How Trauma and Stress Affect Fertility
Many of us know that decreasing stress can help us to conceive yet we’re unsure what that means. Cut back hours at work? Take a bubble bath? In reality, we all have stressors that affect our lives on a daily basis. In fact, a little stress can even be a good thing. For the most part, we know how to manage those stressors and don’t really need to cut them down unless we really feel ourselves struggling under our schedules.
The type of stress that affects fertility the most is the type you don’t see. The trauma from childhood, or a scary previous birth experience can hold us back from getting pregnant. Or maybe it’s a deeply rooted feeling of inadequacy holding us back. These experiences cause us to live perpetually in a state of fight or flight, our bodies charged with stress hormones, and “inessential” functions like baby making are shut down. Whatever it is, we need to find a way to relieve that deep stress.
I am not even going to begin to present myself as an expert on trauma. Instead, I’m going to share with you some things I’ve learned. I also highly recommend reading the book “The Body Keep the Score” if you’re needing a deep understanding of how trauma affects on the body. Just like any treatment, these need to be practiced regularly and with intention to be effective.
Here are some of the most basic tips I have learned:
Start a mindfulness practice. Just 10 minutes of mindfulness meditation today can help relax the vagus nerve and shut off the fight or flight response.
Hypnotherapy has been highly recommended as a way of confronting traumas and accessing major stressors we may not even know are there.
As trauma is stored in the body, massage can be an amazing tool for reaching in and releasing that stores trauma in the tissues.
Yoga is another body-mind tool that has been proven to work in helping people cope with traumas of many varieties (see the book above). I am a living testament to this practice.
