There are plenty of cycle apps. This booklet does something else: it puts into a usable form what an assessment actually needs. For women who have had the same hard days coming back for years — and who suspect it has to do with the timing in their cycle, not with them.
The button takes you straight to this item on Etsy. Once you have paid, the PDFs are ready to download.
Why a daily record and not memory. The UK guideline on managing premenstrual symptoms asks for symptoms to be recorded prospectively over two cycles with a symptom diary. The same requirement — two cycles, daily, recorded as you go — sits behind the diagnosis of premenstrual dysphoric disorder. The difference is measurable: pooled across studies, retrospective questionnaires arrive at 7.7 per cent, daily records at 3.2 per cent.
What you write down over those two months is therefore not busywork. It is the part of the assessment only you can do — and without it the conversation tends to end at “lots of women have that”.
What the booklet does not do: it treats nothing, it diagnoses nothing, and there is no score and no threshold at which something gets a name. That needs a professional and more information than a sheet holds. The booklet collects, orders and hands over.
How it works:
–Choose five symptoms — the ones that actually occupy you, not the ones from a list
–One row a day, thirty seconds, at roughly the same time
–See two cycles through — only the comparison shows whether something repeats or whether one cycle was simply a hard month
–At the end, four questions, one comparison picture and a sentence to open the conversation with
What you get
01A booklet with 17 content pages + info page
02A cycle sheet with 35 rows for repeated printing — 35, not 28, so longer cycles still fit on the page
03Two pages that tell three pictures apart: premenstrual symptoms, premenstrual dysphoric disorder and premenstrual exacerbation look alike in daily life and lead to entirely different paths
04A page of its own for hormonal contraception — four cases, from the pill with a break to the hormonal coil, and what each means for the sheet
05Comparison page: two cycles as strips, one under the other, with a bleeding row — thirty seconds tell you whether the dark days sit before it
06A separate companion sheet, “Before the appointment”: two pages to fill in and take with you, so half of it doesn't fall away in the room
07A page for when the days before turn dangerous — with contacts for Switzerland, Germany and Austria, and an international directory
08A sources page with guidelines and studies
09Every file also as an ink-saving edition: identical text, far less colour — it carries “sparsam” in the file name. For a sheet you print again and again, that is the better choice
