Back before I was a stay-at-home mom, I worked an office job for many years. As a nerdy planner person, I kept records of when I was most productive, and I started to notice a trend: I was getting way more done when I was ovulating than when I was on my period. After a while, I started to deliberately schedule my work load around my cycle, and noticed my stress levels improving as a result.
I didn’t know it then, but I was cycle syncing.
The term “sincronización de ciclos” has been getting a lot of buzz online lately. As it came across my algorithm this year] I remembered how that similar strategy had helped me in the past. So, I decided to try it again: to start working with my hormones–not struggle against them–in my new jobs as a homeschool mom and writer.
Enter Lively, a cycle syncing app available for iOS and Android. It’s more than a simple period tracker, but it’s different from a true fertility tracker (an important distinction you can read more about here). I personally found Lively to be a gentle, easy, and encouraging way to implement cycle syncing into my life, which I’ll talk about more in this article.
What you tell Lively, and what Lively tells you
When you install and first open Lively, you’ll be greeted by a calming palette of neutral colors and minimalist design. Messages and quotes of gentle encouragement are tailored to your current cycle phase, which it determines after you give the app the first and last days of your most recent period. Lively then starts tailoring its home page to your current hormones.
Short snapshot information tells you where you are in your cycle and what’s happening in your body, and also gives you some suggestions for what to “do,” how to “move,” and what to “eat” to take advantage of your current mental state and energy level.
Tap a header, and you’ll be presented with a huge list of suggestions in pictographic form, which you can read about and log as an activity for the day. Under the “log a symptom” section, you can also log your mood, energy level, symptoms and temperature, discharge, and intimacy. You can also enter a short journal entry to log your journey.
At first, you might be overwhelmed by the hundreds of icons and worry that it will be time consuming to log all your activities. Keep calm! You don’t have to log anything but your period dates. Treat the icons as gentle suggestions and go on with your day.
I enjoy opening Lively in the evening when I have my planner open, and using some of the suggested activities to tailor tomorrow’s to-do list to my predicted energy levels.
Practical ways to apply Lively’s cycle syncing suggestions
After two cycles, the Lively app starts predicting your future cycle and period length. This appears on a color-coded calendar, which I personally find very useful.
As I mentioned, I’m a planner, and being able to see a prediction of my cycle helps me to schedule out my projects and tasks in a way that won’t wear me out when I don’t have the energy to give.
Here’s a practical snapshot of how I use Lively’s predictions to schedule my tasks over the course of a cycle:
- I spend my menstrual phase focusing on routine tasks and self care.
- My follicular phase is spent brainstorming, outlining, and project planning.
- During my ovulatory phase, I pick household organization projects and prioritize high-energy chores.
- And my luteal phase is when I get my best focused writing and editing done.
Lively’s calendar view and snapshot pages help me stay on track. Having an app to take out all the guesswork of this schedule was such a great tool while I learned how to cycle sync as both a homemaker and a writer.
“Partner syncing” and other features the Lively app offers
Pretty widgets
Lively offers homescreen and lockscreen widgets. They match the warm golden colors of the app, however, they clashed with my phone’s wallpaper, soI opted not to use them (but your own mileage may vary on this front!).
A reasonable amount of notifications
Lively pushes a surprisingly small number of notifications. This is probably a pro for most people already overwhelmed by constant notifications from their other apps. For me, I think I would prefer a daily morning notification to remind me what phase I’m in, and how to plan my day accordingly.
Partner syncing
Partner syncing has been a lot of fun, which I didn’t expect. My husband can see a few pieces of information including my current phase, with a few details about hormones and energy levels to go along with it. This helps him keep tabs on when I might need a bit more support or self-care, as well as roughly when we’re most fertile.
I can also manually update my mood and libido for him to see. I wish there were more descriptive options, but we’re stuck with a 5-point scale from a frowny face to a smiley one. My husband likes “nudging” me from time to time, which sends me a notification that he’s thinking of me and wondering how I’m feeling. It’s cute.
“Modes” for different phases of fertility
There are now pregnancy, postpartum, and menopause modes, which I haven’t gotten a chance to experience, but I’m interested to try if I have another baby. I think Lively’s gentle self-care focus would pair nicely with these hormonally stormy times.
Lively’s downsides
This is not a cycle tracking app, so it’s not designed to help you pinpoint ovulation and determine fertility.. This is an important distinction to point out: since the only information Lively has is your period start and end dates, all the rest of the advice in the app is actually based on the “método del ritmo“. Unfortunately, there is no way for you to enter other fertility data in Lively, or even manually adjust your ovulation date if you’re tracking with an official fertility awareness method and would like to include that information in the app. Therefore, the demarcations between the follicular, ovulatory, and luteal phases are not necessarily accurate. Importantly, this is not the first cycle syncing app to have this issue.
Of course, the borders between cycle phases can be a little fuzzy anyway, so this might not be a deal breaker, especially if your cycles are fairly regular and you’re not looking to strictly prevent or achieve pregnancy. The app does adjust to your average cycle length as you go, but if your cycles are wildly irregular, this might be another solution that doesn’t tailor to you.
The data you input doesn’t actually change Lively’s recommendations
And speaking of missing data, we come to what I think is the most frustrating thing about Lively. The app includes hundreds of activities, symptoms, and foods you can track and log. There are even spaces to enter your basal temperature and mucus observations… but the app doesn’t do anything with any of that information. That’s why I recommend that you don’t bother logging those activities. It doesn’t change anything! The only data that makes a difference are your period start and end dates. A recent update has added a place to view all your journal entries together in chronological order, but the rest is just nice advice. All of this begs the question: why are they asking you to log that data in the first place, and what are they using it for?
The whole time I used the Lively app for this review, an announcement in the settings menu of the app has teased that a “new insights feature is on the way…” powered by “AI insights” and coming in Spring of 2025. As of early June, those features are nowhere to be seen yet. We’ll see.
Lively doesn’t do anything special, but it’s a good shallow entry for cycle awareness
If I’m going to be blunt, it’s true that there’s nothing unique about Lively that you couldn’t find elsewhere. Blog posts and social media can give you all the same information about cycle syncing, and other apps, like 28, do everything Lively does and more, like personalized menus and workout videos.
I think Lively’s value proposition is the low barrier to entry. You don’t have to sit in front of countless videos and blog posts taking notes, and you don’t even have to wade through visual clutter to make the most of the app and your cycle. With Lively, you open one app, you glance at a few recommendations and an inspirational quote, and you’re on your way.
For someone like me, who was interested in cycle syncing during a new season of my life, but didn’t know where to start, it fit the bill perfectly, and I found it valuable.
Lo esencial
My life has gotten so much more peaceful and productive since I started cycle syncing, and Lively has made it so easy to learn how to go with my monthly flow. I like Lively’s soothing and minimalist aesthetic. I like getting little nudges from my husband and sharing my cycle information with him.
That being said, unless new features are released soon that allow the data you enter to be useful, I don’t think I’ll be renewing my $30 per year premium subscription.
I’d definitely recommend trying Lively if you’re intrigued by the idea of cycle syncing but you don’t know where to start. This app will give you gentle guidance to get under way and feel confident. But I would recommend starting with the free version, and only upgrade to premium if you see a feature you’d really like, or if they ever release those new features “coming soon.”
