Have you been told you'd be far more likely to get pregnant if you could just relax and forget about your fertility problems? I'm sure most of us have had to listen to advice like this somewhere along the line in our fertility journeys... If you'd just stop trying to get pregnant / go on holiday / chill out you'd conceive, people tell you, and of course they like to mention that couple everyone except me seems to know who had been trying for a baby for years and finally had a child just a few months after adopting a baby/giving up on treatment/moving to the other side of the world... There's an underlying implication that somehow our infertility is our own fault because we're too stressed. Even doctors and consultants will often suggest that you need to lower your anxiety levels if you want to get pregnant. For patients, it's a vicious circle - infertility causes stress, which then apparently leads to more infertility.
Well, we can all take heart from a new Dutch study published in the latest edition of the journal Human Reproduction which has found that anxiety and depression levels before and during treatment have no influence on pregnancy rates. The researchers followed more than 700 women at seven fertility clinics, and you can read their paper here . So next time someone tells you that you need to stop being so anxious if you want to get pregnant, you can enjoy telling them it wouldn't make the least bit of difference.
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