iOS 14 – how to keep track of your menstrual cycle with the iPhone

Among the iPhone Health functions is the cycle control, a feature of the iPhone that allows you to know and control the status of your period. It is a function included within the iPhone itself, so it is completely free. In addition, if you have an Apple Watch, the app also integrates with the watch and all the information and reminders it offers will work for you.

We are going to show you how you can keep track of your cycle with the iPhone from iOS 14, a very useful function that is worth exploring, since it allows you to automate many processes that we may still be measuring by hand.

Configure the cycle control in the Health app

Within the Health application, pre-installed on your iPhone, you will find the ‘Cycle Tracking’ function. We already warn you that its configuration is somewhat long, since being information related to such a delicate subject, it requires you to give it certain data to correctly carry out the follow-up. The app will also be installed on your Apple Watch by default, but we can only configure it from the iPhone.

The application, once we hit the cycle tracking function, will ask us several questions. We will have to tell you how long our period usually lasts, how long this cycle lasts, whether or not we are taking contraceptives (it will ask us for an approximate start date of when we start doing it), etc. They are somewhat committed questions, but necessary to keep an exact follow-up of it.

Once we configure everything, we can receive interesting notifications about when the next periods will be, fertile days and others, so that we can keep track and forget about counting, since the application will do it for us. But the monitoring does not end here, since notifications are only part of this app.

From the ‘Monthly flow’ section, the new one that will appear when you open the Health app and have configured everything, you will be able to access the calendar view of your period, indicating with colors the possible days of period and fertile days.

In the same way, we can record how we are- symptoms during the period, ovulation test results, spotting, basal temperature, progesterone test results, etc. The app will offer us relevant information that will improve as it has more data about the cycle.