'Innocent' will lose homes, King warns

By Sean O'Grady, Economics Editor
Wednesday, 11 June 2008

Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, gave a stark warning yesterday that the financial excesses of recent years will lead to misery for homeowners.

In his gloomiest assessment to date of the prospects for British homeowners, Mr King said the recent financial "party" of cheap credit and excessive risk-taking has left a situation where "when the party ends, some innocent bystanders may lose their homes altogether."
Mr King's gloomy comments are unlikely to be welcomed by ministers. The credit crisis, Mr King suggested, "is not yet over". He said: "We are passing through the most prolonged period of financial turmoil that most of us can remember. Whether, as the IMF has argued, it is the worst period of financial stress since the 1930s is too early to judge".
The Governor added that "a wide range of financial institutions, including investment banks, monoline insurers, even hedge funds, have the potential to cause significant damage to the rest of the economy".
Mr King's speech to the British Bankers Association also included detail of how he believes financial regulation and supervision can be improved, promising to make financial stability a key priority in his second term of office. The Governor announced that the Special Liquidity Scheme, by which the banks can exchange mortgage-backed securities for more marketable government securities, will be placed on a more permanent basis.
"We intend to learn from the experience of the scheme to put in place a liquidity facility that works in all seasons – 'normal' and 'stressed'," he said. "Any such facility will need to meet two challenges: it will need the right pricing structure and it will need to overcome the 'stigma' problem."
The Governor also welcomed the proposal by Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, for the launch of a Financial Stability Committee, which could be set up to advise the Bank on matters relating to the markets. Mr King's words echoed those of Mr Darling, who said: "We should learn from the example of the Monetary Policy Committee, and take a similar approach to financial stability, bringing in outside expertise to advise the Governor and the appropriate deputy governor."
While many analysts have interpreted Mr Darling's proposals, made unexpectedly in the House of Commons, as a sleight on Mr King's handling of financial stability, the Governor said: "In monetary policy we now have a framework which makes the commitment to low inflation credible ... we need now to develop an equally strong framework for financial stability."
One question within that debate that has yet to be resolved is the issue of who will succeed Rachel Lomax when she retires at the end of this month as deputy governor for monetary policy.
Tensions have arisen between the Bank and the Treasury over whether Ms Lomax should be succeeded by the Bank's chief economist, Charles Bean, as the Governor prefers. Mr Darling is thought to prefer an alternative figure, who could bring more markets experience to the Bank's ruling triumvirate, such as Paul Tucker, the Bank's director for markets.
George Osborne, the shadow Chancellor, said he welcomed the Bank's proposals. He told the bankers: "I believe there is a deal to be struck between the Government and the City. Your side of the bargain is to manage risk properly, to understand the products you buy and sell fully, to make sure the generous rewards your staff receive do not distort proper judgement about financial control, and to be open, transparent and honest about losses in a timely way."
The Bank's challenges in coping with the credit crunch are continuing. Its own figures on mortgage rates, released yesterday, showed that the cost of the average two-year fixed-rate mort-gage deal rose from 6.06 per cent in April to 6.27 per cent in May, the highest level since 2000.

---

Miss your Messenger buddies when on-the-go? Get Messenger on your Mobile!

 

The cheesy secret behind successful decision making

By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
Friday, 6 June 2008

It may look like an ordinary cheese sandwich – but it could contain the vital ingredient that helps you successfully negotiate that pay rise.

