Periods, the hormonal chaos that women face every month, are mostly discomforting. Lucky are those who get painless periods, but for the women who experience?pain, periods are no less than a nightmare.
Painful or not, have you ever noticed that women who spend a majority of the time together get their periods in sync. You may have often realized that your periods either sync with your room mate or your colleagues. Ever wondered why?
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We all know how people connect mentally and sometimes say the same things at the same time but it is just plain weird how our bodies can do the same.
For those ready to brush this aside as some misconception, we want to tell that it's not in our imagination or some kind of an urban myth.
According to a famous theory, the reason behind the same is because of the chemical signals that are given off by the body known as pheromones interact when they are in the same vicinity which causes the syncing?of the periods.
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A researcher named Martha McClintock studied the menstrual cycles of 135 women in an American college. It was found that the?beginning?of the menstruation cycle was more similar among friends and roommates than among random pairings of women, says Alexandra Alvergne, associate professor in biocultural anthropology at the University of Oxford.
Why, you ask?
Well, another most prevalent theory has a completely different conclusion. It is the collaborative strategy among females in order to stop one man from reproducing with multiple women at the same time. This not only exhibits?their?unity but also works as a mechanism to prevent them from becoming prey to a dominant male.?
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It was the year 1970 when this paper came out and due to feminist movements, the idea became all the more popular. Join the dots. Women-collaboration-unity-sync.?
However, this does not really explain why periods sync or if they sync at all, so this can not be the end?
But there is always another road!
If you go by recent studies and with the researcher Jeffrey Scha, it's nothing but a coincidence of women’s cycle lengths. It is difficult for them to occur at the exact same time. He expanded by saying that any similarity in cycles between women is likely to be more random and less likely to remain the same over time because of the small shifts in their cycle lengths.
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Well, now you know why your periods sync with your close friends or colleagues!