Learn to listen to yourself during your period
Our modern pace of life often pushes us to our limits. And when we find ourselves in a situation of weakness, even temporarily like during pre-menstrual syndrome for example, we can no longer bear all the pressure that is imposed on us. Unfortunately, our education and our culture have not taught us to recognize or listen to the signals that our body and mind send us daily. However, we could derive great physical and psychological benefits from it.
Listening to our menstrual cycle whisper in our ear
Listening to your menstrual cycle can help us better understand our needs. It is difficult to find time, in peace, to understand the subtleties of our sensations and our emotions. But difficult does not mean impossible. It may be interesting to keep a menstrual diary in which we note our emotional states and our physical desires (food, need to move, libido, etc.). Over time, trends will emerge and it will be easier to identify the different phases of our menstrual cycle. Effective mobile applications can also help us carry out this process of listening to ourselves.
Mindfulness applied to rules
Mindfulness is a practice particularly suited to listening to yourself. It's about trying to connect as much as possible to the present moment. To do this, we must stop thinking about the past, the future and “elsewhere”. Thoughts should be entirely focused on what is happening here and now.
To successfully achieve this difficult-to-define state, several techniques are used. For example, we can concentrate on our breathing but also on all the sensations present in our body. During menstruation, it could be contraction of the uterus, tension in the breasts, blood leaking, etc.
It is also possible to put your body in motion and achieve a high level of concentration on the action you have chosen. We think here of yoga, active walking, a manual activity or even housework. When you wash the dishes, you think of other things, like everyone else. Mindfulness invites us to concentrate on the sensations experienced during this harmless everyday act: the temperature of the water and the well-being it causes, the movements made, our posture, the sound of the dishes clinking together. , etc.
When it comes to periods, you can try to take care of yourself mindfully: take a shower, clean your menstrual panties , prepare a natural remedy for stomach aches , etc. This awareness allows you to live your rules fully and accept them better.
Adapt your lifestyle to your periods
Once the needs and desires have been detected, we can move on to the adaptation phase. After all, why try to surpass ourselves even on days when our body demands a reduction in activity? What motivates us, or even compels us, to do this? For centuries, women's physiology was little respected. Today, things are changing. Western women are starting to be able to say loud and clear that they have their period and that a break would be welcome.
Periods are often synonymous with fatigue. This phenomenon, which men do not experience, should allow us to adopt a lifestyle different from theirs for a few days a month. Of course, every woman feels things differently and not everyone has the same life goals. Some people don't feel the need to change anything during their period, while others experience real hell having to continue their lives as if nothing had happened.
What if we respected our own needs? Shift your work if you are independent. Child care when the need arises. Staying in bed all day with a hot water bottle on your stomach if that helps us and so many other things. Taking the time to listen, analyze and adapt our way of life allows us to justify the decisions we make to ourselves and permanently remove any impression of weakness or guilt. Because let's not forget that this process of listening to oneself aims to live better in general and should therefore not be accompanied by any negative feeling.
By Emilie