Scientists have found that people with high levels of the brain chemical serotonin are more likely to succeed in delicate negotiations affecting their own interests. Serotonin is manufactured in the body from the amino acid, tryptophan, which is present in several foods – and cheese is a particularly good source.
Eating a cheese sandwich before entering the boss's office could therefore give your brain that vital edge.
Psychologists at the University of Cambridge who manipulated the diets of volunteers to alter their serotonin levels found that when the levels of the brain chemical were low the volunteers were more likely to allow emotion to rule their heads and make decisions that harmed their long-term interests.
But when the levels of serotonin were high they behaved in a more rational, level-headed fashion, putting their own material advancement ahead of the short-term satisfaction of telling their boss exactly what they thought of them.
It is one of the first studies to demonstrate the role of serotonin in regulating emotion and aggression in social decision making. The findings help explain why some people tend to over-react to a perceived unfairness, becoming angry and combative, when they haven't eaten.
People with short fuses have traditionally blamed a shortage of calories – "low blood sugar" – for their bad temper. But the Cambridge psychologists say fluctuations in serotonin levels have more subtle effects.
To test the theory, the researchers manipulated serotonin levels in 20 volunteers aged from 20 to 35.
The volunteers were asked to fast overnight before being given a protein-rich drink in the morning, followed some four hours later (once it was digested), with a request to participate in a financial negotiation called the Ultimatum Game. All the volunteers participated twice – once receiving a shake with tryptophan removed and once receiving a normal, tryptophan-rich shake.
The game, which has been used for decades in studies of economic behaviour, involves one player proposing to split a sum of money, say £10, with a partner. If the partner accepts, both players receive their agreed shares but if the partner rejects the offer, neither player is paid.
Normally players tend to reject about half of all offers of less than £2.50 (25 per cent of the total stake), even though this means they receive nothing, because their anger at the perceived unfairness outweighs their interest in the cash.
But among players with low serotonin who had received the tryptophan-free shake, the rejection rate rose to 80 per cent.
Molly Crockett, of the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, who led the study published in Science Express, said: "The Ultimatum Game is a favourite of economists to show that human decisio making is not rational. If it were rational we would accept every offer, even those that are really unfair, but that is not what happens."
She concluded: "Our results suggest serotonin plays a critical role in social decision making by keeping aggressive social responses in check. Changes in diet and stress cause our serotonin levels to fluctuate naturally, so it is important to understand how this might affect our everyday decision making."
How to get serotonin in your diet
Serotonin is manufactured in the body from the amino acid tryptophan, which is present in most protein-based foods. High levels of tryptophan are found in cheese, meat, soya beans, sesame seeds, chocolate, oats, bananas, dried dates, milk and salmon.
Turkey is reputed to contain high quantities of the amino acid, which is said to account for the air of contentment that reigns immediately after Christmas dinner. But analysis shows that turkey contains only marginally more than chicken, pork or beef – and somewhat less than cheese.
Tryptophan is sold in healthfood stores as a dietary supplement that is claimed to act as "nature's tranquilliser", boosting serotonin levels and making us happier, calmer and less stressed. Its sleep-inducing properties are, however, more likely to be linked with the quantity of food eaten than the amount of tryptophan it contains – as the near-universal urge to snooze after a large meal confirms.

---

Get Started!

Why adultery can help save a marriage

Therapist is under fire for saying that cheating on your spouse can be more of a blessing than a sin

Amelia Hill, social affairs correspondent
Sunday June 8, 2008

Observer

A controversial self-help book for married philanderers claims most adulterers are good, kind people. It says affairs can help a marriage and that those who stray should never admit it because the truth can cause even more damage.
'Cheating on your spouse isn't a moral act, but most men and woman who have affairs are good people who made a mistake,' said Mira Kirshenbaum, author of When Good People Have Affairs, published this week. 'They never thought it would happen to them but, suddenly, they're in this complicated, dangerous situation. We all agree that infidelity is a mistake. But once you've crossed the line, what then?'

Kirshenbaum has been criticised by her peers for saying cheats deserve sympathy and understanding. 'Adulterers are neither kind nor good people, so what sort of sympathy are we supposed to give them?', said Leila Collins, a psychologist who has given relationship counselling for 15 years. 'A good person doesn't betray their loved ones. A good person who is unsatisfied in their relationship ends it before starting a new one.'

Kirshenbaum, clinical director of the Chestnut Hill Institute, a centre for relationship therapy and research in Boston, Massachusetts, admits that infidelity is a controversial topic to address sympathetically. 'But these people are suffering terribly and need to be relieved of their sense of guilt and shame because those emotions are paralysing,' she said.

