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The longer you are on your family building journey, the more likely you are to be in survival mode, trying to limit the problems that may come your way. In the beginning, you may have had an expansion mindset, hopeful that treatment will work and excited for the prospect of raising children with family or friends. Although fertility treatment is typically successful, the process can be difficult emotionally, physically and financially, and sometimes it takes longer than expected. This experience can be a shock to your system.
You may be thinking, “this doesn’t make sense, I am healthy, do the right things and have spent my entire adult life trying not to get pregnant. It simply does not add up.” After all, when you study, you often improve your grades, when you work hard, you have a better chance of getting a raise.
Up until this moment, many people experiencing infertility may have seen life through the lens of, you do the right things and life works out. As we age, we see bad things happen to good people. We witness unfairness in life and slowly begin to adjust to a new view of the world. But when you are young, and starting your family building journey, often this realization has not yet set in and you may be finding yourself not only frustrated and sad, but shocked.
This combination of feelings, the intrusion on your life and schedule, the hormones and the lack of control over the process and the outcome can cause you to feel anxious or depressed. In this state, many shift into survival mode. When we are in survival mode, our bodies hyperfocus on the problem. That may have worked on a final exam, but it can make matters worse on your family building journey.
Many obsess about treatment options, spend hours scouring the internet, talk and think about treatment constantly and sometimes even quit their jobs so they can “focus on it more”. But unlike that exam, focusing on it more, won’t improve your chances, it will just raise your cortisol and make it harder to think clearly about your options, engage fully in work and personal relationships and care for your health.
This experience is common, so it is important to know that it is unlikely that you will feel comfortable not knowing how your journey will end, with the injections, the costs and everything related to this very difficult process. However, you can mitigate the long list of items that can cause stress with some efforts to calm your nervous system and expand your feelings of productivity.
It is not easy, as many may suggest, “to just relax”, “take a vacation” or “stop thinking about it” so efforts to meditate and calm your mind shouldn’t be discarded but they may be only minimally helpful. Counseling with a seasoned professional who understands your journey, journaling, moving your body and minimizing excess stress in your life can help, but feeling more of a sense of control can also be extremely helpful. Quitting your job to “focus on it more” may leave you feeling like you are watching grass grow.
Instead, are there classes you can take, projects you can start and new things you can learn that could bring you a bit of joy? Perhaps you, or you and your partner, would like to take a cooking class, learn knitting, pottery or a new language. Maybe you would like to hike every trail within 50 miles over the next two months or redecorate your living room? Find things that are not work related, this way the activity will not only provide a good distraction but will also be pleasurable. You may feel that there is no use, that it is impossible to distract yourself from your fertility treatment, but if the activity distracts you thirty percent of the time, that’s better than none.
Most of all, these activities will give you a sense of productivity. You will see the benefits for your efforts and that can be enormously helpful. You may feel that painting your bedroom is not important compared to family building. While this is true, your brain doesn’t know that. Your brain sees that something incredibly important to you is not working, and it wants to go into overdrive to fix it. Putting that energy somewhere else, and feeling a sense of satisfaction when it is completed, will tell your brain that you do have some control in your life. It won’t take away the sadness the infertility has caused, but it can help stabilize your system because now your body feels less out of control.
And there is one more added benefit to this strategy. Time will move more quickly. While no one wants to wish any moment of their life away, it would be preferable to get to the finish line faster, wouldn’t it?
Treatment won’t last forever but parenthood will. Take care of yourself now, your future family will thank you.
