Not everyone is blessed enough to have a baby of their own, which is why if you are currently in preconception, you need to do a number of things so you could avoid affecting your chances of getting pregnant in your upcoming ovulation period.
One of the most common questions that we get about pregnancy is related to stress.
Questions like “can stress affect fertility?” are really important to ask, especially if you are going through something right now.
Sadly, the answer is yes.
Numerous studies have found links between stress and being unable to get pregnant.
According to a report that was published by WebMD, they said that studies have found links between women’s levels of day-to-day stress and lowered chances of pregnancy.
They noted in their article that women whose saliva had high levels of alpha-amylase, an enzyme that marks stress, took 29 percent longer to get pregnant when compared to women who were less stressed.
Alice Domar, Ph.D., executive director of the Domar Center for Mind/Body Health, who is also a longtime infertility researcher, said that the body is smart and it knows stress is not good when it comes to having a baby.
They also noted that stressed women also have less sex, which affects their chances of getting pregnant in a huge way.
Stressed women are also more likely to smoke, drink, and abuse other types of substances that could affect their odds of getting pregnant.
The good thing is that there are a number of things that you can do to avoid being too stressed and increase your chances of getting pregnant again.
Domar published a small study in 1990 and in that study, it showed that lowering stress with group therapy, individual cognitive behavior therapy, and relaxation techniques like guided imagery helped infertile women to get pregnant.
Talking about that study, she said that the medical community believed that her study was stupid because there is no way that the mind had any control over the ovaries.
After that specific study, Domar carried out another bigger study to report the things women have to go through to get pregnant.
In their bigger study, which was carried out a decade later after their initial study, reported that women who had “trouble conceiving, those who received cognitive behavioral therapy were almost twice as likely to end up pregnant as those who didn’t.”
Right now, researchers across the globe accept that stress and fertility rates in women are deeply connected.
