The Questions I Wish Someone Had Answered About My Period

I used to go to the nurse's room instead of PE.

Not every month. But enough that it became a pattern. I would lie flat in a dark room, hot water bottle pressed against my abdomen, waiting for the worst of it to pass. Nobody asked me how I was feeling. Nobody sat down and explained what was happening in my body. Nobody said this is your cycle, this is normal, and here is what will actually help.

I was anaemic. I was exhausted. And I genuinely believed something was wrong with me.

Nothing was wrong with me. I just did not have the language.

Years later, I stand in front of rooms full of young women in schools across South East London and I ask them questions. How many of you know where you are in your cycle right now? How many of you have ever been told that your period is a vital sign? How many of you have pushed through training on a day your body was asking you to rest?

The questions they ask me back tell me everything. They are curious, articulate, and hungry for information. What they are lacking is language, framework, and permission to ask.

This piece is for them. And for every woman who was once that girl in the nurse's room, wondering why her body felt like a problem nobody wanted to talk about.

Why are my periods so heavy?

Heavy bleeding is one of the most common and most under-discussed experiences in young women. Many girls assume that what they are experiencing is normal simply because nobody has told them otherwise. In reality, heavy menstrual bleeding can be a sign of iron deficiency anaemia, hormonal imbalance, or conditions like endometriosis or PCOS that respond far better to early identification than to years of managing symptoms alone.

If you are soaking through protection every hour, passing clots, or feeling significantly fatigued during your bleed, that is information worth bringing to a GP. Not because something is necessarily wrong. Because your body is communicating and you deserve to understand what it is saying.

Why am I so tired all the time?

Fatigue in adolescence is often dismissed as laziness, late nights, or the general chaos of being a teenager. For many young women, particularly those with heavy periods, the tiredness is physiological. Iron deficiency anaemia is significantly more common in menstruating females and its symptoms, exhaustion, difficulty concentrating, low mood, reduced exercise tolerance, are frequently misattributed to everything except the actual cause.

If you are training regularly and your energy does not match your effort, start with your iron levels. Ask your GP for a full blood count. It is a simple test and the results can change everything.

Why do I feel disconnected from my body?

This is the question nobody thinks to ask and the one that matters most.

The menstrual cycle is not just a reproductive event. It is a hormonal rhythm that affects energy, cognition, mood, pain tolerance, strength, and nervous system regulation across four distinct phases. When young women have no framework for this rhythm, the fluctuations feel random and destabilising. The low energy of the late luteal phase feels like failure. The brain fog before the bleed feels like something to push through. The vitality of the follicular phase goes unrecognised and therefore unleveraged.

Disconnection from the body is often not a psychological problem. It is an information problem. When you understand that your body is moving through a predictable, intelligent cycle, the disconnection starts to resolve. You are not broken. You are fluctuating. And fluctuation, understood, becomes an asset.

What do I do when I feel fatigued but still have to show up?

The answer is not to push through. The answer is to adapt.

Gentle movement, particularly in the early bleed phase, often serves the body better than rest or high intensity training. Breathwork and somatic movement can reduce pain, regulate the nervous system, and restore a sense of connection to the body. A heated pad, a slower pace, a modified session rather than a skipped one.

The goal is not to perform at the same level across all four phases of the cycle. The goal is to understand which phase you are in and meet your body where it actually is.

Why do I feel so alone in this?

Because we have not built systems that make this conversation easy to have.

The girls I work with are not lacking resilience or intelligence. They are operating in environments that were not designed around their physiology. Schools, sports programmes, and training plans built on a model of consistent, linear output are a structural mismatch for a body that operates in cycles.

Changing that starts with language. With a girl in a classroom raising her hand and asking a question she was never sure she was allowed to ask. With a coach who knows that day two of a bleed is not the day to push for a personal best. With a practitioner who sits with a young woman in a nurse's room and says your body is not broken, it is communicating, and here is what it is trying to tell you.

That is what I am trying to build. One school, one session, one question at a time.

If you work with young female athletes, or if you were once that girl, I would love to hear from you.

Seema Chopra works with high-performing women to train intelligently, recover well, and sustain performance without burnout