Emotional & Mental Wellness Tips for Your Fertility Journey
Posted on December 29th, 2022
No matter where you are on your fertility journey, your overall wellness is of utmost importance. To ensure you are emotionally and mentally prepared for your fertility treatments, there are certain measures that may help to enhance your mental and emotional health.
Ways To Improve Emotional and Mental Health During Fertility Treatment
Although fertility care can be an exciting chapter in your life, it’s not uncommon to experience challenging emotions during the process. Emotions like stress can not only make you feel bad mentally, but they can also take a toll on you physically, or potentially make it more difficult to conceive. To help make the journey easier, you may find these self-care tips to be beneficial, both now and in the years to come.
Benefits of Mind-Body Practices for Fertility
Engaging in activities involving mind-body medicine, which supports the mental and physical health connection, may improve quality of life, pregnancy rates, and emotional well-being, while reducing stress levels. These practices may benefit relaxation and significantly reduce anxiety scores in women undergoing fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), and include:
- Acupuncture, a form of traditional Chinese medicine, involves stimulating particular points in the body to balance energy. Thought to improve health and well-being, acupuncture may benefit fertility by inducing deep relaxation and emotional release.
- Meditation may benefit relaxation by gently helping the mind to enter a calmer, more relaxed, focused state of being. You may also want to try mindfulness, which involves paying attention to the present moment in a nonjudgmental way. This therapeutic tool helps women and couples cope with the stress of infertility or fertility treatments.
- Yoga has long been employed for healing purposes, blending physical postures and breathing exercises to create a meditative, relaxing experience. Popular for fertility, yoga has been found to reduce anxiety and depression and boost fertility-related quality of life. Plus, the gentle exercise that yoga provides can also help support your fertility journey from a physical standpoint.
Being Creative May Help to Improve Infertility
Mind-body practices incorporating creative efforts can help with your fertility issues. For instance, expressive writing, such as journaling or blogging exercises, may lower depression rates associated with IVF or other treatments. Not only do they help you express and process difficult emotions, but they may help you connect with others experiencing infertility.
You may also find that engaging in creative works – such as art, music, dance, or acting – is therapeutic and may help you express and process emotions. Art therapies may help infertile women cope better with stress, anxiety, and hopelessness.
Consider Therapy for Your Fertility Concerns
Psychological intervention may benefit fertility and improve pregnancy likelihood. In fact, for egg donation, many clinics and agencies require donors and recipients to first undergo a psychological consultation.
With cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a treatment approach emphasizing the role of thinking, you replace negative or unhelpful thought and behavior patterns, such as anxiety due to infertility, with more positive, realistic ones. Among CBT’s proposed benefits are improved pregnancy rates and reduced depression and anxiety rates.
Infertility may lead to feelings of isolation, which can increase hopelessness and depression. You may find benefits with group therapy, in which individuals or couples with similar problems meet to discuss their lives and concerns, under a certified counselor’s guidance. RESOLVE, the National Infertility Awareness Association, offers a list of nationwide infertility support groups.
Feed Your Mental & Emotional Wellness
Because our bodies are deeply connected to our minds, nurturing your physical health can significantly help your mental and emotional well-being and vice versa. When it comes to infertility and fertility care, there are many ways to feed your body that can simultaneously greatly improve your outlook and reduce stress. In addition to fertility-forward diets and nutrition, you can also consider including supplementation to support your physical, mental, and emotional health. There are also supplement blends and kits that are specifically formulated to help support reproductive health and fertility. One such brand is Nutrabloom, which offers whole food-based vitamins and nutritional supplements that can help aid conception. Nutrabloom provides various supplemental kits for male fertility, polycystic ovarian syndrome care, ovarian support, and more.
Regardless of your fertility path, you need to continually tend to your emotional and mental health. Should you have any If you have questions or concerns, contact Aspire Fertility for an appointment.
