If you are wondering if you should add sex data in the app, the answer is yes!
What are the benefits to logging sex data?
Logging sex data can help you get to know your body better! Sex drive, which tends to increase before and during ovulation, can be a telltale of your overall health, where you may not be ‘in the mood’ as often if you are not feeling well, sleeping poorly, etc.
When using NC° Birth Control, logging sex data helps you track how well you and your partner use protection and also informs you of the possibility of pregnancy should a protective method fail or be forgotten during sex.
When using NC° Plan Pregnancy, logging sex data helps you know the chances of conception for each cycle, as you will know exactly when you had sex in relation to your ovulation. It will also help you analyze if you and your partner should aim for intercourse a few more times in the days leading up to ovulation or not. We recommend intercourse regularly during the fertile (pink-red) days to increase the chances of conception.
Last but not least, if you’ve consented to share your data for research purposes, our Research team will use this data to add to the high-quality research that we do to continuously improve the app and the algorithm. This data enables us to perform the studies we have conducted so far including one of the largest studies ever conducted on a fertility awareness-based method which included over 22.000 women! If you're nervous about sharing your sex information, we talk about that more here.
How to log sex data
If you open your Add Data page, you will see the Sex tracker right below the Bleeding tracker.
For NC° Birth Control, you have three options for logging Vaginal sex: Protected, Unprotected, and None.
For effectiveness monitoring purposes, it is important to know whether protection has been used or not, which is why you are presented with these three options:
- You should select Protected if you’ve had sex today, and a barrier method has been used. You can also specify if you used a condom or if you used other protection.
- You should select Unprotected if you’ve had sex today, and no barrier method was used. Here, you can specify if you used Withdrawal or No withdrawal.
- You should select None if you did not have sex today.
Reminder: Natural Cycles recommends male condoms or abstinence from vaginal sex on all red days when using NC° Birth Control.
For NC° Plan Pregnancy, it’s more straightforward — you only need to add whether you’ve had sex or not by selecting either one of these two options: Yes or No.
No matter which mode you use, you also have the option to log other types of sex — masturbation, oral, touching, toys and anal — and these options are presented in a separate section called More types of sex. This highly requested feature can help you track the kinds of sex that may not lead to pregnancy. This tracker is optional and you can deactivate it at any time (learn more about trackers here).
How to log sex for the correct day
We count all your data points per calendar day, meaning from midnight to midnight. This means that if you have had sex at 11pm (23.00) on a Monday, you should log it for Monday. If you had sex after midnight, you should add the sex data for the following day.
Remember that you can always alter and add data for previous days by clicking on any day in the Month view or swiping left or right in the Add data view. Learn more here.
I feel unsure about logging sex data in an app
First and foremost, we understand that sex data is very private and that you may feel unsure about logging it in an app. At Natural Cycles, we take data protection seriously – we realize the trust you put into us to keep your sensitive data safe, and since many of us who work here use the app ourselves, we truly do treat your data as if it’s our own.
We take our responsibility to manage your confidential information very seriously –- we take every precaution, and comply with advanced industry standards to protect the security of your data.
If you’ve consented to share your data with us for research purposes, that data is kept anonymous. This means that our Science and R&D teams cannot see your name when using the data: we anonymize information by either deleting all information that cannot be connected to you, or encrypting it in such a way that it cannot be reversed.
Learn more about how we protect your Natural Cycles data here.