Spotting between your period can be really stressful and very confusing. Usually it makes you question if you have some kind of hormone imbalance, a serious medical problem, or some other serious scare. And although spotting mid cycle can be a sign of endometriosis or another medical condition, tracking your period can allow you to actually understand if you’re experiencing something regular and somewhat normal or something completely not right!
For example, did you know that spotting at the very beginning of your fertility window is actually completely normal? Today, I want to take some time to tell you about why spotting during ovulation is nothing to be concerned about!
Let’s talk about Ovulation
Ovulation is the phase of your cycle when the ovarian follicles rupture and release the oocyte ovarian cells. In other words, the eggs are released from the ovaries. At this point, the egg can either be fertilized by a sperm, or discarded by the body.
To begin this process the body increases the production of the egg white like substance, cervical fluid. The production of this fluid peaks a day or two before ovulation, which is the point when estrogen levels are the highest. Next, an increase in luteinizing hormone triggers the egg to release (about 2-3 days later).
How does bleeding work into this?
Although there are no solid answers for the exact reasoning bleeding can come with ovulation, some studies suspect that people who bleed with ovulation have increased levels of hormones such as estradiol, progesterone, and luteinizing hormone during ovulation. The blood most likely coming from the ruptured follicle, giving it a very light pink color.
Should you be worried?
If you are noticing a small amount of light pink blood during your fertility window that only lasts for 1-2 days (3 max), it’s nothing to be worried about, especially if this reoccurs multiple times. This does not mean you have a hormone imbalance or that something is wrong with your cycle. Keep it in mind the next time you have an OBGYN appointment, but don’t go out of your way to make a special appointment for it.
However, if your bleeding is dark red or brown in color or seems more like a light flow than just spotting, a trip to your OBGYN might be a good idea.
Implantation Bleeding
Don’t confuse ovulation spotting with implantation bleeding, which occurs about a week after ovulation, but before the period begins and is much lighter and shorter than a typical period. Although implantation bleeding is also light pink (and sometimes light brown) in color, it occurs at a very different time than ovulation bleeding.
Implantation bleeding occurs when a fertilized egg burrows into the endometrium and is often an early sign of pregnancy.
Do you have any other questions about your cycle? Let me know in the comments below!
Until next time,
Kat
Sources and Further Reading
McWeeney, C. (2017). Ovulation Bleeding: What is it, and how to know if you’re experiencing it. Clue. https://helloclue.com/articles/cycle-a-z/ovulation-bleeding-what-it-is-how-to-know-if-youre-experiencing-it
Ernst, H. (2018). What is Ovulation Bleeding? Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/health/pregnancy/ovulation-bleeding
The color and consistency of your flow can tell you a lot about what’s going on with your cycle. Light pink, bright red, and thin blood means it’s fresh blood that isn’t spend a lot of time in your uterus and is flowing relatively quickly. Dark red or brown blood is blood that has spent more time in the uterus and is considered older. This type of blood is most common at the beginning of the cycle, when remnants of the past cycle are being expelled, or at the end of your bleeding cycle.
If you have concerns or this is new to you, you may want to consider how you are collecting your blood and determine if there is a better way to evaluate the consistency of your flow. Whereas pads and tampons are the most common form or collection, they soak up most of the period blood and make it difficult to determine the consistency of blood flow. Menstrual cups, which collect the blood however, will make it easy to determine if blood flow is thick, thin, and the color of the blood.
Clue is a cleverly named tool that lets you clue in on your period. It tracks your flow’s length, amount, and symptoms easily for you in one little app! You can customize it to track the things you want to track such as flow, cravings, pain, emotions, sleep, and a lot of other things!
I love how easy clue is to use! As soon as I open the app the first thing that pops up is the icon to enter today’s data. I don’t have to scroll through a calendar or through any complicated pages to enter data. I just hit the big “Today” button and I have all my tracking options right there! It also makes tracking how heavy my flow is super easy giving me “light” “normal” “heavy” and of course “Spotting” options. It also makes seeing my period overview very easy. It’s all viewable from the homepage, I can see how long my period is going to last, where I am on that cycle, and what comes next so I always know what to expect. And if I don’t want to read it there, I just have to switch over to the Calendar view, which is also very easy to read and use.
I love that I can so easily see my fertility window and can track all the same things throughout the entire month. Seeing when I am spotting during this time has become extremely important to me and that’s very easy to read whether from the homepage or from the calendar. Learning this about my period has been detrimental to me learning about my flow and my body!
The biggest downfall I find with clue is that although you can track a lot of different things, I find that the more you track, the harder it is to keep track of WHAT actually happened easily. For example all the ailments, i.e. bloating, cramping, fatigue etc. go under the blue category. So when you track them, they simply come up with a blue square on your calendar. So if you are tracking more than one ailment, you have to many little blue squares and can’t tell which is which until you click each individual day. It’s certainly not the end of the world and usually I only track my cramps since that’s my biggest ailment. I like to just be able to look at my period on a calendar and know exactly what happened on what day very easily.
Similarly, I find the analyzer on this app a little useless. It takes a lot of getting used to in order to understand how to read it and what it all means. It’s not in graphs or anything like that, so it’s an adjustment from what other apps offer. That being said, it’s not the worst thing in the world, and I personally find I use the calendar to asses more than anything else, but I would personally prefer graphs or charts!
You’ve probably heard it from your doctor every time you’ve gone it for a checkup: “When was your last period?” And some of us have had to scour the backs of our minds trying to remember exactly what day our last period actually was, only to result in a lecture from the doc about how we should be tracking our period every, single month.
Kat Classics 