Those who have affairs are seeking real happiness and love in their lives, believes Kirshenbaum, who has been treating couples and individuals for 30 years and has written 10 books on relationships. 'Until now, the story of these men and women has never been told,' she said. 'Shame and fear have kept it in the closet and so they haven't had the understanding that might save them from ruining the lives of everyone involved.'

She believes that society's refusal to have a sympathetic discussion of infidelity has meant that the positive sides of betraying a spouse have been ignored. 'Sometimes an affair can be the best way for the person who has been unfaithful to get the information and impetus to change,' she said. 'I'm not encouraging affairs, but underlying the complicated mess is a kind of deep and delicate wisdom. It's an insight that something isn't working and needs to change.'

Her views reflect the plotline of Adrian Lyne's 2002 film, Unfaithful, in which Richard Gere's love for his wife, Diane Lane, is rekindled by her affair with a younger man, Olivier Martinez. 'If handled right, an affair can be therapeutic, give clarity and jolt people from their inertia,' she said. 'You could think of it as a radical but necessary medical procedure. If your marriage is in cardiac arrest, an affair can be a defibrillator.'

Kirshenbaum believes there are 17 reasons why people have affairs, including the see-if affair, the distraction affair and the sexual-panic affair. To help people decide whether their infidelity should spell the end of their marriage, she lists a few that she believes do indicate the relationship is over - and those that do not. 'You should stay with your partner if your affair is a heating-up-your-marriage affair, let's-kill-this-relationship-and-see-if-it-comes-back-to-life affair, do-I-still-have-it affair, accidental affair, revenge affair or midlife-crisis affair,' said Kirshenbaum.

'But you need to think carefully about whether to stay with your primary partner if your affair is of the following kinds: the break-out-into-selfhood affair, unmet-need affair, having-experiences-I-missed-out-on affair, surrogate-therapy affair, ejector-seat affair,' she said.

Kirshenbaum is adamant that an adulterer must never confess - not even if their partner asks directly. 'This is the one area in which the truth usually creates far more damage in the long run,' she said. 'A lot of people confess because they feel they just have to be honest. Well, honesty is great. But it's a very abstract moral principle. A much more concrete, and much higher, moral principle is not hurting people. And when you confess to having an affair, you are hurting someone. If you care that much about honesty, figure out who you want to be with, commit to that relationship and devote the rest of your life to making it the most honest relationship you can,' she said.

There are two huge exceptions to not telling. 'If you're having an affair and you haven't practised safe sex, you have to tell,' she said. 'You also have to tell if discovery is imminent or likely. If it's clear that you're going to be found out, it's better for you to make the confession first.'

Another reason for not telling is that it makes it far more difficult for a remorseful adulterer to return to the fold. 'If your partner will find out about your affair, your whole future happiness together depends on whether he's basically vengeful or basically merciful,' she said.

Kirshenbaum's opinion on what constitutes a happy ending is also controversial. Divorce, she believes, can be the path to a bright future. 'Sometimes - many times, in fact - divorce is worth it,' she said. 'It plays an important function. It gets us out of misery-making marriages and we have a chance of finding happiness somewhere else.'

No one wins in modern-day academia

No one wins in modern-day academiaNick Cohen The Observer, Sunday June 8 2008 Article historySt Matthew's warning that 'unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away' is the biblical quote least likely to stir the Labour soul.

That the rich get richer and the poor will get poorer is not a policy prescription that appeals to the left. With the best of intentions, however, Labour is imposing the Gospel according to St Matthew on England's universities and is providing a parable on the state of the nation in the process.

Few dispute that academia needs reforming. Britain has a university system in which the last measure the government uses to judge the quality of academics is their ability to teach. Instead, tortuous bureaucracies assess the merits of the research produced by every department in all the 200 universities. On their ruling rests the disposal of £5bn of public money.

