Your Period and SEASONALE®
One of the biggest questions women have about SEASONALE® is “what is it doing to my body?”
Understanding how your cycle works — both on a birth control pill and off — will help you understand how SEASONALE® can work to extend the time between periods.
Take a quick refresher course — remind yourself what happens to the body during its basic menstrual cycle, during a typical monthly “Pill period,” and compare it with a SEASONALE® extended-regimen period. You can read all about it below or watch our demo for a quick visual explanation.
If you’re an average, healthy woman not taking a hormone-based contraceptive (and who hasn’t yet reached menopause), you most likely ovulate each month. This means 1 of your 2 ovaries releases an egg into your fallopian tube. The egg then travels to your uterus, a small, hollow organ designed to house a developing fetus.
If the egg is fertilized by sperm on the way, it embeds itself in the uterine lining, which has thickened in case this happens, and you become pregnant.
If the egg is not fertilized, about 2 weeks after ovulation, your body sheds the unfertilized egg along with built-up layers of the uterine lining. This discharged blood and tissue passes through your cervix, the neck of the uterus, into the vagina, resulting in your menstrual period. The cycle then repeats — meaning, your ovary releases another egg about 2 weeks later. Watch our demo to see how your body behaves during its regular menstrual cycle.
When you’re on the Pill, you’re not ovulating. The hormones in the Pill that you take every day for 3 weeks — estrogen and progestin — send special signals to your body. Your ovaries don’t release an egg, and your uterine lining doesn’t thicken very much or need to shed.
When you stop taking the “active” pills, the withdrawal of the hormones tells your body to shed the uterine lining, and you experience what seems like a normal period. But because the shedding of the uterine lining is due to the withdrawal of active hormones, we call this kind of bleeding a “Pill period.” Watch our demo to see how your body behaves during a Pill period, compared to its regular menstrual cycle.
When you take SEASONALE®, your body behaves just as it does when you take a traditional birth control pill. You don’t ovulate and the period you experience is a “Pill period,” not a menstrual period.
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The one important difference between SEASONALE® and the traditional Pill is that SEASONALE® is an extended-regimen birth control pill. Instead of taking an active pill every day for 3 weeks, you take one every day for 3 months (84 days). Taking your pills for 84 days extends the time between your scheduled periods to 1 every 3 months — 4 per year. While taking SEASONALE®, your periods will be about the same as with a traditional birth control pill — they shouldn’t be any longer or heavier. However, during the first year, you are also more likely to have spotting and breakthrough bleeding (which varies from slight spotting to a flow much like a regular period) than with a traditional birth control pill. This is common and should decrease over time. During the first year, total bleeding days are similar to a traditional Pill.
Watch our demo to see how your body behaves during the SEASONALE® extended-regimen period, compared to its regular menstrual period or typical monthly Pill period.
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