Planning around irregular cycles and perimenopause.

Why forecasts break

Perimenopause can start years before periods stop. Cycles often get shorter, longer or skip, and symptoms like poor sleep, low mood, brain fog and hot flushes can come and go. Irregular cycles at any age make "day 24" meaningless. What still works is noticing how you actually feel and spotting runs of hard days.

Plan from your own check-ins

• Check in once a day, even on good days. The good days are what make the hard ones visible.
• Watch for runs. Two or three hard days in a row are a signal to keep the next evening clear and lighten tomorrow.
• Log sleep. For a lot of people in perimenopause, a bad night predicts the next day better than the calendar does.
• Keep notes short. "Woke at 3, foggy in standup" is enough.

What to bring to your doctor

Dates of every period (even spotting), your hardest days and what made them hard, and how sleep has changed. A few months of this makes for a much shorter, more useful appointment.

How Maeve does it

If you tell Maeve your cycles are irregular or changing, it stops pretending to know your phase. Today shows how you checked in, notices runs of hard days, and suggests what to protect in the gaps in your calendar. The doctor report works the same way.

Maeve is not a medical device and does not diagnose perimenopause or any other condition. If your symptoms worry you, talk to a doctor.