By Aleena Ashraf, neuroscientist, published author and part of Véa’s Clinical Advisory Board

Menstrual data is missing a critical layer: the mind.

The menstrual cycle won’t be fully understood until we track the mind alongside the body.

We measure the body exceptionally well.

Just three period-tracking apps, Clue, Flo and Period Tracker, have been downloaded over 200 million times combined.

Dates, symptoms, mood and fertility windows are all diligently monitored.

Still, logging when a period starts doesn’t document what it’s like to live inside a cycle.

A recent survey reported 61.9 per cent of participants used period-tracking apps for more than two years, yet only surface-level data could be observed.

Mental clarity, motivation, resilience, mental load, none of this gets recorded.

Which is why the data can’t answer one of the most common questions women ask themselves: why does the same task feel manageable one week and impossible the next?

Get this right and the payoff is significant: more precise, predictive and personalised care.

Neuroscience and the menstrual cycle

The menstrual cycle isn’t only a reproductive process.

It’s a neurobiological rhythm that the brain actively regulates.

Ignoring that means overlooking the system driving much of what gets logged as “mood”.

After menstruation, rising estradiol lifts serotonin and dopamine, sharpening mood, motivation and mental efficiency.

This is the phase where pushing hard toward a goal tends to feel the easiest.

Later, progesterone takes over and increases GABA, the brain’s calming neurotransmitter.

The body shifts toward rest and recovery: slower pace, more introspection and less drive for risk.

The brain isn’t weaker in one phase and stronger in another. It’s continuously realigning to match hormonal change.

This isn’t a drop in capability but a shift in cognitive mode.

Hormonal changes aren’t disruptive – they’re informative.

The subjective experience of every woman living through them is exactly where current data systems fall short.

The lived experience is missing

What it actually feels like to think and function differently across the month remains almost entirely undocumented.

Women keep pushing through their cycle to meet constant demands at work and at home.

The cost doesn’t show up immediately but builds quietly, then surfaces as burnout, anxiety or withdrawal.

The turning point is rarely dramatic. It lives in small, recurring thoughts:

“Why does this feel harder today?”

“Why can’t I think straight?”

“Why is everything triggering me?”

During the luteal phase, irritability is usually treated as a symptom to control or tolerate.

There is lower tolerance for social demands, heightened sensitivity to routine tasks and occasional emotional outbursts.

But tracked over time against the cycle’s stages, it stops looking random.

It becomes a measurable signal of cognitive and emotional load.

The same is true for the urge to withdraw.

Read in isolation, it looks like disengagement, a dip in performance or a personal shortcoming.

Read longitudinally, it frequently lines up with the phase where the brain is shifting toward introspection and recovery.

Rather than seeing it as avoidance, it’s regulation.

Picture a professional in a high-pressure role.

In one phase of her cycle she is sharp, decisive and efficient.

In another, she is re-reading the same email, struggling to focus and disproportionately overwhelmed by routine tasks.

Without context, that looks like inconsistency.

With context, it’s a pattern that can be understood, anticipated and supported.

Journaling reveals the missing layer

Journaling is already a proven way to surface this deep layer.

It’s well established for improving mental health and stress regulation.

A 2022 systematic review reported a 9 per cent decrease in anxiety levels through writing.

But its potential goes further than that.

Journal entries build a longitudinal record of how someone’s inner state and hormone-linked rhythms evolve across the cycle, across roles, across time.

The problem is journaling can be hard to sustain without structure.

It’s also tricky to know what to write, as it’s self-directed.

Insights end up buried in raw writing, disconnected from the neurological pattern actually driving it.

Véa is a digital platform that guides women to document their lived experience over time, surface recurring trends and put words to what they’re going through.

It develops freeform writing into systematic self-reflection through a framework supported by neuroscience.

This captures snapshots of how women are thinking and feeling across different phases of the cycle.

Guided support peels back layers of cognition and emotion, surfacing what current menstrual data misses.

No single narrative gets imposed on every user.

Instead, the method leaves room for genuinely different perspectives of productivity to emerge.

Performed well, this turns journaling into a system of signals, not a pile of disconnected entries.

Done responsibly, privately and anonymously, this kind of data could help understand more about female health.

It isn’t diagnostic and it isn’t here to label anyone. But it can feed clinical understanding and future research alike.

What changes if we take this seriously

Treat the menstrual cycle as a neurological framework rather than a purely reproductive one, and the entire model of care begins to change.

