Menstruation cycles are a wild ride, aren’t they? One day you’re bounding around loving life and feeling like a little ray of sunshine, the next you’re snapping at your partner for hogging the bathroom and raging out loud at the kettle for taking too long to boil.

While in the midst of PMS it might seem like there are no upsides to this monthly cycle, it turns out ovulation is in fact a great time when it comes to your creativity, with a recent study showing that women had their most original ideas during this stage of the month.

The study, published in Frontiers In Psychology, involved 72 women completing various tasks, such as one in which the women were asked to list as many alternative uses as possible for an everyday object. In another task, the participants were shown three words and asked to come up with a fourth word related to all of them. Their ideas were then scored by four trained, independent raters.

The results showed that women’s ideas showed the highest originality during the ovulatory phase, suggesting this is when we’re at our most creative.

The authors of the study, Professor Aleksandra Szymkow and Katarzyna Galasinska, said that the research suggests creativity may be a ‘mental ornament’ in women – a sexually selected trait that is enhanced during the fertility peak, just like our pheromones and desire to be social.

‘Creativity may be associated with mating, helping women to attract potential mates,” Galasinska said. ‘Other studies showed that both sexes value creativity in a potential partner and I showed that it can be a sort of a tactic. Specifically, being original may be functional in this context.’

We know when to schedule our next brainstorming meeting for then!

Images: Getty