The 2008 fight for loot is under way. Luckless workers at a Bristol warehouse are sending 200,000 scholarly books and papers to the 1,000 or so professors who adjudicate on 70 panels like the judges of beauty contests.

In the inaugural issue of the new magazine Standpoint, Jonathan Bate of Warwick University despairs of the absurdity of the enterprise. He explains that panels filled with professors of foreign languages have been more generous in rating the work of their peers than professors of English. Officially, our universities are now world leaders in the study of French literature but awful at studying English literature. What's really happened, says Bate, is that while other professors of literature covered each other's backs and looked after each other's departments 'the Eng lit lot couldn't resist biting each other's backs' even if it meant their subject lost money.

Neither he nor the government says this, but a second failing of the system is that it creates conformism in supposedly independent minds. There are many honourable exceptions, but as a herd, academics are the most predictable of beasts. If I sit down with builders, dentists or accountants, I have no way of knowing what their opinions will be. Within seconds of talking to an academic, I guess their views on every major political issue.

Why should I be surprised? To get the academic papers published the judging panels demand, lecturers must engage in the soul-destroying task of sucking up to the editors of learned journals. The funding for their departments and their very livelihoods depend on their ability to please. The government does not ask researchers to produce work of intellectual distinction, however long it takes. They must loyally churn out enough papers to allow their department to claim a slice of the booty.

The government admits this can't go on. It plans to replace the judging panels with a computer, which will record the number of times an academic's name is mentioned by his colleagues. The theory is that the best academics receive the greatest number of acknowledgements in footnotes. Let a database identify who these oft-cited professors are and - bingo! - you have found the finest minds of your generation.

Ministers possibly realised that under the present funding arrangements, Cambridge University would have to sack Ludwig Wittgenstein. He might have been a genius, but it took him decades to produce a book. Under their new system, the thousands of academics who quoted his work would provide a true assessment of Wittgenstein's worth and spare him the dole.

It sounds fair until you remember St Matthew. In 1968, Robert K Merton of Columbia University coined the phrase 'the Matthew effect' when he looked at how scientists valued each other. He found that the already eminent got disproportionate credit for their work while unknowns, whose research was often as valuable, struggled for recognition.

The great English geneticist JBS Haldane illustrated Merton's argument with the story of an Indian student, SK Roy, who had found a way to improve strains of rice. 'I thought it was a rather ill-planned experiment,' Haldane admitted, 'but I let him go ahead on the general principle that I am not omniscient.' The experiment was a triumph. Haldane said that Roy deserved 95 per cent of the credit, but would never get it. 'Every effort will be made here to crab his work. He has not got a PhD or even a first-class MSc. So either the research is no good or I did it.'

Beyond the prestige of quoting established names lies the incentive to cheat - academics are already promising that 'if you cite my research I'll cite yours' - and beyond that lies sheer luck. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who glories in the title of professor in the sciences of uncertainty, points out that what leads to one academic being cited rather than another can be a simple fluke. But as soon as he or she is cited in one paper, the odds increase that he or she will be cited in another.

The Matthew effect does not only work in academia. Of the thousands of first novels each year, the few that are reviewed make the literary pages because the author is already well known in another field (prestige), the author is a friend of the literary editor (cheating) or the author's book was picked at random from a pile on a slow week (luck).

City firms give lavish bonuses because they don't want to lose staff to rivals (prestige), because they dealt on insider information (cheating) or because they pulled out of the sub-prime market just in time (luck).

You only have to read the financial press to know that the beneficiaries of the property crash won't be first-time buyers - they are struggling to get mortgages because of the credit crunch. The winners will be the already rich sitting on piles of cash who will snap up assets when their prices hit the floor.

Labour should not be happy with helping those that hath. If it wants to reform education, it should begin by noticing that working-class students are dropping out and middle-class students are paying fees for substandard courses, because the first concern of the universities isn't teaching. Ministers would do better to redirect public money to make sure that it is.