It’s possible to identify strain earlier.

Work can be paced differently.

For clinicians, it means treatment plans that account for cyclical variation in symptoms and inner state.

For researchers, it gives a richer dataset that moves past static and linear measurements toward dynamic patterns.

For employers, it’s a chance to build more personalised ways of working around shifting cognitive load.

For families, it’s a reason to recognise and redistribute the invisible load carried by female homemakers.

This also fits within the broader shift toward preventative healthcare.

Catch the early signs and intervention can happen before burnout or more serious conditions take hold.

The menstrual cycle may be one of the richest data systems we have, if we are willing to read it correctly.

Learn more about Véa at veajournal.com

Cultural stigma and a lack of education are making it harder to get menopause help, ethnic minority women in Jersey have said.

The women came together to share their stories at an event in St Helier hosted by Eve Studios and Liberty Underwear.

Participants were encouraged to speak openly about the symptoms they had experienced.

Angela Mowanga, from Jersey, told ITV Channel: “I became dismissive about signs and symptoms. From our parents and our grandparents, they just carried on.

“I hardly heard the word menopause spoken about in my household. We never had things like hot flushes, itchy skin and tiredness.

“So for us to start talking about menopause, there is a taboo around it. A taboo that comes from ignorance but also not being willing to educate ourselves.

“We as women of colour, societies of colour, we have a lot of taboo subjects, which now have to be highlighted with the generation today.

“However, with the modern day, society is changing. And we hope programmes like this can actually be well received.”

Daisy Ayebale, from Jersey, added: “I think it’s important we are listened to. We need the right information from the experts, but we have also been overlooked when it comes to the healthcare system.

“We need to know this information before it’s too late, before you’re gambling with your health. We are glad to be changing the narrative, we are glad to be changing things right now. We are very hopeful.”

Research shows that black women are more likely to experience menopausal symptoms earlier, more intensely and for longer.

Cambridge health tech company TidalSense has secured £14.2m in funding led by Cross-Border Impact Ventures to expand its AI-powered lung disease test across the NHS and into Europe and the US.

The investment, which also includes returning backers BGF, Airstream Capital and Foresight Group, will fund the rollout of a handheld diagnostic device that can detect chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in as little as five minutes.

It will also support the development of software to diagnose asthma using the same platform.

Donna Parr is managing partner at Cross-Border Impact Ventures.

She said: We look for technology that doesn’t just have a compelling story, but a body of clinical evidence behind it.

“TidalSense has both, with a CEO who has lived the problem she’s solving, and a product that’s already live within the NHS healthcare environment, saving time for patients who have waited years for an answer.

“It is also technology that can improve access to appropriate treatment for COPD sufferers on a global basis and especially for women who are often misdiagnosed.

“This is exactly the kind of impact we want to make with our investments.”

COPD, a progressive condition that restricts airflow and makes breathing increasingly difficult, is the third leading cause of death in England, according to the NHS.

It is responsible for about 30,000 deaths each year and costs the health service an estimated £1.9bn annually.

The company believes its technology could transform how respiratory disease is diagnosed by replacing the need for conventional spirometry in many settings.

Patients simply breathe normally into the handheld device for 75 seconds while artificial intelligence analyses the breath in real time.

A diagnosis is then displayed on screen, allowing clinicians to complete the entire process in around five minutes.

TidalSense says the technology allows clinicians to assess as many as six patients an hour, compared with roughly one an hour using spirometry, which has remained the standard diagnostic test for COPD despite changing little since it was first developed in the 19th century.

Spirometry requires patients to perform forceful breathing manoeuvres and typically needs specialist staff to administer.

TidalSense chief executive Ameera Patel said: “Our ambition is really bold and broad, and it is to have a really significant impact at a population level on chronic respiratory diseases like COPD and asthma.

“We want the test to be available to anyone the first time they present with symptoms, so there’s no bias in accessibility based on where you live, your socio-economic status or your ethnicity.”

Founded in 2013 by chief engineering officer Julian Carter, who holds a PhD in microelectronics and has more than 35 years’ experience developing medical devices, TidalSense has spent more than a decade building the technology.

Its AI models have been trained on more than 2.5 million recorded breaths to identify the distinctive patterns associated with COPD.

The device was introduced into the NHS last year and is now being used by public health providers in Suffolk, north-east Essex, Wales, Glasgow and community lung screening clinics across the south of England.