You’ve heard it before…
- “Maybe you just need to relax…”
- “Just go out and get drunk and you’ll get pregnant…”
- “My husband and I went on vacation and that’s how we got pregnant…”
- “Maybe you should quit your job…”
Here’s the thing – stress doesn’t make you anything. It doesn’t make you sick, it doesn’t make you age faster, it doesn’t make you infertile.
It’s the way you choose to respond to stress that determines how your physiology changes.
You can go on vacation, quit your job, move to an ashram and do nothing but yoga and chant 12 hours a day… But, if you don’t change how you’re thinking about and reacting to life, your internal environment isn’t going to change one bit.
I see this all the time. People come to me telling me they just changed jobs to reduce their stress. Within three months they’re just as stressed – but about something else. Maybe at their old job it was the hours. At their new job it’s a coworker that they allow to get under their skin.
One of the key practices I’ll show you later is Transforming Stress Into Fertility. It’s a technique that teaches you how to transform the energy of stressful states into positive energy that instantaneously shifts your body into a powerful self-healing state that supports optimal egg quality and all other reproductive systems.
Once you get to that chapter, I strongly recommend you put the technique into practice. It is, without question, one of the most powerful ways to amplify fertility I’ve ever encountered.
Tina was, and still is, one of my favorite patients I’ve ever worked with. She’s a straight shooter, to say the least. She would always make me laugh with her wit and insight.
Tina doesn’t pull punches, she calls it like she sees it. And, she wears her emotions on her sleeve. You can’t get away with any BS with Tina. No sir.
And, that includes her husband, with whom she’s had an up and down relationship.
Tina was referred to me by a fertility doctor friend of mine after a couple of failed IVFs which she was doing because of her husband’s untreatable low sperm counts.
Once we started working together, she was able to get pregnant with her beautiful daughter (who I’ve met several times since and is adorable).
I’ll never forget the day before the embryo transfer where she finally got pregnant. Tina stormed into the room. She was furious. I thought initially she was mad at me because I was running late that day.
Turns out she’d just had a big blow up argument with her husband. “F this,” she said. “I’m not doing the transfer. I hate my husband and I don’t want to have his baby!”
Now, I knew Tina. I knew she had a temper and there was a serious possibility she was telling the truth. But I recommended we go forward with her acupuncture session that day.
In fact, I remember after she told me her plan (and I have no idea where this came from) I just deadpanned to her, “Well, let’s just do the treatment anyway, in case you change your mind.”
To which she quickly replied, “Well, alright. At the very least I’ll be a little more relaxed after the treatment.”
So, she got up on the treatment table and I did my usual pre-transfer acupuncture protocol.
She got pregnant that cycle, as I mentioned earlier. As history would have it, even though she was still mad as hell at her husband, she went through with it anyway because she realized she really wanted a baby and she wasn’t going to let this stop her.
BTW, they’re still married, and they now have a son, whom I was also honored to help with when she went back for another round of IVF.
Point here is that Tina was far from “relaxed” in the traditional sense the day of that embryo transfer that finally yielded her first of two children.
She may not have been relaxed, but she certainly was REAL.
That’s why I never tell my patients to “just relax”. I let them feel their feelings and be authentic. I still give them the meditations and the breathing exercises, but I feel it’s more important for them to be real about how they feel than to try and put a fake happy face on (which is probably more stressful than the stress itself).
