After all, there IS a connection between women’s menstruation and the moon, study shows
The lunar calendar has long been associated with women’s menstrual cycles, but a new study has officially revealed that the two are inextricably linked.
Researchers from France and the United States analyzed menstrual cycle data from 3,296 European women and 721 North American women to see if the dates fell on specific lunar cycles.
The team found that women in North America were more likely to start their period when there was a full moon, and Europeans during a waxing crescent moon.
Researchers believe the synchronization may stem from their new findings that menstruation is controlled by a woman’s internal clock, which can be affected by the lunar cycle.
Scientists have found that the moon plays a role in women’s menstrual cycles because it controls the body’s circadian rhythm, telling the woman’s body that it is time for their cycle to begin.
The clock controls our body’s daily (or ‘circadian’) rhythm in a 24-hour cycle, which is responsible for waking our bodies in the morning and ensuring they get a good night’s sleep.
However, it has also been noted that our internal clocks can be affected by the lunar cycle, which can cause people to lose sleep – and a disruption of the circadian rhythm is associated with disturbances in menstrual function.
This changes how our internal clock is calibrated, so that “if the cycle lengthens, for some reason, this clock-based process adapts to quickly shorten it,” said neuroscientist Claude Gronfier of the University of Lyon in France. BBC Science Focus.
The researchers found that when this happens, it creates something called a ‘phase jump’, when the biological clock gets out of sync due to the waxing moon and tries to correct itself by moving forward to the body’s next stable state .
A phase jump is also known as ‘relative coordination’ which occurs in circadian clocks, such as the tired and out of sync feeling you get when traveling across time zones.
Researchers looked at menstrual cycle data from the more than 7,000 women across two continents.
Researchers believe the synchronization may stem from the fact that menstruation is controlled by a woman’s internal clock, which can be affected by the lunar cycle
In some species, the measurement can occur twice per lunar cycle, when the attractions are strongest, when the sun, earth and moon are aligned, during the new or full moon.
The team noted that previous research has shown that women’s menstrual cycles with a period of more than 27 days were intermittently synchronized with the lunar cycle.
“Our work confirms and extends both the oscillatory nature of the menstrual cycle and the possible synchronization in different phases in two larger data sets,” it read in examination.
They may have developed an internal clock with a period close to the lunar cycle at the time they were confronted with the tides.
“Thus, over millions of years of hominid evolution, this rhythm may have been active, possibly linked to the lunar night-light cycle,” the study reads.
“This may have enabled a relative synchronization of cycles for women living together.”
“There is a lot of work ahead of us and we hope our colleagues will join us in what could be a future area of ambulatory medicine,” Gronfier told the BBC.
“If the existence of an internal clock that controls the menstrual cycle is confirmed in further studies, then the medical treatment of ovulation disorders could use the chronobiological approaches that have proven successful in the treatment of cancer, sleep and circadian rhythm disorders and depression,” the study said.
The perceived connection between the lunar and menstrual cycles has continued through the ages, dating back to ancient Greek culture, where the word ‘menstruation’ is derived from the Latin and Greek words for moon – mene.
Doctors in ancient Greece believed that women were more mentally and spiritually powerful during their period because it typically occurred during the full moon.
Likewise, the period in indigenous cultures is known as ‘moon time’, when women still rest at home and reflect on their experiences.
“Women have great power under their moons,” Patty Smith of the Leech Lake Band of Minnesota Ojibwe told Rewire News Group in 2019.
‘When they bleed, they reveal the accumulated experience and stress of being a woman.
“Some of these experiences are painful or may contain negative energy, so we want to be careful that we don’t interrupt that process,” Smith continued.