Ep 029: Do Moon Phases Really Affect Your Period?

This show is for every woman who has accepted pain and discomfort as inherent to be a woman or has denied any part of themselves to "make it" or feel accepted. Women of reproductive age have been left out of a lot of research because our bodies and our hormones are considered too complicated. What is worse is this idea trickles down into education leaving women with very little information about how their bodies work. Not only are we not taught how our bodies work, but once you start asking questions it is surprising difficult to find answers.

I believe that every woman deserves to know how her body works, to recognize when symptoms arise, and to feel confident in her inner voice because the pain, the mood swings, and the hormones are not your problem. They are your body's messengers.

So I am here to confront and change narratives around being a woman, being hormonal. and yes, PMSing. I am your host Briana Villegas and welcome to my Hormone Rants.

Today, we're talking about moon cycles, you may have heard this. You may use this terminology yourself to refer to your period as a moon time or a moon cycle. And this comes from the idea that cycles are seemed to the phases of the moon and the overlap in cycle length.

The transition between each phase of the moon takes about on average 29 days. And this is very similar to the average menstrual cycle as well. And there's really a whole philosophy around what it means to cycle with the moon. And how you cycle with them in, There are four ways that your cycle could line up with moon phases.

The first is called a white moon. And this is when your period happens during the new moon, or when you, the moon is not visible. And you ovulate with the full moon, when you're actually seeing, you know, the moon at its fullest phase and this is thought to be the most typical way to cycle with the moon because it's thought that the full moon is the earth's most fertile time.

And so this alignment with female ovulation would promote fertility and it's not that this is the mother phase of a woman's life. So if you find that, you're cycling with the moon, in this way, where you ovulate during the full moon, it can be reflective of you wanting to get pregnant being ready to start a family or being in a phase where you're focus is on nurturing and raising children.

Another way to interpret this is that a white moon cycle could indicate that you want to give more energy to yourself at this time. So it's more of a nurturing phase the other common. All those things is slightly less typical is the red moon and this is one bleeding happens.

During the full moon and ovulation is occurring at the new moon. When the moon is not visible, The thought here is that in ancient times, the women who cycled with a red moon, were the priestess healers, the witches medicine women, these people who really channeled their energy inward, and had this deep desire for self-actualization self-growth, creativity mentorship.

And that's not to say that these women cannot also be mothers and raising children. But that their focus is about investing in their community, whether that's teaching or leading others. But the other two options are called a pink moon and a purple moon. And these reflect when you're bleed and ovulation are occurring during the waxing and waning faces of the moon, instead of aligned with the new moon and full moon.

And in both of these cases, their thought to be representative of transitional phases in your life. The pink moon where bleeding occurs with the waxy moon and ovulation with the waning mood is thought to reflect a transition from maybe a rest period in your life or a healing period in your life into a more productive strength and power focus because of the way that the waxing moon is going from darkness into more light and expansion.

The purple moon where bleeding happens during the waning moon and ovulation is happening. During the waxing moon, The idea again is that this can be transitional but shifting from a time of output and strength into a time of rest and reflection as a season in your life anecdotally. When I looked this up, just out of curiosity to see, was, I cycling with either of these sort of moon phase concepts and did that seem to align with where I was in my life.

I found that I am on a red moon cycle meaning that my period is coming during the full moon. And I'm ovulating closer to the new moon and the philosophy around. It does align. I am in a season of growth and community building as I built this business, my focus is more pushing outwards versus a more nurturing season in my life.

Even though I do have young kids and I am in the trenches of motherhood and it's kind of interesting to see those parallels lineup, But of course, there's the question of, you know, with our modern scientific methods. Is there any evidence that this is more than anecdotally? True. The idea that we cycle with the moon, has its roots in ancient cultures, who had developed rituals and sacred times around this, where they often had sort of red tent type experiences where women would go together and have a bleed time or ceremonies.

And in some of the articles I read, talk to some women who are descendants of these tribes that had rituals. And one woman talked about a moon timer referring to bleeding during the new moon, or when the moon is not visible. As a time, when a woman is at the height of her powers, she talks about, this shouldn't be a time to be wasted in mundane tasks and social distractions, or should someone's concentration be broken by concerns with the opposite sex?

I found this quote, really interesting because it is the roots of this idea of cycles linking where menstruation whether that's aligned with the moon or not. Is this time to go in words and understand what your needs are and lean into, you know your intuition and your power and understand where your life is going.

