After all, research shows that there IS a connection between women’s menstruation and the moon

The lunar calendar has long been associated with women’s menstrual cycles, but a new study has officially found that the two are inextricably linked.

Researchers from France and the US analyzed menstrual cycle data from 3,296 European women and 721 North American women, looking to see whether the dates fell on specific lunar cycles.

The team found that women in North America were more likely to start their periods when there was a full moon and Europeans during a waxing crescent moon.

Researchers think the synchronization may stem from their new findings that menstruation is determined by a woman’s internal clock, which can be influenced by the lunar cycle.

The clock regulates our body’s daily (or ‘circadian’) rhythm in a 24-hour cycle, which wakes our body up in the morning and ensures it gets a good night’s sleep.

However, it has also been noted that our internal clocks can be affected by the lunar cycle, causing people to lose sleep – and disruption of the circadian rhythm has been linked to disruptions in menstrual function.

This changes the way our internal clock is calibrated, so “if the cycle lengthens for any reason, this clock-based process adapts to quickly shorten the cycle,” neuroscientist Claude Gronfier of the University of Lyon told me. in France. BBC Science Focus.

The researchers found that when this happens, so-called ‘phase jumps’ occur, where the biological clock goes out of sync due to the waxing moon and tries to correct itself by moving forward to the body’s next stable state.

Also called “relative coordination,” a phase jump occurs in circadian clocks, like the tired and out-of-sync feeling you get when traveling across time zones.

Researchers looked at data on the menstrual cycles of more than 7,000 women on two continents.

Researchers believe the synchronization may stem from the fact that menstruation is determined by a woman’s internal clock, which can be influenced by the lunar cycle.

In some species, the measurement may take place twice per lunar cycle when the journeys are strongest, when the Sun, Earth and Moon are aligned, during the new moon or full moon.

The team noted that previous research has shown that women’s menstrual cycles with periods longer than 27 days were intermittently synchronized with the lunar cycle.

“Our work confirms and further extends both the oscillatory nature of the menstrual cycle and its possible synchronization across phases in two larger datasets,” the statement shared in the study.

They may have developed an internal clock with a period close to that of the lunar cycle when they encountered the tides.

“During the millions of years of hominid evolution, this rhythm may have been active, possibly associated with the moon’s night-light cycle,” the study said.

‘This may have allowed for a relative synchronization of the cycles of cohabiting females.’

“There is a lot of work ahead of us, and we hope that our colleagues will join us in what could be a future field of circadian medicine,” Gronfier told the BBC.

‘If the existence of an internal clock that controls the menstrual cycle is confirmed in further studies, the medical treatment of ovulation disorders could make use of the chronobiological approaches that have proven successful in the treatment of cancer, sleep and circadian disorders, and depression,” the study said.

The perceived connection between lunar and menstrual cycles has continued through the centuries, 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 mentally and spiritually more powerful during their periods, as this usually occurred during the full moon.

Likewise, this period is known in indigenous cultures as “moon time,” when women still rest at home and reflect on their experiences.

“Women have great power during their manes,” Patty Smith of the Leech Lake Band of Minnesota Ojibwe told Rewire News Group in 2019.

“As they bleed, they lose the accumulated experience and stress of being a woman.

“Some of those experiences are painful or may contain negative energy, so we want to be careful not to interrupt that process,” Smith continued.