No, you cannot ovulate twice in one menstrual cycle!
Every now and then I see people on social media saying they ovulated twice and that’s absolutely not possible. This myth is part of the reason some people don’t trust the fertility awareness method, but I promise this is not going to happen.
The reason this cannot happen is because once you ovulate the hormone shift that takes place will prevent any further ovulation from happening until the next cycle (the rise in progesterone after ovulation will stop any other eggs from being released – in the case of fraternal twins the two eggs will be released within 24 hours of each other before that hormone shift takes place).
What might happen is what is called a “double peak” which is essentially two (or more) phases of the cycle that have cervical mucus. What this looks like on a chart is once menstruation ends there may be some dry days, then mucus for a few days, then more dry days, then another patch of mucus, then dry again until the next cycle. Another possibility is that some people have hormone imbalances that regularly lead to multiple patches of mucus, for example PCOS. See an example chart below – green are dry days and purple are mucus days.
When this happens you are not ovulating twice, but rather the first patch of mucus was your body trying to ovulate, but it was unsuccessful for some reason. The second patch of mucus and the final day of mucus (the Peak Day) was when your body was finally successfully completing an ovulation event. So while there may be two (or more) patches of mucus and potential fertility in the cycle, only the last one will be the one that is actually ovulation.
Rest assured, the fertility awareness method calculations for how to determine a fertile versus a infertile day take this into account and as long as you are confident in the method you will be able to implement the method as you need to, multiple patches of mucus or not.
Are you having multiple patches of mucus and not sure what they mean? Contact me or sign up for one of my programs and I can help you decode your cycle.