This piece is the fifth of a multi-part Future of Cyclical Work essay series written by a number of different authors exploring the intersection of cycle literacy and organizational design.
I am the founder of Period Reality and JIBE. I work with organizations, leaders and high performing teams navigating burnout, health strain and unsustainable expectations. My work sits at the intersection of menstrual cycle awareness, leadership and the future of work. I am writing for anyone who has ever felt that their body was the first thing to break in systems that reward consistency over reality. For everyone who has ever felt that their body was swimming against a current.
I did not come to cyclical living through theory.
I came through my body disagreeing with the life I was living.
For years I was doing work that looked right on paper. International stages. Policy rooms. Deadlines that mattered. Impact that could be counted. And yet my body kept interrupting the story. Headaches that arrived without explanation. Creativity that surged then vanished. That feeling of riding a high wave and then crashing down. A quiet knowing that something about the pace was wrong.
At the time and as someone with ADHD, I assumed this was a personal failure. I needed better habits. Better resilience. Better discipline.
What I was missing was a map.
Not as a timetable or a performance plan but as an internal orientation system. A way of understanding rhythm, fluctuation and capacity across time.
The Missing Sense We Were Never Taught
The missing sense is our ability to read internal rhythm and bodily signals as meaningful information.
We are taught how to read clocks. Calendars. Metrics. Milestones. We are rarely taught how to read ourselves.
Body literacy is not niche knowledge. It is a foundational skill that many of us were never given - especially those of us raised to perform consistently above all else, to override sensation in favor of output, and to mistrust any internal signal that disrupted the plan.
In many pre-industrial cultures this knowledge existed. People lived closer to land, seasons and cycles. Modern systems prioritized standardization and output. In the process we lost fluency in our own internal signals.
Especially for those raised to perform consistently above all else. To override sensation in favor of output. To mistrust any internal signal that disrupts the plan.
What we actually need are better ways to organize energy across time.
Cyclical living begins there.
It shapes how we plan our days. How we prioritize work. How we lead. It applies to health, leadership and organizational design.
At its core it is about knowing your own body. Understanding how your strengths shift across the cycle. Using that information to make well informed decisions about how you spend your time and energy.
Not as an optimization. Not as a productivity strategy. But as orientation. As learning how to locate yourself in time, rather than forcing yourself to keep up with it.
Like learning to read tides instead of forcing the sea to behave like a motorway.
Once you learn to read the tides of your body, you stop blaming the water for moving. You change how you navigate.
Cycles as a Language, Not a Label
If the map is the territory, language is how we learn to read it.
One of the reasons cyclical living is often misunderstood is because it gets framed as identity. Something you are. Something you disclose. Something that sets you apart.
In practice, cyclical living is a language.
A way of noticing patterns. Naming internal shifts. Making sense of change without pathologizing it.
The language gives access to the map.
When people learn this language, something subtle but profound happens.
They stop outsourcing authority over their bodies.
They begin to recognize signals before they become symptoms.
Boundaries before burnout. Desire before depletion.
This is where agency is born.
Not in control. In relationship.
Why Personal Becomes Collective So Quickly
What surprised me most, once I began speaking openly about cycles, was how quickly the conversation stopped being personal.
Stories spilled out. Across ages. Across cultures. Across genders.
People spoke about working against themselves. About ignoring signals until their bodies forced a reckoning. About never having words for what they felt, only a vague sense that something was wrong and that they were the problem.
Cyclical living travels fast because it names something many people already recognize in their bodies but were never taught to trust. It doesn’t require belief. It requires attention.
It creates community not through sameness, but through shared permission. Permission to be variable. To be seasonal. To change without explanation.
When Organizations Stop Designing for Constant Performance
There is a moment in most organizational conversations when silence falls.
It usually comes after someone says some version of this: We keep designing for a human that does not exist.
A human who performs the same every day. Who is endlessly available. Who separates body from mind from life.
The silence that follows is not awkward. It is heavy and spacious at the same time - like something unspoken has finally been placed on the table and everyone can feel its weight.
Once that fiction is named, the question shifts.
Not how do we fix people?
But what would it look like to build environments that listen?
This is where my work now lives. At the intersection between personal insight and structural response.
Because when organizations learn to work with rhythm rather than against it, trust changes. Planning changes. Leadership changes. Not through policy alone, but through culture.
The Future Will Feel Different
The future of cyclical living will not disappear into frameworks.
It will be shaped by them but experienced as relief.
In people who stop pushing through signals they finally understand.
In teams where expectation meets reality. Where planning accounts for fluctuation rather than denying it. Where happiness and sustainability emerge when the wave is acknowledged rather than flattened.
In cultures that measure sustainability not by speed, but by continuity over time.
We will recognize it not because it is loud, but because it makes room. For health. For agency. For contributions that last.
Cyclical living is not asking us to slow down.
It is asking us to stop getting lost.
And once you have a map and learn to read internal rhythms as information rather than interruption, you do not need to force the journey.
You can move with far more confidence.
About the Author
Marlou Cornelissen is the founder of Period Reality, a global movement advancing menstrual cycle awareness as a foundation for health, agency and collective wellbeing and JIBE, a workplace partner supporting organizations to design more human, sustainable ways of working. She works at the intersection of health, equity, leadership and systems change.