Taking charting advice from other people: should you do it?

Sometimes I see things happening in the fertility awareness world that I know are sure to lead followers down the wrong track. When I see it happening, I try to talk about it here so that you won’t fall into some evil trap.

That’s what lead me to today’s video, which is about one thing that I see very commonly asked about temperatures that can very easily confuse you and mess you up. Check it out:

Transcript:

Hey, It’s Hannah from Holistic Hormonal Health. Welllllcome!

Today, I want to talk about a little somethin’ that I see tripping people up when they start charting. It is one specific thing and one more general thing that I will be applying it to.

The specific thing I want to talk about is temperatures and asking people how certain things apply to their temperatures. Like, how they might change their temperatures.

Now, the reason I want to talk about this is because I see a lot of people asking “I drank last night, how is this going to affect my temerature?” OR they’ll show their temperature and say “I drank last night, does this have anything to do with this?” OR “I woke up at this time, how does this normally affect your temperature? How much different will it be?”

The reason that I worry about this and would tell you not to do this is because everything is different in different bodies. So alcohol isn’t necessarily going to effect your temperature the same way that if affects your friends or your neighbors temperature. And sleeping in is not necessarily going to do that to you. Everyone has their own individual things that are going to affect their cycles.

And that’s how I’m applying this generally; It’s really your whole cycles, it’s not even just temperatures. Temperature is just a really common way to see this because so many people ask these questions and it’s not necessarily going to help you at all.

The other reason that I worry about this happening is because asking that question wouldn’t actually change your action. What I mean by that is when you are asking someone that, what they respond shouldn’t have any bearing on what you do.

They are going to say “Oh, yeah, every time I have three drinks my temperature goes up by .5 degrees F” and you are like “Wow, that is a lot.” and you might then see a lower temperature that is maybe just up .2 F and you are thinking that it’s up by .5. YOU DO NOT WANT TO ADJUST THAT TEMPERATURE. Don’t ever adjust your temperatures. That’s not what you are supposed to do. What you have to do is you have to just write “I drank alcohol the previous night” on your chart and then you will notice over time how it affects YOU individually. Not how it effects anyone else.

Even if it does affect you individually, you still would not ever be making those adjustments on your temperature. You would just see it and be like “Ok, I have a good idea that that temperature is not going to be correct or that I can discount it because I drank alcohol (or whatever).”

That’s fine, but you don’t want to just willy-nilly change your temperatures around. That’s not going to work. That’s going to be very dangerous and lead to potentially reduced efficacy with your method.

So, I want to very much discourage you from just taking information that other people give you about their bodies and applying it to your own, because it’s not necessarily going to be exactly the same for you. In order to learn more about your body you always just want to chart whatever it is that you are seeing and then mark down whatever it is that may be changing your temperatures or any fertility sign and then learn about your own body rather than trying to learn about somebody else’s body and then apply that to yours, because that’s not going to be fun, it’s just going to confuse you, and it’s just going to be bad.

Anyway, there is my advice about temperatures, listening to other people too much and understanding your own body and having a really great charting journey and relationship with your body.

Hope that was helpful and you you have a great day. I’ll see you next time, bye!