Your period already comes with enough discomfort on its own. Certain habits, from what you eat to how you manage hygiene, can quietly make cramps, bloating, and fatigue worse. Here’s what to skip (and why it matters) during those few days each month.
Loading Up on Coffee and Inflammatory Foods
That extra cup of coffee you reach for when you’re exhausted on day two of your period may be working against you. Coffee has been shown to increase menstrual cramps by triggering a higher release of prostaglandins, the hormone-like chemicals responsible for uterine contractions. When prostaglandin levels spike, blood vessels feeding the uterus constrict, reducing blood flow to the muscle and intensifying cramping pain.
Coffee isn’t the only culprit. Red meat, sugar, and other inflammatory foods appear to worsen cramps through the same prostaglandin pathway. This doesn’t mean you need to eliminate these foods entirely, but scaling back during your period, especially if you already deal with painful cramps, can make a noticeable difference. Swapping your second or third coffee for herbal tea and choosing lighter meals with fruits, vegetables, and whole grains gives your body less inflammatory fuel to work with.
Douching or Over-Cleaning
Feeling “unclean” during your period is common, but douching is one of the worst ways to address it. Your vagina maintains its own ecosystem of bacteria and a naturally acidic pH that protects against infections. Douching disrupts that balance, killing off protective bacteria and allowing harmful ones to overgrow. The result is often a yeast infection or bacterial vaginosis, the exact opposite of the “freshness” you were going for.
The risks get more serious if you already have an infection without knowing it. According to the U.S. Office on Women’s Health, douching can push bacteria upward from the vagina into the uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries, potentially causing pelvic inflammatory disease. This is a serious condition that can lead to chronic pain and fertility problems. Warm water on the outside is all you need. Your body handles the inside on its own, period or not.
Leaving a Tampon in Too Long
It’s easy to lose track of time, especially overnight, but tampons should be changed every four to eight hours. The absolute maximum is eight hours. Leaving one in longer creates a warm, moist environment where bacteria can multiply rapidly, raising your risk of toxic shock syndrome. TSS is rare but potentially life-threatening, and it progresses fast, with sudden fever, vomiting, a sunburn-like rash, and a dangerous drop in blood pressure.
If you tend to sleep longer than eight hours, switch to a pad or period underwear at night. On lighter flow days when you might forget a tampon is even there, set a reminder on your phone. Always use the lowest absorbency tampon that handles your flow, since higher-absorbency tampons kept in longer pose a greater risk.
Pushing Through Intense Workouts
Exercise during your period is generally a good idea. Light to moderate movement can ease cramps and boost your mood. But there’s a meaningful difference between a 30-minute walk or gentle yoga session and an all-out high-intensity training session. Research on intensive training shows it drives up cortisol (your body’s primary stress hormone) and prolactin while suppressing estrogen and other reproductive hormones. When your body is already managing the hormonal shifts of menstruation, piling on extreme physical stress can leave you feeling more drained, not less.
Listen to your energy levels rather than your training schedule. If you normally do intense interval workouts or heavy lifting, consider dialing it back to 60 or 70 percent effort on your heaviest flow days. You won’t lose fitness from two or three lighter sessions, and you’ll likely recover faster.
One common worry you can let go of: yoga inversions. The idea that going upside down causes menstrual blood to flow backward and leads to endometriosis has been studied and repeatedly disproven. There is no medical evidence that inversions are harmful during your period. If a headstand or shoulder stand feels uncomfortable, skip it for comfort’s sake, but not out of fear.
Skimping on Sleep
Sleep quality tends to dip right around menstruation. Research published in the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews found that subjective sleep quality is lowest around menses, even though the structure of sleep stays relatively stable in healthy women. Part of the explanation is hormonal: progesterone, which has mild sedative effects, drops sharply just before your period begins. Your body temperature also shifts as it transitions from the luteal phase (when it runs about 0.4°C warmer) back down to baseline, and these thermal fluctuations can make it harder to settle into restful sleep.
This is not the week to stay up late binge-watching or scrolling. Prioritizing a consistent bedtime, keeping your room cool, and avoiding caffeine after noon (which also helps with cramps) can offset some of that natural dip in sleep quality. If you wake up feeling unrested despite a full night, a short nap earlier in the day is a better fix than more coffee.
Skipping Water and Relying on Salty Snacks
Bloating during your period is driven largely by hormonal water retention, and it’s tempting to think drinking less water will help. The opposite is true. Staying well hydrated helps your kidneys flush excess sodium and actually reduces bloating. Dehydration also makes cramps worse because it decreases blood volume, which compounds the reduced blood flow to the uterus that prostaglandins are already causing.
Salty, processed snacks amplify the problem. High sodium intake signals your body to hold on to even more water, making that puffy, uncomfortable feeling worse. You don’t need to eat bland food for a week, but being mindful about salt on your heaviest days and drinking a glass or two of water beyond your normal intake can take the edge off.
Wearing the Same Pad or Liner All Day
Like tampons, pads and liners need regular changing, ideally every three to four hours even on lighter days. Menstrual blood that sits against warm skin becomes a breeding ground for bacteria, which can cause skin irritation, unpleasant odor, and in some cases external infections. If you’re in a situation where frequent bathroom breaks are tough, period underwear with antimicrobial fabric is a more forgiving option than a single pad worn for eight or ten hours.
Ignoring Pain That Goes Beyond Normal
Many people treat period pain as something to just power through, and mild to moderate cramping is a normal part of menstruation. But pain that keeps you home from work, doesn’t respond to over-the-counter pain relief, or gets worse over time is worth investigating. Conditions like endometriosis and fibroids are common and treatable, but they’re often diagnosed years late because people assume severe pain is just “how periods are.” Tracking your pain level, location, and duration for a few cycles gives you concrete information to bring to a healthcare provider.