Guest blog by Karen Braford.
You’ve always had a plan for your life. Finish college, meet the love of your life, have a fairy-tale wedding and start a family.
For some couples, starting a family is quite easy, however, others find that their trying to conceive (TTC) journey takes a little bit longer. This isn’t always easy and it can be more than a little stressful—and we all know that stress doesn’t help when TTC!
If you’re about to embark on a TTC journey and feeling the pressure, now is the time to take a step back. Use these eight creative ways to reduce stress and give your body the best chance.
- Start With The Basics
Give yourself the absolute best odds and go to your OB first for a preconception check-up. The sooner that you do this, the better, because you don’t want to leave your conception journey too late.
Learn the fundamentals of ovulation and conception and become familiar with your menstrual cycle so that you can pinpoint your most fertile days. This will assist you with properly timing intercourse and gives you a sense of control over the conception process.
Read up on ways to get pregnant faster and utilize tools that can assist with taking some of the guesswork out of the whole process. An ovulation predictor kit or fertility chart is incredibly useful in tracking your cycle, and with femtech on the rise, there are numerous fertility apps you can use too.
- Swap Stress For Scribbling
Writing down your thoughts in a journal is proven to assist in relieving stress. However, when you’re writing in your journal don’t just give an account of your day. The process is all about getting the complex and negative thoughts off your chest and onto paper (or on your computer):
- Are you secretly worried that you could be infertile?
- Are you worried that your partner may be sterile?
- Do you think that your younger sister may become a mother before you do?
Write it all down. Journaling helps you let it all out, preventing you from “ruminating—in other words running negative thoughts over and over in your head—which has been shown to contribute to depression and anxiety.
- Seek Out The Support Of Others TTC
If you get a negative pregnancy test result and your partner nods and says, “That’s OK, we’ll just try again next month,” and goes back to watching TV does that mean they don’t care? Absolutely not!
Just because they’re not as clearly upset as you don’t mean they don’t understand what you’re feeling and empathize with you. Your partner is just dealing with it in a different way.
Find a support group of other women who are going through the same process. They will probably be feeling the same things and articulating them in a similar way to you. Having another confidant can help take some of the pressure off your relationship and let you enjoy the act of trying to conceive rather than simply focusing on the end goal and feeling stressed.
- Focus on Fun
Keep on doing the things you used to do. Become involved in something that makes you feel as if you are contributing and gets your mind off trying to fall pregnant (e.g., work, volunteering). Get outdoors and engage in activities that you enjoy that are enjoyable and soothing.
The stress of infertility can make you so focused on getting pregnant that you forget what you used to do for fun. List all the things you enjoy (or used to enjoy) doing. If you can’t think of anything, think back to what made you happy as a child.
If you’re having a bit of trouble remembering, phone a friend or have your partner assist you. Ask them clearly what they remember doing together with you that made you smile. Put your list where you’ll see it every single day. When you’re feeling down, check your list and take action by selecting something from it. It may feel like a chore at first, but you’ll soon start to relax and enjoy the time spent doing something different.
- Exercise And Eat Right
Physical activity both reduces stress and enhances fertility. However low key exercise is what you need to stick to. Working out at a moderate pace, between one and five hours a week doing activities such as walking, raises the odds of conception. However, women who work out more vigorously are less likely to fall pregnant.
What you eat is very important now too. When you’re stressed, it’s very tempting to load up on processed and sugary foods. However, women who follow a Mediterranean-style diet that is rich in whole grains, omega-3 fatty acids, fish, and soy are far more likely to conceive as opposed to those who eat a high-fat, heavily processed diet.
- Swap Yes For No
Setting boundaries with the people in your life may be incredibly useful in lowering stress, and guiding you in what you choose to do, see, and speak about. In addition, boundaries can help to prevent you from getting triggered into a spiral of negativity.
You have to have clarity with yourself first and foremost. Establishing and owning your boundaries will assist you with feeling sovereignty over your body, mind, and spirit. Second, “no” is a complete sentence. While there will be some instances of how you may explain your boundaries to someone else, keep in mind that these are just that—examples. At the end of the day, if something or someone breaches your boundaries, “No” is a complete sentence. You never have to explain yourself when something is making you feel unsafe, unworthy, stressed, or not cared for.
While questions or comments could be well-intentioned, these can still feel quite insensitive and incite negative feelings. It’s quite OK to set boundaries with the important people in your life about what they may ask you or what you may be willing to talk about when it comes to your fertility. If you don’t feel very comfortable doing this yourself, ask your partner to do it for you.
Your mental and emotional well-being have to be conserved as much as possible during this strenuous journey and you mustn’t feel guilty about the need to do so.
- Step Away From Information Overload
With any type of anxiety, people frequently tend to engage in obsessive checking and support-seeking behaviors. There are a lot of motives for pregnant women looking for information from pregnancy message boards as opposed to from health-care professionals, yet other “static” pregnancy or–alternatively–parenting websites, books, and even from the actual experience of friends and family members.
Looking up a lot of information about pregnancy online can become a kind of compulsive behavior. Often, you’ll find useful information. At other times, it will make you more anxious or confused. If reading information on the internet feels a bit obsessive, it’s probably making you far more anxious overall.
Try to discover the sweet spot for you. If it seems as if reading about trying to conceive or pregnancy is making you more anxious, take a break from it. If it’s really not a problem for you, then there is absolutely no need to cease doing it.
- Get Outdoors And Play
Spending time outdoors in the fresh air is linked to lower rates of depression and anxiety. This means that you need to plan some enjoyable activities for you and your partner to do together:
- Enjoy a picnic
- Go for a leisurely walk
- Take a dip in the pool
If you need a little more than this, you can always find interesting things to do on days out and plan a mini-adventure for you both. Not only will you get some fresh air and well-deserved vitamin D, but spending time outdoors is also a great way to bond with each other without focusing on your fertility struggles.
There are so many other ways to relax that you can use in your own TTC journey but we’ve just listed the ones we’ve found most successful. As we’ve said before, your journey will bring up a lot of emotions, both positive and negative. The worst thing that you can do is to keep them bottled up because as the pressure in you mounts you are far more likely to explode–think about the principles that make a volcano erupt.
So, before anything like this happens to you, make sure that you have an outlet for your emotions. Ensure that you express them in a positive and productive manner because if you start screaming and shouting, you’ll end up creating a very negative atmosphere.
Always involve your partner at every step along the way. They are there to support you and WANT to support you, so let them! If you don’t feel that they’re supporting you in the way that you want to be supported, tell them. They will listen and make you feel heard and appreciated. It’s a journey for you both but you’re the one who’s doing the heavy lifting!
Karen Braford is a custom home security expert at Fortified Estate with a passion for the written word. When she’s not designing plans or writing, you can find her playing puzzle games or challenging herself at an Escape Room.
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