anything beyond that, but I do have a list of ideas that I'd like to film at some point. Some of them are things like plotting experiments, so they're not going to happen in the near future because I've done enough plotting for this book. And I think I can wait until I start my next project to do some more plotting methods. But there are other things like writing at 6am every day or trying new tropics to see how they help with writing and so on. So I might plan out some of those and see which ones I can do in this month. I think the obulatory phase, just let me check my notes. Yeah, the obulatory phase is when your communication is supposed to be really good. So in theory, if I plan my videos now, then I could potentially film a bunch of them during that phase when my communication is at its highest. Yeah, other than that, the other, I suppose, good-ish thing that's happened at the moment is my company has enforced a 14-day work-from-home policy due to coronavirus, not because we've had any cases or because Estonia is a high-risk country, but because they're just being safe. So I'm at home this week and next week, which is a little annoying because it means some of the things I plan to do with my team may not potentially go as well like we had a brainstorming meeting today and I'm still going to try it over Slack to see if we can do it virtually, but it is one of those things that I personally prefer to do in person so you can better feed off each other and you know that everyone's focused, no one's distracted looking at other tabs. But the good thing about being at home is it means I can be a little bit more flexible in terms of diet and exercise and how I manage my time. Now ideally it would have been the next two weeks because then the menstrual phase of the cycle is when your energy is supposed to be the lowest so ideally I would have been home in that week but oh well. In any case, I'm curious to see what having a little bit more flexibility does when it comes to planning out my tasks. Obviously there are things that are due this week, there are things that are due next week, that are due every week that I do need to do regardless of whether they are the ideal task for that stage in my cycle but I think being at home will just allow me to manage my time and my energy a bit better so if I want or need to lie down I can, if I want to move from the dining table to the couch I can and I'm hoping all of that will help and that will show up in my writing work so let's see how it goes. The purpose of today's meeting was basically we're at the end of Q2, no we're not, we're at the end of Q1, which means it's time to start thinking about what we want to work on next quarter and I thought it would be fun and interesting to have a shared brainstorming session about it. It is now 4pm and I'm basically going to wind down for the day. One of the really annoying things for me about living in Estonia is that here most people don't start work until 10 and I'm a morning bird so when we're working in the office I'm usually there between 8 and 8.30 and when we're working at home like at the moment often I'm already online before 8 so I actually get a lot done before anyone else gets online and it means that even though I really enjoy that and it's great to have that focus time it means that when we get to sort of 3pm it's like I feel like my day's done so I'm going to stay online but I've put in my full day and I think I can take a little bit of time for myself now. So today what was interesting about work was that there was an opportunity for creativity and planning because I had a brainstorming meeting with my team. What we ended up doing was I shared my screen and was just typing in a word document as we went. It wasn't, it went surprisingly well. It wasn't as good as I think it would have been if we were in person but one person in particular really like brought a lot of ideas to the table so I'm actually happy with what we accomplished today and originally I went into the meeting thinking okay if it really doesn't work like in 10 minutes we'll just call it a day and reschedule this for when we're back in the office but it was still a valuable exercise so it was interesting to have that creative planning task align with the stage in my cycle. I'm not sure if it went better because of that but I did enjoy it, it wasn't a draining activity. The other thing I've noticed today is that for my own stuff I've just been getting ideas so I actually thought of a new scene I can include in Powerless when I decided to go back and revise it. I had another idea for a video when I wasn't even thinking about it. I can't say whether that's more ideas than I would usually have so I think it's going to be interesting to get to the end of this video and see whether this trend is consistent through the month or whether this week does lead to a lot more idea generation. However, if I compare to a few days ago when I had my period then the idea of planning anything new or filming anything new just felt exhausting so noticing the difference from last week to this week has been really interesting and I'm curious to see how this experiment continues to go. So now I'm going to plan out some video ideas and I will check back in in half an hour or so. It has been all of 15 minutes and I don't know if I'm just being more efficient because this is the ideal time in my cycle we're planning or if I've been more efficient because I realized it's almost time for Camp Nanorimo which makes the process of planning out videos a bit easy because I'm about 90% sure I'm going to do weekly writing vlogs again like I did back in Nanorimo. So if I'm aiming for two videos a week that means half of those videos until the end of April are already planned. It's just that one of the videos for each of those weeks is going to be the Camp Nanorimo weekly writing vlog. So I feel like I'm in a pretty good position as far as video content planning goes. I already do have a number of future video ideas as I mentioned earlier however many of them are things I can't do yet so there are a number of different plotting methods I want to try beyond the ones I've already done and those are going to need to wait until my next project so probably before the July Camp Nanorimo so maybe in June. Then there are obviously going to be more powerless videos coming out when I'm ready to revise so things like reading through the powerless draft for the first time and what my impressions will be. Then there