Shopping Sprees: A natural occurence

A LOT of women love to shop, and buy things -- expensive things. But really it's not our fault! It's completely natural I swear. Of course like our bad mood swings, and our thirst for chocolate and cheese (not together), it's all linked to our monthly cycle. And now we can all blame a trip down Newbury Street, maxed credit cards in hand, on our bodies. At least that's what a new study coming out in Britain is saying anyway.

As women we all know that shopping makes us feel good. At least it does when we find the miraculous pair of jeans that fit us like a glove and make us look skinnier than we are, not so much when we try on 20 pairs of jeans and all we wind up feeling like are stuffed sausage links. When everything goes right, shopping is a great release and this is what psychologists believe causes us to shop when we're PMSing -- to deal with all the negative, I'm-gonna-kill-anyone-who-looks-at-me-badly emotions that are created from our hormones shifting. Shopping becomes our great drug.

According to the BBC, Professor Karen Pine of the University of Hertfordshire asked 443 women on their spending habits. Pine found that almost two-thirds of these women bought stuff on impulse, and paid too much for the impulse goods, while they were PMSing. She will present her work to a British Psychological Society meeting in Brighton later this week.

The BBC quotes the good professor as saying: "The spending behaviour tends to be a reaction to intense emotions. They are feeling stressed or depressed and are more likely to go shopping to cheer themselves up and using it to regulate their emotions."

Read the BBC's interview and full article here.