Preparing for IVF - How to Mentally Prepare for IVF?
Mentally Preparing for IVF - Is Your Mind an Ally or Enemy?
It’s an important question but few women experiencing infertility have considered the huge influence your mind and brain have on your reproductive system. Most people have no idea what’s happening ‘upstairs’. It’s not something you learn in school unless you’re a mental health professional. You probably know more about how your smart phone works than how your brain works. But until you get curious about what your mind is doing when you’re not looking (when you’re on auto-pilot) you can’t change how you experience infertility. You’re at the mercy of your monkey mind and the unseen damage it causes every day. So what can you do to prepare for IVF at home?
How to Prepare for IVF at Home?
Your brain runs every system in your body - and what your brain is doing on a day to day basis is either helping you get closer to your dream of starting a family - or taking you further away from it. It makes sense to understand more about how it works - and how you can make it work for you. Infertility self-care starts in the mind - not a massage.
As you grew up the way you were cared for, culture etc influenced the way you experienced the world and how you saw yourself in the world. Many of us learned coping mechanisms that evolved from our cave dwelling days - they have been helpful at one point but often times some of coping mechanisms followed us into adult life and made this journey a lot more difficult than it already is. Basically your brain picked up some bad habits along the way so now we need to ‘upgrade’ those outdated and harmful habits of thought. We do this by ‘training’ the brain with specific exercises in the same way you train a muscle at the gym. Intentional ‘training’ of the brain by using mindfulness practices and compassion exercises physically changes your brain in ways that are supportive of a healthier mind and body. These practices will help you in the process of preparation for IVF and make this journey a whole lot more tolerable - and it only takes a few minutes and you won’t break a sweat.
Awareness as a part of the Mental IVF Preparation
It’s about awareness. It’s about noticing. You start to see how you can easily get hooked into the same painful thoughts you’ve been replaying regularly while you try to conceive. You may not even realize how damaging those thoughts about your ability to conceive are.
Those thoughts and the accompanying difficult emotions are not benign.
We don’t really tend to pay any attention to the inner workings of our mind. It’s like the adage ‘fish can’t see water’. When you’re used to being in a negative mindset that becomes the new normal for you. You try to put on a happy face, you try to feel optimistic but it’s short lived as your brain now has well worn ‘grooves’ like a record that keeps playing over and over again.
It often comes as a surprise to the couples I work with that they have any influence on what their brain is doing - it literally seems to have a mind of it’s own. They’ve never considered that they can retrain their brain to think and feel differently - and without a lot of work - just a few minutes every day. By the time they find me they’ve tried all of the quick fix solutions. The herbs, acupuncture etc etc…all helpful in their own way but we can become prisoners of our own minds without realizing we have become our own jailer. They know they are exhausted from being at the mercy of erratic mood swings and sometimes harmful emotions. They are on the brink of giving up. They didn’t know they could do anything about it. Until they started working with my approach and intentionally focused on their mental and emotional fitness.
Practising Mindfulness can Reduce Stress and Help you Mentally Prepare for IVF
As you begin to practice mindfulness people are often quite surprised at how little control we seem to have over our thinking and how often it wanders off to stress town when our mind is left ‘unsupervised’. Regular visits to stress town negatively impacts your hormones, mental health, cardiac functioning, blood glucose levels etc etc etc.
No system of the body is untouched by stress and most of your stress is caused by the way you are thinking about your circumstances - not by external events. That is in fact very good news. You have no control over most external stressful events anyway but you DO have control over your internal environment to a large extent.
You might think that getting away from stress by taking a vacation or enjoying some regular body work would reduce your stress - it will for a short period of time. Often times couples take that vacation and realize that although you’ve had a welcome change of scenery and have some new distractions for a few days - you also packed your worries about your fertility with you. As the saying goes - “wherever you go - there you are”. Unless you learn how to manage your mind and emotions that vacation isn’t as helpful for you as you might imagine.
Try an Experiment.
Set an alarm on your phone for 1 minute. During this 1 minute do nothing but focus on the feeling of your breath coming in and out of your body. Do that now.
If you’re like most people that was probably a light bulb moment for you….as soon as you try to focus and not think about everything else going on right now your brain goes wild and jumps from thought to thought. We call it ‘monkey mind’. This constant mind wandering wouldn’t be such a bad thing if your mind kept wandering off to vacations, sunsets or memorable moments with someone you love. But the brain is wired to continuously scan for threats and has had free range all of your life and it rarely goes to those thoughts…instead it’ll time travel to something that happened yesterday or thoughts about what you think you should be doing right now (possibly thoughts of boredom too) or musings of how on earth THIS is going to help me not want to murder my husband when he has to travel when we’re TTCing!
(If you’re worried about medication shots - manage that stress with our Easy Injections hypnosis training).
Benefits of Mental Preparation for IVF
No more avoiding social events. You now have strategies to navigate discussions with family and friends in a healthy way.
Your IVF is more likely to be successful with mindful coping strategies such as acceptance.
You feel more connected to your partner.
You re-engage with life and with other life goals.
You get to ‘catch’ stressful thoughts BEFORE you go off down a rabbit hole of negative emotions and feel better more often.
Feel less overwhelmed and more in control.
The less time you spend feeling bad - the more your capacity for joy grows.
Mindfulness is not about ‘thinking positive’ - it gives you a chance to notice you’re having those murderous thoughts that now have your brain and body on a freeway of distress to stress town. Compassion and mindfulness practices don’t magically stop negative emotions but they activate the soothing systems of the brain so that this time in your life is more tolerable. They help you to find your way quickly to an offramp so you can emotionally slow down, feel more centered and bring yourself into a state of balance. The more often you notice that you’re getting amped up, the more you can do about it and the less time your mind and body spends in a dysregulated state. The skills of emotional mastery can make your fertility journey less stressful and more joyful.
Make your mind an ally on this journey to parenthood, master your mind with the FertileMind app and learn how to work with shame or any other state that makes you feel less than the amazing human being that you are!
Tracy