are videos where I don't think now is the best time to do them so one example is I'd really like to try every exercise and save the cat because I enjoyed save the cat so much but because I'm working full time at the moment if I was to do that now that would take away from the already limited time I have for writing so something like that I think will be better for later this year when I'm hoping to take a couple of months off and just travel and write for a bit. I'm quite happy with the number of videos I have in the agenda the ones with the exception of the weekly writing vlogs which are obviously going to happen as they happen I do have the points I want to cover in each of those so that's gone really well in terms of planning there are still those spaces in the calendar where I'm not sure what I'm going to talk about but at least I know it's just these four spaces I've reviewed the existing ideas I had written down and I know that they're not suitable so that's hopefully going to act as a little signal for my brain to start thinking about new things I could talk about so all in all I think today has been a productive day in terms of planning and creativity I just finished filming my cat Nana Rhymo prep video and realised I should probably be documenting this as part of my flow video as well so planning for cat Nana fits perfectly into the focus of this week which is again creativity and planning if you haven't seen that video I basically went through all of my notes from the story clock workbook the snowflake method and the story grid and I put them all together into a spreadsheet that spreadsheet isn't complete yet I have my list of scenes but there are a few details for each of them I need to clarify like who the point of view character is for some of them what the emotional changes what the goal of the scene is what the main conflict is and so on I don't know if the process of trying to fill that out is going to be interesting or frustrating simply because I don't think it's relevant for every scene and when it comes to having a usable list of scenes I find having a list where it's simply one scene after the other is far more easier to use as a writer than having one scene with this detail in this column and this detail in this column and this detail in this column and so on so I'll see how I go but ultimately I think I'll have my list of scenes and then I'll be ready to go when it comes to the activity itself and whether I think that preparing for Camp NaNarima was more effective given the time of the month I really have no evidence to demonstrate whether that's the case or not however something I have noticed in the last couple of days is that I've really been looking forward to these planning type tasks so yesterday I was really eager to get to the end of my work day so I could start planning out the next few videos today I was really eager to get to the end of my work day so I could start planning for Camp NaNarima so I think the fact that I have been feeling enthusiasm about these planning type of tasks is indicative that this is a good time to be doing them when it comes to non-planning type of tasks so things that aren't in the planning and creative space it's a little bit hard to know like even if I think of my day job it's a little bit hard to know whether I'm less enthused about doing them or less effective at doing them simply because this week has been crazy so given that this video is coming out in a few weeks time for context today is the 18th of March the last couple of weeks have seen the stock markets crash and I work for a company that provides people the opportunity to trade the markets which means things have been very busy for us where probably one of the few industries is actually benefiting from the situation at the moment so that means most of my day job has been like drafting and sending emergency communications like this stock index has been blocked for trading or there's extreme volatility please be careful and manage your risk well like that sort of thing so I haven't had a chance to do any planning or not even that creative type of work because even those communications aren't that creative like you just need to get the message done for rare moments when I can take a breath in between all of this stuff I haven't felt drawn to like more in-depth tasks so things like potentially pulling apart and putting back together a 5,000 word article that was done really badly in the past and that needs to be fixed and what's interesting is there are usually times when I quite enjoy that and the way Alyssa Vitti has broken down the different tasks per week of the month that I think is more over either an ovulatory phase task because that's your communication time or it's a menstrual phase task because that's the evaluating time so just interesting to note that even if I had time to be doing that I haven't been particularly drawn to doing those sorts of tasks and other than that I can't think of any examples of stuff I could be doing I suppose administrative type of stuff yeah not feeling particularly drawn towards that at the moment but that's a luteal phase type task so beyond this day to day stuff I have to deal with I think the things I've been drawn to especially in my writing is the planning and creative stuff so just interesting to note how that's aligning with this time of the month Hello and welcome to my ovulatory phase at least according to the MyFlow app I'm now in the ovulatory phase and I will be if we just check it I will be from today which is the 21st of March until the 25th of March so this app was also developed by Alyssa Vitti's company so it goes hand in hand with the recommendations in the book and what I'm exploring in this video so the follicular phase which is the one that just finished was supposed to be my time when creativity and planning were at their highest and as you know during that time I did my plan for Kant and Anorimho what else did I do? you'll know what I did because you're watching the video and it would have been like 10 minutes ago so it was you experienced this much more recently than I did but I did a couple of plans oh I did my planning for YouTube videos of course so I did my Kant and Anorimho planning and my planning for my next few YouTube videos and as I mentioned I thought it went really well I also got to do some brainstorming type of stuff for work which was fun even though we're all working remotely at the moment I don't know if I did these tasks better