It's true that stress can cause infertility, but it's not the only cause and it may not be your cause, and you certainly don't need to feel guilty about it (raising your stress hormones even more). So let's do away with the guilt and blame and explore why stress affects fertility and what you can do about it.
Chronically-elevated stress hormones--epinephrine, cortisol, endorphins and prolactin--can cause menstrual irregularity, interfere with ovulation, and can prevent your eggs from maturing. They can also cause body-wide symptoms that will upset your overall health and impair fertility indirectly, for example, cortisol can raise blood sugar and blood pressure.
But we're not talking about a single stressful day at the office. The kind of stress that can affect your fertility is more of an ongoing feeling of stress and tension, day in and day out. So what to do?
- Meditate. Meditation is the most solidly researched stress-reducing activity. If you have chronic stress, those hormones that are supposed to be a temporary response to a perceived threat, stick around for the long haul. Meditation triggers the relaxation response, effectively turning off the stress response and normalizing stress hormones. There are many forms of meditation, but their goals are similar--to focus your mind on internal sensations and actions like breathing, while keeping out thoughts that are distracting. To learn to meditate, visit www.learningmeditation.com or www.meditationcenter.com or any number of websites out there.
- Do Yoga. There are many types, but I recommend hatha yoga, a relaxing form of synchronized movement and breathing that doesn't focus on meditation, yet achieves similar results. Studies show that a 45-minute session twice a week can reduce the effects of stress and promote hormone balance.
- Mini-Meditate. This won't have the same benefits as a half-hour meditation session, but it can calm you down and help your muscles relax when you're feeling particularly stressed. Here's one take on mini-meditating.
For more ways to reduce stress (including improving sleep), see my book, Perfect Hormone Balance for Fertility.
Laurie
Tarkan is the co-author of Perfect Hormone Balance for Fertility
and Perfect Hormone Balance for
Pregnancy. She writes for the New York Times and national magazines and is
also the author of My Mother's Breast: Daughters Face Their Mothers' Cancer.
Check out Laurie's recent post on the Huffington Post.
Toxic Wombs
and infertility related articles:
Lowering Odds of Multiple Births
and
Are Men Overlooked at Fertility Centers
as well as her co-author, Dr. Robert Greene's bulletin board on www.haveababy.com
[photo credit: Getty Images]
