When trying to conceive turns into a mystery and a labor of love, charting basal body temperature (BBT) is a proactive and inexpensive way to find some answers. 

What you’ll need:

• A digital basal thermometer
• A paper or digital way to record cycle day on the x axis and waking temperature on the y axis (There are lots of apps for that!)
• A scientist’s mind: Replicate the way you take your temperature every morning as soon as you wake - before kissing your partner, before petting your cat or dog, before moving around or doing anything else.

A well-known reason to chart BBT is to determine if, when and how smoothly ovulation is occurring. 

The lens of Chinese medicine gives us another reason

Maintaining a BBT chart can illuminate these temperature irregularities or imbalances that can impact fertility:

1. Excess heat (temperatures are too high during the follicular phase before ovulation).
2. Deficiency (temperatures are too low in the luteal phase after ovulation).
3. Stagnant Qi and Blood (temperatures are erratic).

I encourage my clients to chart BBT

I didn’t decide that I wanted to be a mother until I was 36 years old. It’s not so much that I was taking my fertility for granted. I was just focused more on things like travel, endurance running, and career. I was also concerned about adding to the global population problem. Having a child just wasn’t something I really wanted to do – until I did. And when that switch flipped, my quest to have a child was on.

At first, it was a funny realization that we could probably have been having unprotected sex for years since, without any contraception, I wasn’t getting pregnant. Then after a year or so, the humor wore off.

The questioning started – Why am I not getting pregnant? Will I ever know what it is like to be a mom? Why can everyone get pregnant but me? And, perhaps, most importantly, what can I do to boost my fertility?

Like many other women in my position, I tried assisted reproductive technology, much of which was less than