than usual but I did feel more enthusiastic about them than I would have a week earlier so I think that's interesting and I think it's enough of a sign for me to continue this next month and see if see if I get the same return on my investment of time and energy so during the ovulatory phase your strengths are supposed to be communication and collaboration so this is actually the perfect time to be filming YouTube videos it's also a good time to be writing it's a good time to be doing anything where you're working with other people so having group meetings and negotiations and so on when it comes to energy during this time you should be feeling outgoing, revitalized, refreshed and exercise that's good for this time is high intensity interval training which is kind of good for this period in self-isolation because I could actually do those workouts at home when it comes to activities so today I've just filmed a couple of short little writing ramble videos just because I did have a couple of small ideas for them today and in fact let me know in the comments if you've watched any of my rambly videos do you actually enjoy them? because for me I do have these questions that bubble up to the top of my head and I'm interested in exploring them however sometimes I feel like they're a little bit self indulgence it's just me exploring a question and I don't really come to any conclusions or give any advice or share that much of my experience so let me know if you find them interesting and entertaining I quite like to watch other people's chatty rambly videos so that's one of the reasons why I do them obviously I want to do videos that you like so let me know what you think in the comments below other than that at work this week I think it would make sense to do some more writing so there are a couple of articles in my backlog that I could get through if anything else happens in the market in the next week I'm sure I'll need to do some urgent news now in terms of writing an author tube though the obvious thing I should be doing this week if it's communication week is writing and I'm into your minds about this because part of me thinks maybe I should get a head start on reciprocal stalking and make the most of my energy and mental state during this phase but the other part of me goes well I don't want to like I don't want to waste any of my ideas before Canton and Arama I want to save it until April so I'll have to think about that and see how I'm feeling but I'm pretty sure I'm going to do a little bit of writing for reciprocal stalking so from here I will keep you posted with how it goes according to the MyFlow app my ovulatory phase ended yesterday and the ovulatory phase was supposed to be the time of the month when my communication was at its strongest so one of the things Alissa talks about in the book is that this is the time for writing blog posts and marketing and collaborating with others and unfortunately other than the couple of videos I filmed on Sunday I don't feel like I've used those skills at all I mean from a writing perspective I think that would have been the perfect window for me to start writing my book and I did not start writing my book yet unfortunately when it comes to my day job I did have a couple of things to write to be honest there was a couple of articles I needed to redo we've had another few announcements because volatility in coronavirus so I've used those skills to an extent where I was really excited about doing anything related to what I was supposed to be primed for in that phase of my cycle it just felt like those were any other tasks like I didn't feel particularly fast or talented or like I was doing great work or at least no more so than when I was doing a lot of reviewing because it's the end of the quarter so I need to review everything we've achieved other than that the other thing that annoyed me a little bit was that the ovulatory phase is supposed to be the time in your cycle when your energy is at its highest and until yesterday actually which is like the end of the phase I was I had a couple of days where I just crashed and I think there are probably a number of factors leading into that like one of them is probably that no gym so my I'm not being as physically active as I usually am being house bound is like not the end of the world but and I'm a natural introvert so I'm fine not seeing people that much but I do like to I'm an active introvert though like I like to go out and experience the world and I've been going for walks but it's not the same as going out and doing an activity so that's probably contributed in general though I was a little bit annoyed and I hadn't inkling this would be the case when I read the book because one of the things she wrote about was women have a certain period when they feel great in the month and then they want to know why can't I feel like that all the time why can't I have all this energy all the time and I've probably mentioned in the past that energy has been a struggle for me until like the second half of last year I was basically exhausted for since early 2015 so we're talking four and a half years of really struggling to drag myself out of bed and live to my full potential and I do feel like some of that came back a little bit this year in my slump so when I was reading this book and she's saying people feel great they have energy and they go why can't I feel like that throughout the month I'm like I don't have any point in the month where I feel like I'm bounding with energy so this is probably more about me and how my body is built and how I've effectively managed my energy over the past throughout my entire adult life but it was interesting to observe or even just confirm that no there is not a certain point in the month where I have this peak or at least if I do have a peak it's not when it's supposed to be so no key takeaways from the ovulatory phase I do want to keep playing with this beyond this video to see how things improve over the long term I don't think this is something where you just start doing the right things one month and everything falls into place but it is interesting to observe hello it's future Jackie here as you can see this video is getting a bit long so I've decided to split it into two parts and in a few days time I will upload the video that covers the luteal and menstrual phase of my cycle and if you are also from the future please check the link in the description where you can go straight to that video right now