Can an app really track my emotions?
Femtech innovation Moody Month wants to do just that, and educate women about their hormones. Jessica Salter tries it out
We’ve been brought up to try our best to ignore any “time of the month” problems and shroud them in euphemisms. In fact, new research shows that we use more than 250 different phrases to describe periods, according to the campaign group, Wear White Again, while a fifth of women are uncomfortable talking about them even among female friends.
I’m not one of those, but with an adult life spent taking the Pill (until I wanted to get pregnant), my natural hormones were suppressed for decades, and beyond my period arriving at the end of every packet, I didn’t really know what was going on in my body – or care that much.
But the tide is turning. Led by the burgeoning industry of period coaches, who aim to help women manage their cycles, and Gen Zers such as Youtuber Hannah Witton, whose 500,000 subscribers tune in to listen to her “hormone diaries”, there’s a growing interest in understanding and harnessing the power of our hormones.
I first woke up to the power of my own after having a baby: a heady mix of weeping like clockwork at 4pm in those first few postnatal days, due to a drop off of hormones oestrogen and progesterone, through to a second mood crash that followed the abrupt dip in prolactin when I stopped breastfeeding – all on top of chronic exhaustion. Not keen to restart the hormonal contraceptive when my periods returned, I wanted to learn more about my body’s natural ebbs and flows, so, along with 100 other women, I signed up for a pre-launch test of the mood and cycle tracking app, Moody Month, which launches officially today and has a cognitive neuroscientist leading its research, along with a gynaecologist, GP and registered nutritionist.
Simple period tracker apps like Clue and Glow have been around for a while (although not as long as you’d expect for a nation obsessed with health); Apple’s Health app included a tracking function in 2015, and Fitbit finally allowed its female users to track their menstrual cycle dates this summer. But, as sports scientist and co-creator of the recently launched Fitrwoman app, Dr Georgie Bruinvels, says, “It’s all well and good tracking your menstrual cycle, but it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know what happens in that space between the dates of your period. What I found was that women don’t really understand their bodies and don’t understand why they feel like they do, but are desperate to do so.”
Which is why Fitrwoman and Moody Month, both free apps, are at the forefront of a movement which sees scientists and app developers join forces to create a new breed of period tracking apps that aim to do more than just alert you when to stock up on Tampax, or when you’re fertile. They’re part of the so-called Femtech industry of (often female) entrepreneurs creating products for the women’s health market. While Fitrwoman is designed to help athletes track their cycles and determine how to tailor their exercise regimes, Moody Month is aimed at women of all ages to educate them about their hormones and moods. “When you understand your patterns, you can optimise your month, from the meetings you choose to schedule to what type of exercise at what times of the month,” Moody CEO Amy Thomson says.
Based on my logging of period dates, mood, physical symptoms such as bloating, sleep, and external pressures like worries about work, the app offers daily insights on what my hormones might be doing and how I can adopt lifestyle changes to best support them. So, for example, on a high oestrogen day, in phase two, you might feel at your most sociable and energised, or the same excess of hormone could lead to greater feelings of anxiety; it’s up to you to track how it makes you feel.
Every month, users are sent personalised reports summarising the findings. So that see-red flash of anger I get the day before my period? Normal, and something I can now predict (and maybe warn my husband about). “It’s about noticing these patterns and realising that maybe it’s something happening in your body and not in your head,” Dr Anita Mitra, a gynaecologist working with Moody Month, and known to her 30,000-strong army of Instagram fans as @Gynaegeek, says.
Unlike many other “menstrual cycle” apps, Moody Month also functions if you don’t experience periods, as you still experience hormonal fluctuations throughout the month, so tracking and tweaking habits still pays off (a specific postmenopause feature will be added next year). After experiencing insomnia for a week, I tracked religiously, furiously looking for an answer, or perhaps just a digital moan. It turns out, every month I have trouble getting to sleep just before I’m ovulating. So next month I’m going to be more aware, and schedule fewer activities and meetings in my diary for that week when I feel shattered, as well as trying to follow clean sleeping routines like no tech before bed and cutting down on booze.
Araceli Camargo, the app’s lead scientist, adds that I would benefit from logging when things go well, too. “Look for patterns on nights when you had eight hours of uninterrupted sleep and think, ‘what did I do?’” she suggests. These are the micro patterns of my week, month and cycle, but the app is designed to help its users spot bigger health concerns, too: both those related to the menstrual cycle – endometriosis or polycystic ovary syndrome – but also mental health problems.
Which leads on to Camargo’s contribution. “It might sound a little bit odd that a neuroscientist is involved in the conversation about hormones,” she says, “but we’re starting to discover that some mood disorders like depression or anxiety that are more prevalent in women are now being tied to our hormonal cycle.
So, for instance, when someone is starting to suffer the first signs of depression, we often don’t pay attention to what physiological changes have led up to that point. Perhaps that person has increased sensitivity to pain, or less energy, which are symptoms we sometimes see when someone has depression.”
It means that if we were more in tune with our bodies and minds, we might be able to help ourselves from tipping over into extreme ill health; instead of waiting until we hit rock
bottom, mentally or physically, we can start to notice when symptoms are on a downward trajectory.
What she’s especially excited about is what this could mean for the future. Moody Month has a proposed function within the app for users to anonymously “donate” their data back to scientists working on under-researched women’s health issues. “We could head towards an era of science where we understand the complex health issues such as why depression is more prevalent in women, or why women of colour suffer more rates of PTSD,” she says. The period revolution has begun.
‘It’s about noticing patterns – realising it’s in your body and not in your head’