Maths? I breakfasted on quadratic equations, but it was a waste of timeChampioning a difficult discipline of no use merely panders to the political co

Maths? I breakfasted on quadratic equations, but it was a waste of timeChampioning a difficult discipline of no use merely panders to the political correctness of the conservative classes
All comments (53)
Simon Jenkins The Guardian, Friday June 6 2008 Article historyYou don't have to be innumerate to be a mathematician, but it could help. Elders of the tribe have produced a report for the thinktank Reform which calculates that Britain has "lost half a million" mathematicians since 1990 at a cost to the economy of a "staggering £9bn". Needless to say, the government should act.

How £9bn? The boffins have added up the average "market premium" of the 430,000 fewer A-level maths students who have ceased studying the subject over the period and declared that total "lost" to the national product. This is irrespective of what the bright sparks might otherwise have earned, or whether a flooding of the market with mathematicians might have depressed the so-called premium.

Even if the maths is robust, the economics is dreadful. It looks as if the authors thought of a figure big enough to win some headlines and get the excitable Tory schools spokesman, Michael Gove, to demand that the government do something. Both succeeded.

My campaign for curricular updating is getting nowhere. Were the Reform report not devoted to the Holy Mother Church of maths and science, some mathematician would have dismissed it as nonsense. But nonsense in the service of professional self-aggrandisement is what ethicists call "good cause corruption". Maths and science self-justify as economically worthwhile in a way that law or economics or management studies do not dare. They must fight their corner in the marketplace.

Championing the report in these pages on Tuesday, the Oxford maths professor, Marcus du Sautoy, claimed that examiners were now too frantic to make maths seem relevant to young people's working lives. The subject had been "emasculated by a move away from rigour and logic" in pursuit of the fool's gold of "relevance". This had "ended up just making it boring".

I studied advanced maths to 16. I loved wandering in its virtual world of trigonometry and logarithms, primes and surds. I breakfasted on quadratic equations, lunched on differential calculus and strolled, arm in arm, with Ronald Searle's square on the hypotenuse.

It was a waste of time. I dedicated my next two years to Latin and Greek, which proved to be more useful (just). Most teenagers clearly feel the same. They must grapple with difficult techniques and concepts which hardly any of them will ever use, assuming they can understand or remember them.

In the age of computers, maths beyond simple and applied arithmetic is needed only by specialists. Ramming it down pupils' throats in case they may one day need it is like making us all know how to recalibrate a carburettor on the offchance that we might become racing drivers. Maths is a "skill to a purpose", and we would should ponder the purpose before overselling the skill.

An academic subject in decline always grasps at one last straw, that it "trains the mind". In his essay on Arnold of Rugby, Lytton Strachey pointed out that this argument kept Victorian education immured in the middle ages, teaching classical languages while Germany and America were forging ahead with technology. Why irrelevance to life should hold the key to mental callisthenics is never explained, let alone proved. It is on a par with such maxims as "The shortest route to a boy's brain is through the seat of his pants". The old guard say that a dose of algebra and Latin verbs "never did me any harm", but the modern student is rightly more demanding.

When Kenneth Baker invented the national curriculum in 1987, it never occurred to him to question its content. Science and maths lobbied hard and captured the core, alongside only English. Not just history and geography, but economics, health, psychology, citizenship, politics and law - with far better claims to vocational utility - were elbowed aside. Millions of pounds were and still are devoted to teaching maths to reluctant pupils who know that they will never see or hear of it again. Numbers studying maths and science since 1987 have plummeted. Baker's attempt at centralist compulsion was a failure.

The claim that "Britain needs maths" is shaky. In the 60s and 70s, half of Europe's output of mathematicians and scientists was from the Soviet Union. There was a huge "maths premium", but no impact on national prosperity. The Soviets forgot to teach economics, let alone politics, law or the liberal arts. I could as well reply to Reform that more maths at the expense of humanities would spell economic disaster.

In the two decades during which British pupils have fled from maths towards social science and the humanities, the economy has boomed. It has done so on the strength of finance, marketing and design, on service activities that have little mathematical content. If the market is any guide, Britain "needs" more financiers, consultants, marketers, publicists and lawyers. Besides, maths as a discipline is now global rather than chauvinistic. Maths research is online; the HeyMath! website is a universal teacher.

