Tracking your cycle when you have ADHD (without another app you'll abandon)

You install it again. You tap accept without reading, as always, and when it opens it turns out it remembers you.

Inside there are eleven days logged from fourteen months ago. Eleven in a row, with their emoji chosen carefully, and then nothing. A gap of a year and a bit up to today.

You sit looking at the eleven. You don't remember the day you stopped, or why. There was no decision: there was simply a day when you didn't, and another, and that was that.

First of all: nobody logs anything here to get better

What follows tells how a thing works, not how you are. Recognizing yourself here doesn't mean you have ADHD.

And it's worth saying right now, because it's exactly what gets sold badly out there: logging doesn't improve anything by itself. No trial has shown any such thing. It's good for finding out, and that's where what it promises ends.

What exactly to write down is already covered on this blog. This article is about the other thing, the part nobody explains: why a log gets abandoned, and what shape one would have to have to survive a bad stretch with you.

Why it's asked for daily, and not from memory

The studies that have followed women day by day all do the same thing: they ask on the same day, and for at least a whole cycle.

It isn't fussiness about method. It's that what you remember from three weeks ago no longer arrives raw: it arrives sorted by whatever explanation you already had on. If you believe the bad week is the one before, memory will serve it to you that way.

Roberts, Eisenlohr-Moul and Martel did it the expensive way in 2018: saliva in the morning and symptoms logged at night, five weeks in a row.

The honest part: that was a tiny sample and the symptoms were scored by the women themselves. It's good for knowing how this gets looked at, not for knowing what's going on with anyone.

So daily logging isn't a moral demand. It's the only way there is for the data not to arrive already interpreted.

What abandons a log isn't willpower

And here's the whole business.

Logging pays nothing on the day you do it. Nothing good happens when you finish writing the line. The good part, if it comes, comes in two months, when there's enough to look at.

For these brains, that deal is one of the worst there is. What Marx and colleagues gathered in 2021, on choosing between a little now and more later, describes exactly that disadvantage: what's far away competes badly.

And the Tripp and Wickens theory, from 2008, adds the other half: getting going on something doesn't come with a built-in prize either. There's no reward at the start and none at the end of the line, and the result takes two months. There's nothing in there to hold on to.

The honest part: the first was measured with a screen in front of people and the second is still an unconfirmed proposal. In neither case was anyone keeping a notebook.

What does come out of it: a log falling over isn't a fact about your character. It's a badly designed deal.

And the streak makes it worse, though it looks like the opposite

The apps show you a number going up. Seven days. Eleven days. And it works for a while, because at last there's something that pays today.

The problem shows up the day it breaks. The number is gone, and in its place there's a zero with a lesson inside it.

From then on, opening the app costs twice as much, because opening it means admitting the lapse. So it doesn't get opened. And three days later the thing isn't a gap any more: it's a file on you.

A log that punishes you when you slip turns into an exam. And an exam is passed or failed, so it ends up being avoided.

What shape it would have to have to hold up

None of this has been trialed. Not one of these four things has a study behind it saying it makes a log last longer in women with ADHD. They're ways of taking off a log what makes it unsustainable, told as what they are.

Genuinely short

Commonly used.

Short enough to do with one hand and without sitting down. One line, not a form.

The honest part: nobody has compared a short log with a long one in this population. The only thing known is that the studies that do get daily data ask for very little.

Hooked onto something you already do

Commonly used.

Not onto a time, which has to be remembered, but onto a movement that happens anyway: after brushing your teeth, when you plug in your phone. What it takes out of the way isn't the effort of writing: it's the effort of remembering.

The honest part: it's environment design, not a treatment, and it hasn't been tested here.

Where it can be seen

Commonly used.

Whatever gets put away in its place disappears. A notebook left open on the nightstand can be seen; an app inside a folder on the third screen can't.

The honest part: the idea of leaving what matters in plain sight is used everywhere and has no trials behind it for this.

No streak

Commonly used.

So that three days can be skipped and you can come back without anything saying so. A log with gaps still works. An abandoned one doesn't.

The honest part: a log with a lot of gaps is worth less for looking at patterns, and that has to be said. The arithmetic that comes out best is this one: better a month with gaps than zero perfect months.

And no app is needed

Let it be said, because the word "log" comes with a screen stuck to it. The paper calendar in the kitchen works, with two letters a day. A note on a phone works. A notebook works.

What you have to be able to do is this: see two months in a row at a glance, and take them to someone.

And there's a reason to be a little wary of the apps, convenient as they are. Many of them are built to predict, not to observe: they show you what's going to happen according to an average cycle, with colors and phase names already in place.

For what we're doing here, that gets in the way. If the screen has already told you which phase you're in and what you're due to feel, whatever you write down afterwards will come with that idea inside it. You'd be measuring with the answer already on the table.

A dumb notebook predicts nothing. That's why it works better for this.

And the thing everybody skips

A log is information, and information isn't a grade.

Six days marked isn't a report card for this month. Zero days doesn't mean you were making it up either: it means this month came out like that.

It sounds obvious and it isn't at all, because the moment there's something written down the head uses it for the usual thing, which is measuring yourself.

If what turns up when you look at the notebook is the voice that tells you off, the notebook gets closed. And with it goes the only way there was of looking at this with data instead of memories.

What happens with logs and never gets told

Filling in five days backwards in one go, inventing a little, so the week doesn't look ugly.

Logging one good day and deleting it, because it didn't fit what you'd already decided was going on with you.

And the most maddening one: stopping just when things get worse, which is exactly when the log would be worth something.

So what is it for

For having something to put on a table that isn't your memory.

Telling apart what's there all the time from what fires on a few particular days isn't a job for one person alone in her kitchen. It takes both things: the data, and a professional who knows how to read it. Your primary care doctor, your gynecologist or mental health services. You go with the notebook if there is one, and without it if there isn't.

And nothing gets concluded, not even for yourself, before there are two whole months in front of you.

And if it falls over again, it gets started again with no ceremony. A log isn't a commitment: it's a tool you pick up when you need it.

This is educational support, a complement to medical care and never a substitute for therapy or treatment. Nobody is diagnosed here.

And if what you're missing isn't the log but knowing what to look at, that's where the Map starts. It's free, it takes a few minutes, and it won't tell you what you have: it hands your own tangle back to you, in order.

And one more thing, set apart from everything above. If you find yourself thinking you don't want to be here, that doesn't wait for an appointment: tell someone today, a professional or a crisis or emergency service in your country. And if something is getting away from you, with drink, with food, with whatever it is, that's one to take to a professional too. It isn't that there's no room here for how you're feeling: it's that they can help you better there than here. No talking around it, and nothing to be ashamed of.

Where this comes from

• Roberts, Eisenlohr-Moul and Martel (2018). Psychoneuroendocrinology.
• Marx et al. (2021). Journal of Attention Disorders.
• Tripp and Wickens (2008). Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. This is a theory, not a finding.