Menstrual cycles alone do not have a direct effect on mood in healthy young women with regular cycles, finds a new University of California, Irvine (UCI)-led study that points to sleep as the culprit instead. Poor sleep, researchers discovered, is to blame for negatively shifting emotional states directly before and during periods. Findings, published in SLEEP, may seem surprising, says lead author Alessandra Shuster, UCI cognitive sciences graduate student and researcher in the Sleep and Cognition Lab, because they fly in the face of a long-held stereotype. “There is a general belief that women are highly affected by their menstrual cycle, specifically that women get more irritable and emotionally unstable during their period,” says Shuster in a release. “But there hasn’t been a lot of research to back up that belief for the majority of women in the US who do not report clinical premenstrual or mood disorders, and findings have been inconsistent at best.”

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