Is fertility-related stress a good thing?

If you've ever worried about your stress levels when you're going through fertility treatment, you can stop worrying now. A new study has found that women who were most stressed during treatment had a higher pregnancy rate than those who rated themselves lower down the stress scale.

The researchers in the States weren't expecting this outcome when they studied more than 200 women going through treatment as it is generally believed that stress has a negative impact on fertility. They found that women who put themselves high on the stress score appeared to have a 20-30% higher pregnancy rate than those who were less stressed

There is nothing less helpful when you are going through fertility treatment than being told that it won't work if you are stressed - infertility causes a huge amount of stress, and telling women that they are making things worse by feeling stressed ends up being a vicious circle - you feel guilty about being stressed which then makes you more stressed, so you have to feel even more guilty about being more stressed etc. For that reason alone we should welcome this new research.

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Don't worry about your stress levels

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.