Knowing yourself: noticing your patterns and naming your feelings
For a long time I thought a good life was something you planned. You set goals, made lists and pushed. What I learned more slowly is that the plans only worked when they fit the person making them, and I didn't know that person as well as I assumed.
Knowing yourself sounds abstract, but most of it is ordinary. It means knowing what time of day you think clearly, which foods leave you tired, how many late nights you can handle in a row, and what tends to set off a bad mood, a bit like learning your own weather.
Patterns you can only see over time
A single bad day tells you almost nothing. Twenty bad days, written down with dates, can tell you a lot. Many people who start keeping notes find their moods, energy, cravings and sleep follow loose patterns. Some of those patterns line up with the menstrual cycle. Hormones like estrogen and progesterone rise and fall across the month, and many people feel that in their bodies and moods. Others notice very little. The research on cycle and mood shows wide differences between individuals, which is a good reason to trust your own record over a general rule.
Some people also like to watch their days alongside the phases of the moon. Science hasn't shown that the moon sets your mood or your cycle. Still, the moon is a steady, visible calendar that has marked time for people for thousands of years, and checking in with yourself at each new and full moon is a gentle rhythm for reflection. It gives you a regular moment to stop and look back.
Why patterns give you more choice
When you don't know your patterns, they run you. You snap at someone and feel ashamed, without realizing you've slept badly for four nights and you always feel this way two days before your period. You plan a packed weekend for a week when you're usually worn out.
Once you see the pattern, you get options. You can warn the people close to you that you'll be quieter this week. You can move the hard conversation to a day you usually feel steady. You can go to bed earlier on purpose. Your body is the same as before, and you are no longer caught off guard by it.
What naming a feeling does
One of the simplest tools for knowing yourself is putting a name to what you feel. Psychologists call this affect labeling. In a 2007 brain imaging study led by Matthew Lieberman at UCLA, people looked at photos of faces showing strong emotions. When they chose a word to describe the emotion, activity in the amygdala, a brain area involved in emotional reactions, was lower than when they did other tasks with the same photos. A region in the prefrontal cortex became more active, and the two seemed linked.
Later work has found related effects on how upset people report feeling and on physical signs of stress. In a 2018 review, Jared Torre and Lieberman described affect labeling as a kind of emotion regulation that happens without people setting out to regulate anything. They were also clear that the science is still early, and that much of it comes from lab settings with small groups.
The research supports a modest claim, that putting a feeling into words is linked to a calmer response in the moment. In daily life that might look like writing "anxious, tight chest, worried about money" instead of carrying a vague dread all day. The feeling is still there, but now it has edges.
Rituals as prompts
Some people set an intention at the start of the day or the start of a cycle. Some draw a card. I think of these as questions with a shape. A card doesn't know your future, and an intention doesn't make anything happen by itself. What both can do is give you a few quiet minutes and a starting point. You draw a card about patience and find yourself thinking about where you've been impatient this week. The thinking that follows comes from you, and the card simply gave it a place to start.
Used this way, rituals are prompts for reflection rather than predictions, and you are free to ignore any card that doesn't fit.
Small notes, kept for a long time
The word barkat means abundance, or a blessing that keeps growing. I've come to believe the most dependable kind of abundance comes from understanding yourself well enough to make choices that fit. That understanding builds slowly, a word or two at a time.
If you want somewhere to keep those words, Barkat's cycle tab lets you add them to any day and shows patterns across your cycle, privately on your phone. A notebook by the bed does the same job. Write down how you feel, and in a few months, read it back.
Sources
- Lieberman et al. (2007), Putting feelings into words: affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli, Psychological Science (PubMed)
- Torre and Lieberman (2018), Putting feelings into words: affect labeling as implicit emotion regulation, Emotion Review
- Cleveland Clinic: Menstrual Cycle
This is general information, not medical advice. If something about your cycle worries you, talk to a doctor or midwife.
Next: Why we made Barkat