Free Willpower by Roy F. Baumeister Page B

distress at this time. Women have more conflicts with spouses and other relationship partners, as well as with colleagues at work. They become less sociable and often prefer to be alone—which may be an effective strategy of avoiding conflicts that would arise from interacting.
    The standard explanation for PMS has been that the luteal phase directly causes negative emotions, but that explanation doesn’t really fit the data. Women aren’t uniformly affected by negative emotions. When Amanda Palmer was posing as a living statue in Harvard Square, she found that PMS weakened her self-control because it liberated both positive and negative feelings.
    “I’m prone to being way more sensitive and likely to cry when I’m PMSing, and that translated right into my statue work if something emotional happened,” Palmer recalls. “Something emotional could be as simple as nobody walked by and looked at me for ten minutes, and therefore the world was a cold and lonely place and no one loved me. The other extreme would be a ninety-five-year-old man hobbling up to me at the rate of one mile per hour and taking five minutes to get a folded five-dollar bill out of his wallet and put it into my can and look up at me with his wizened lonely old eyes. I would just lose it. I would try to transmit the largest concentration of love I could possibly transmit without speaking or moving my face.”
    Her experience is fairly typical of what other women report during the luteal phase: They’re affected by a variety of feelings, and their problems often arise from a strong reaction to some event. They say they don’t want to get upset but can’t seem to stop themselves from getting worked up over minor things. They’re not consciously aware that their body has abruptly cut the fuel supply for self-control, so they’re surprised that normal controls don’t work as usual.
    It feels to many women as if life stresses increase: They report more negative events and fewer positive events occurring during this luteal phase. But the outside world doesn’t predictably change for a few days every month. If a woman feels less capable than usual of handling her problems, she’ll be more stressed out. If PMS weakens her control over her emotions, then the same misfortune is more upsetting. The same task at work is more of a challenge if she doesn’t have as much energy available to focus her attention. In carefully controlled laboratory tests requiring concentration, women in the luteal phase performed worse than women at other stages of the menstrual cycle, and these effects were found for a general sample of women, not just PMS sufferers. Whether or not they felt the acute symptoms of PMS, their bodies were short of glucose.
    We don’t want to exaggerate these problems, because most women cope quite well with PMS at work and at home, and we certainly don’t want to suggest that women have weaker willpower than men. To repeat, women on the whole have fewer problems with self-control than men: They commit fewer violent crimes and are less likely to become alcoholics or drug addicts. Girls’ superior self-control is probably one reason they get better grades in school than boys do. The point is only that self-control is tied in to the body’s rhythms and the fluctuations in its energy supply. A woman with the self-control of a saint may become a tiny bit less saintly during the luteal phase. PMS, like hypoglycemia and diabetes, makes a conveniently clear-cut example of what happens when the body is short of glucose—and everyone, male or female, diabetic or nondiabetic, runs low on glucose at times. We all succumb to frustration and anger. We all sometimes feel beset by insoluble problems and overcome by impulses that seem alien, if not satanic.
    Usually, though, the problem is within. It’s not that the world has suddenly turned cruel. It’s not that Lucifer is tormenting us with dark new temptations and impulses. It’s that we’re less