Are your stress levels decreasing your chances of conception? The evidence based answer.
What is stress?
Stress is simply a biological response to a threat, an increased demand or a danger. Our body, sensing danger, switches to our sympathetic nervous system, aka our ‘fight or flight’ mode.
When operating in our ‘fight or flight’ mode, our body releases a flood of hormones, including cortisol and corticotropin-releasing hormone aka CRH. These two hormones, along with a host of others, act together to get our body to run from the stressor, or address it. We see physiological responses like:
Increased heart rate
Increased breathing rate
Dilated pupils
Diversion of blood flow to our muscles
When we have dealt with the stressor, the parachute opens up so to speak, and everything slows back down as our body moves back into the parasympathetic nervous system - also referred to our ‘rest, digest and nest’ system. This mode is all about recovery and energy conservation.
It’s an incredible system when the two are functioning well. However, our ‘fight or flight’ mode was always only supposed to be short term, so the health problems we see associated with stress, are due to long term stress where the body doesn’t get the chance to shift back into the rest, digest and nest system.
What causes stress?
Over-exercise: when we exercise we temporarily shift into the fight of flight mode. When done right, regular exercise actually has a stress buffering effect, meaning that the body doesn’t respond in such a heightened way to stressors. However, over exercising means we don’t have enough time between sessions to shift back into recovery mode and we have an increase in cortisol, leaving us stuck in our fight or flight mode.
Lack of sleep: 8 hours or more! Less than this and our body switches into our ‘fight or flight’ mode, hypothetically to create an alertness we are lacking from fatigue.
Emotional: We simply cannot seperate the mind from the body. Overthinking, worrying, working hard, being alive in 2020… all have the same impact as physical stressors on the body.
What is the impact on the reproductive system?
Several hypothesis have emerged over years of observing and researching reproductive health which suggest an ‘adaptive suppression’ - meaning that animals, people included, have adapted to a point that reproduction is suppressed in times of hardship, to support survival of the offspring.
Is that true? Does stress impact chance of conception?
Delaying ovulation: The biological impact of the hormones released when we are in the ‘fight or flight’ do suppress LH. This has the impact of delaying ovulation, or in some cases, switching ovulation off. When ovulation becomes irregular and cycles become longer identifying the fertile days becomes tricky. Longer cycles and more time between ovulation also obviously means fewer opportunity to try conceive.
Blood flow: The blood flow to the reproductive system is impacted by the shift between the ‘fight or flight’ and ‘rest, digest and nest’ modes. Essentially, when we are under stress and in our ‘fight or flight’ mode, blood is diverted away from the reproductive system to the muscles. Blood flow is important - blood flow transports nutrients and hormones necessary for maturation of the the follicles and therefore, the eggs.
What about the research?
Investigating stress and fertility is hard, given there are so many variables in playing a role, however two recent studies may shed a little light;
Study one:
In 2016 researchers looked at 400 women who were trying to conceive, asking them to report their daily stress on a level of 1-4. Importantly, these researchers adjusted for lifestyle factors.
They found that women who reported high levels of stress in the first half of the cycle had a significantly lower chance of pregnancy. Women who reported high levels of stress after ovulation didn’t have these same negative impact on their chance of conception.
Are you in the two-week-wait? This research would suggest if you’re stressing about stress, you don’t need to. It appears that stress does have a negative impact on conception, but more likely in the pre implantation phase.
Study Two:
Research from 2018 looked at 4,769 couples and found that stress was significantly associated with a reduction in pregnancy, however importantly, these researchers took a different approach in regard to adjusting for lifestyle factors. Rather than trying to adjust for them (essentially cancelling them out) , this study looked at what lifestyle factors were associated with both groups.
They found women with higher stress and lower chance of pregnancy were more likely to be smokers, drink alcohol and caffeine, sleep less and have an irregular cycle.
Conversely, the women with low stress and a higher chance of conception were more likely to take their supplements and multivitamins, have more sleep, have regular sex, and have a regular cycle.
This begs the question: Is stress impacting chance of conception, or are the lifestyle factors associated with stress impacting chance of conception? Furthermore, why are those lifestyle factors associated with stress? Could these be coping mechanisms?
This said, are our stress coping mechanisms the bigger issue?
The takeaway:
Perhaps stress plays a role in fertility challenges, but it appears unlikely to be the major player that so many women believe it is. Monitoring the cycle may become harder, but certainly not important. The key then, is limiting stress where you can, avoiding stress as much as possible in the first half of the cycle and creating an outlet for stress that isn’t detrimental to fertility.
Need more help with your mental space? I wrote this article on the benefits of self compassion.
Love Jenna
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