The two best books on this topic are Innumeracy, by the American John Allen Paulos, and A Mathematician's Apology, by former Cambridge professor GH Hardy. The first describes all the maths a person needs to know, mostly simple concepts applied to daily life, to proportion, risk and probability. Paulos makes the point that a nation may be expert at algebra yet have no sense of statistical probability, to the profit of its insurance industry and the detriment of its public life.

To Hardy, maths was a sublimely cerebral activity. "The mathematics that can be used for ordinary purposes by ordinary men is negligible," he wrote. The glory of maths was aesthetic, "justified as art if it can be justified at all". The practitioner is pursuing "a harmless and innocent occupation", an intellectual hobby. What stimulates today's students is the realm of the creative imagination and the working of the marketplace. This spectrum, from English and drama to business and finance, seems benign both to individuals and to the economy. Students are not stupid. They know where money is to be made, which is why they flock to medicine among the sciences.

Maths replies that these young people are just taking easy options. But there is no virtue in a difficult discipline whose victims regard it as of no use. Students are declining to specialise in maths not because it is difficult but because they cannot see the point.

Curricular archaism is the political correctness of the conservative classes. To pass muster, a subject must help the economy or, if not, be deliberately irrelevant, a mind trainer. It must have a long academic tradition. It must be obscure. Above all, it must not be novel or popular with students.

Yet there is no reason why a new subject cannot be made challenging. That is the job of education. Besides, young people are voting with their feet. They want the humanities and social sciences that are clamouring for a place on the curriculum, and they will get them. The old guard must make way.

The Mortgage

 

For his birthday a little boy asked for a 10-speed bike.

'Son, we'd give you one,' the father said,

'but the mortgage on this house is $280,000,
and your mother just lost her job.  There's no way we
can afford it in our current situation.'

The next day the father saw the little boy heading out the front
door with a suitcase. So he asked, 'Son, where are
you going?  ''Well,' the boy said, 'I was walking past
your room last night and heard you telling mom aloud that you
were pulling out. Then I heard mom scream asking you

to wait because she was coming too.  And I'll be damned if
I'm staying here by myself with a $280,000 mortgage and no bike!'

---

Miss your Messenger buddies when on-the-go? Get Messenger on your Mobile!

The right time for women

The right time for women to quit smoking
When it comes to giving up smoking, pick the start date carefully. At certain times in your menstrual cycle, you are twice as likely to succeed at kicking the habit. And the same applies to starting a diet, finding a new boyfriend or going for a job interview


Leah Hardy
In fact, giving up smoking is far from the only thing affected by the menstrual cycle — the ebb and flow of hormones have a powerful impact on nearly all aspects of your life. So, make the time of the month work for you.


The best time to give up drink and drugs Scientists have discovered powerful links between cravings and hormones. Recently, researchers at the University of Minnesota found that women who gave up smoking in the follicular part of their cycle (from the start of their period until ovulation on about day 14) were half as likely to remain smoke-free as those who gave up in the luteal phase (after ovulation, but before the start of the next period). Only two in 10 of the women who gave up in the earlier phase managed to abstain; however, in the second group, four in 10 were successful. Why? It seems the high levels of progesterone found in the luteal phase can help to move nicotine out of the system more quickly, thus reducing withdrawal symptoms. Studies also show women are more easily tempted to smoke by seeing other people smoking when oestrogen levels are high, as in the follicular phase.


Don’t be tempted to experiment with drugs such as cocaine in the first half of your cycle, either. Large amounts of oestrogen also boost levels of the pleasure hormone dopamine and reduce the amount of mucus in your nose, ensuring you will get more of a hit from the drug, thus increasing the risk of addiction. And if you want to stay sober, the hormone allopregnanolone is your friend. This also peaks in the phase before ovulation, and high doses reduce your desire to drink.