And and taking that initiative, there of making decisions that are taking you in the direction and they're trajectory that you want to go. Another interesting thing that this woman said was that if a woman ever felt out of synchronization with the moon meaning, she was no longer cycling as expected and having bleeds line up with the moon to, it would go and sit in the moonlight and there is some basis for this idea in the animal kingdom marine organisms do synchronize reproduction with the moon.

That's been established, but it's been harder to establish in women and there have been studies that have gone both ways some say yes, this does that happen, others say that it doesn't but this conversation is coming back up in the media and a little bit more in public light in the last couple years.

Because if a new study that came out in 2021, that did something different and it was with a small number of women but it actually looked at longitudinal data. So it took data of cycles over, I believe it was like 15 years. And they found that when they did combine the dates for individual women, over this long period of time, they did find significant, correlations with the start of periods, and the full moon and the new moon but not with other parts of the cycles.

So what they found was this connection between the idea of a white soon and a red moon synchronization. And from these findings they suggest that it's the moonlight as well as the moon's gravity and distance from the earth that could be influencing menstruation. They don't know exactly how that works or how women our sensitive to those changes.

But they do notice that there is a difference in women who live in rural areas, versus urbanized areas. And in this particular study, most of the women lived in a ruled area where moonlight was more visible, suggesting that they might be more aware of these changes in the moon's brightness and therefore may be able be more synced with the moon because of that because they did find that participants in the study who didn't show this consistent cycling with the moon reported being night, owls suggesting that they might be having additional exposure to artificial lights at night.

That could be overriding the sensitivity to moonlight. And what's interesting is back to the quotes, I mentioned earlier with the tribal women was that if someone in the tribe ever fell out of synchronization, with the moon. The recommendation was that she take time sitting in the moonlight and communing with the moon, in some way asking it to balance her and restore her.

But again that exposure to moonlight was the answer to getting back in sync with the moon. Another interesting finding was related to cycle length, where older women who cycles were longer and further away from the 29-day average as they entered perimenopause and were on their way to menopause had fewer cycles that synchronized with the moon.

And another study they talked about how women in urbanized areas tend to have shorter cycles closer to 26 days as opposed to the 29 days. And so this led that women in organize areas were less likely to be in synchronation with the moon and what these researchers concluded is that ultimately the biggest reason that we don't see synchronization as much in the modern world is not that.

It's not a real phenomenon, but that with so much more exposure to artificial lights, and just lifestyle habits of our modern environment are not conducive to us being sensitive to the changes in the moon, I do want to make a note here that cycling with the moon, is not necessarily better than not cycling with the moon.

It doesn't necessarily mean that your cycle is more or less healthy. So if this is a little bit too far out there for you, it's not something that you have to aspire to, or to feel like there's something wrong with your cycle based on not aligning with the moon.

However, I also think there's room for for the research and room to speculate that women who are cycling with the moon may have certain lifestyle practices that do contribute to greater regularity and health in their cycle. They may be more projective around their sleep. They may be spending more time outside in nature.

So if there's something that you are interested in looking up, I'm going to link in the show notes, a website where you can see the lunar calendar based on where you live and just check it out. And see if your current cycle is aligning with the moon. If you find that you're out of sync with the moon and you are curious about, seeing if you can get yourself cycling with the moon, some ways to do, that would be doing some grounding practices.

Particularly in the evening barefoot outside in the moonlight, as well as limiting artificial lights at night. And that's just a healthy practice any way to promote a healthy sleep pattern. Another way that you could utilize this idea of cycling with the moon, is if you have irregular cycles, this is another way that you can set yourself up on a 29-day cycle and set up your menstrual phase and ovulatory phase and then ludial and follicular around the phases of the moon and can help you sort of find a cyclical rhythm.

That feels more intuitive as opposed to an artificial, you know, first week of the month second week of the month. So, whatever feels most aligning for you. This just gives you another option of a way to tap into that rhythm.

Transcribed by Pixel

Thank you so much for listening. If you want more great episodes like this one, subscribe on iTunes, follow on Spotify, or wherever you listen, and be sure to share with someone who could also benefit from this information. And if you want to learn more about how I can help YOU stop normalizing your symptoms and start optimizing your experience head to www.brianavillegas.com or find me on Instagram @brianavillegascoaching. You've got this!