What If Nothing Was Wrong With You?
You Were Never Inconsistent. You Were Just Uninformed.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from doing too much, but from judging yourself for the weeks when you can't.
You probably know the pattern.
Some weeks, you wake up ready. Energy feels available. You move through your days with a kind of ease — ideas come, conversations flow, your body feels like yours.
Other weeks, the same life feels heavier. The same tasks take more from you. You need more time, more quiet, more space just to feel like yourself. And somewhere along the way, you decided this meant something was wrong with you.
It doesn't.
What no one taught us
We grew up learning one rhythm: the 24-hour day. Wake, work, rest, repeat. Productivity measured in consistent daily output. Rest treated as something you earned, not something your biology requires.
What most of us were never taught is that women's bodies also run on a second, longer rhythm — an infradian cycle that operates across approximately 26 to 34 days and shapes, in very real and measurable ways, how we think, feel, communicate, create, and recover.
The four phases of the menstrual cycle — follicular, ovulatory, luteal, and menstrual — are not just reproductive events. They are whole-body shifts. Each phase brings a different hormonal environment, a different neurological state, a different metabolic mode. Energy, cognitive style, emotional capacity, stress tolerance, muscle recovery, even immune function — all of them move through this monthly rhythm.
This is not metaphor. It is neuropsychophysiology.
And yet it was largely absent from health and performance research for decades, because clinical trials routinely excluded women of reproductive age on the grounds that hormonal variation made results harder to standardise. The result is a generation of women reading their bodies through frameworks that were never built for them.
The self-criticism entry point
When we don't have language for something, we fill the gap with stories. And the story most women I work with have been telling themselves is some version of: I should be able to handle this. Other people manage. What is wrong with me?
The inconsistency you've been judging — the weeks when everything flows and the weeks when nothing does — is not a flaw in your character. It is your body cycling through phases that were never named for you.
When women learn this, something shifts. Not because they suddenly have all the answers, but because the self-criticism loses its grip. The question changes from what is wrong with me? to what does my body need right now?
That is the beginning of body literacy.
What the research actually says
A few things worth knowing:
The infradian rhythm influences far more than most people realise. Research on the menstrual cycle and cognition shows that verbal fluency, fine motor skills, spatial reasoning, and working memory all shift measurably across the cycle — not randomly, but in patterns that are consistent enough to study. This is not weakness. It is variation. The kind of variation that, if you understand it, you can work with rather than against.
The McKinsey Health Institute estimated in 2024 that closing the global women's health gap could add one trillion dollars to the global economy annually. Part of that gap is straightforward: women's bodies were understudied for decades, and the knowledge gap is real, measurable, and costly — for individuals and for societies.
A 2021 study published in Science by Pontzer and colleagues, tracking energy expenditure across the human lifespan in over six thousand people, found that metabolism does not slow in midlife the way we have been told. The shift women experience in their thirties and forties is not metabolic breakdown. It is a body moving through changing hormonal territory that we were never taught to navigate.
Individual variation is the consistent finding across the most rigorous cycle research. The 2025 paper published in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, reviewing decades of menstrual cycle and sports performance studies, concluded clearly: what matters most is not which phase you are in, but how you feel in it, and how you are fuelling yourself. The body is always communicating. The work is learning to listen.
What body literacy actually is
I want to be careful here, because the popular version of cycle education has sometimes overcorrected in the wrong direction — replacing one set of rigid rules (perform the same every day) with another (do exactly this in each phase).
That is not what this work is about.
Body literacy is not a prescription. It is not a schedule. It is not four boxes into which you sort your weeks.
It is the practice of noticing — without judgment — what your body is doing, and having enough understanding of why to meet it with curiosity instead of criticism.
Some women feel their energy shift dramatically across their cycle. Others notice more subtle changes. Some months are different from others. Stress, sleep, nutrition, life circumstances — all of them move through the rhythm too. The cycle is a context, not a formula.
What changes when you have the language for it is not that life becomes predictable. It is that you stop treating your body's variation as evidence of failure.
An invitation
If any of this is landing — if you recognise yourself in the woman who has been calling her rhythm a flaw — this is where the work begins.
The workshops I offer support you looking at your cycle as a system: what is happening hormonally in each phase, what it means for energy and mood and recovery, and how to start building the kind of self-knowledge that changes not just how you manage your health, but how you hold yourself.
Not because there is something to fix. But because understanding your body is one of the quietest, most powerful forms of self-respect there is.
If this resonates with you, let’s talk!!
With love,
Tarsila.