The best time to hit the gym Want to show off your stretchy yoga moves in class? Shift your mat to the front just before your period, as this is when you are most flexible. A hormone called relaxin peaks at this time, softening your ligaments. But don’t go mad — that extra flexibility may result in injury. A study at the Portland Hospital in London found that women were at the greatest risk of damaging their ligaments at the end of their cycle, but were also in danger of pulling muscles and ligaments halfway through the cycle, as levels of the strength-giving hormone oestrogen drop suddenly after ovulation.


For aerobic exercise, pick days 15-22, when rising progesterone will make working out feel easier, and you will burn up to 30% more fat, according to a study published in Australasian Science magazine. If you prefer a weights-based workout, do it in the first half of your cycle, as high oestrogen levels will make you stronger. And if you want to run a marathon, the best days are just before ovulation (days 9-12) and just after (days 17-20).


The best time to meet a man Looking for romance? Then schedule your social life for the week around ovulation, when you will not only appear more attractive to men, but, if you lay off the deodorant, even smell irresistible. A study published in the journal Ethology asked men to sniff the armpit odour of women at different stages of their cycle. The result? The armpit odour of women who were between the end of their period and ovulation — when they are most fertile — was considered the most attractive and least intense.

This surge in attractiveness is matched by a leap in libido around day 13, when rocketing oestrogen and testosterone make a woman feel, dress and even walk (yes, really) more sexily, as nature conspires to make you pregnant. However, a study at the University of St Andrews says the surge in attractiveness around ovulation is masked in women who wear too much make-up. So, the moral is, get out there, but leave the slap and antiperspirant alone.


The best time to have a painful experience Putting off going to the dentist because of the painful needle? Dreading booking that Brazilian wax? Then schedule both for bang in the middle of your cycle. At ovulation, you have a higher pain threshold than at other times, due to the large amounts of oestrogen in your system.


If your idea of agony is applying for a new job, then try to avoid an interview in the days before your period if you don’t want to seem nervous or flustered. According to Dr Ann Rasmusson, a neuroendocrinologist at Yale University in America, this is when you are most likely to be affected by stress. “Levels of progesterone and other related neurosteroids drop dramatically at this time,” she says.


The best time to start a diet According to a team of South African researchers, your food intake can vary by a staggering 2,500 calories a day, depending on your hormones levels. And when it comes to starting a diet, scientists suggest you will be less hungry when your period begins. A study by researchers at Tufts University, Massachusetts, indicates that women eat 12% less per day at the start of their cycle because their levels of oestrogen are lower.


After ovulation, your appetite is naturally boosted by hormones, so if you do happen to be pregnant, you will want to eat enough for two. However, your metabolism and urge to exercise are higher after ovulation, too, so by heading to the gym, you might be able to work off those extra calories.


In a paper published last year in the International Journal of Obesity, researchers say, perhaps unsurprisingly, that women tend to experience cravings for sugary and high-carbohydrate foods just before their period, and they also have the most trouble controlling their hunger at this time.


The scientists agree that starting a diet after day one of your period could be helpful, and also suggest increasing calorie intake by about 100-200 calories when you are premenstrual, so you don’t get so desperate that you find yourself on the phone to Pizza Hut. Their suggestion for how to consume those extra calories? Best-quality dark chocolate. These are the kind of scientists we like.


Understanding your cycle

The average woman’s natural menstrual cycle takes about 28 days, though this can vary by about five days either way. Menstruation normally starts about 14 days after ovulation. The cycle is divided into phases. The first day of a period is day one, and the start of the follicular phase, when an egg starts to ripen in the ovaries. The next stage is ovulation (about day 14), when the egg is released to be fertilised (or not). After ovulation comes the luteal phase, which lasts until the start of the next period.


Straight after a period, levels of the hormones oestrogen and progesterone are relatively low. Oestrogen levels rise to a peak at ovulation, then drop. Progesterone levels rise after ovulation and peak halfway through the luteal phase (about day 21), then fall dramatically just before the start of menstruation.