You’ve probably heard that the moon affects the sea and tides, as well as that the old wives tale that our periods sync with the moon.
There’s also a long-running myth that a full moon can change people’s moods, making them feel slightly off-balance and causing them to behave erratically.
Anecdotally, you’ll find hundreds accounts of weird goings-on at this time.
My own dad – who is a massive skeptic about these things – works night shifts at a train station, and says that people are consistently more violent and out of sorts when it’s a full moon.
But it turns out it’s not just stories that show a correlation between full moons and strange behaviour.
As far back as the ancient Greeks, there was the belief that the moon played a big part in our lives.
Aristotle believed that the moon was responsibly for epilepsy and mental illness, and this was a common belief for many centuries, with people up until 1700 thinking that the light from the moon would leave people sleep deprived, and cause them to act oddly as a result.
Even after this time, well respected medics believed that certain illnesses were exacerbated by the moon.
In fact, the word lunatic derives from the Latin lunaticus meaning ‘of the moon’ or ‘moonstruck’.
We’re all about science these days, though, so want that empirical evidence to prove how the moon screws you up.
An entry in the Journal of Criminal Psychology looked at incidences of crime during different lunar phases, and found that incidences of homicides and aggravated assaults spiked massively during a full moon.
Sleep is also affected at this time.
A 2013 study recorded ‘lower sleep quality… less deep slow-wave sleep… and lower evening melatonin levels 0–4 days around the full moon compared to the other lunar classes.’ This was even when other factors (such as light and biases about lunar phases) were removed.
An psychiatrist called Thomas Wehr spent many years studying patients with bipolar and concluded that their mood swings directly correlate with the moon.
There’s a lot of conflicting information in the scientific community, with results often being hard to replicate and therefore prove definitively.
Even studies that have proven links between us and that big lad in the sky have had to stop short of explaining the underlying reasons behind how the moon can change our moods.
Some have come to the conclusion that it’s down to the light, but this is often disputed given how much light pollution we already deal with in the modern world.
Others put it down to gravitational pull and magnetic fields (after all, the moon controls the tides and we’re mostly made of water) but again there’s no evidence to prove this.
There are plenty of things in this world it’s difficult to explain, but if you’re out tonight and see people fighting outside McDonald’s or falling out of taxis, you can probably blame it on the moonlight.
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