SLEEP. STRESS. SWEAT. FOR YOUR FERTILITY

Beyond diet, we know there are a lot of other things that can affect your fertility. Inflammation is a massive factor and is influenced by diet, stress, sleep, and more. When I work with clients, I take a holistic, functional approach to their health and their plan. This means we don’t look at anything in isolation, but as part of the entire picture. The body doesn’t work in isolation, so why should our approaches to support it? My clients know that their plan is going to include working on more than just the food they eat (or don’t eat), with a huge focus on re-establishing balance through movement, breath, and more. It’s so tempting to think there’s this one, magical change you can make that will be the ticket to success, but the reality is, your body requires so many things to functional optimally, and while it may be able to compensate for some deficits or imbalances, that’s certainly not the ideal way to try to conceive or go into a pregnancy. So, let’s explore some other contributors to imbalance and obstacles to conceiving.

Your Body Was Made to Move

Movement is one of the cornerstones of good health. This doesn’t mean CrossFit every day (that’s actually not good), nor does it mean walking from your house to the mailbox daily. Both too much and too little exercise stress the system and can lead to imbalance. In a world full of extremes, I see far too many clients talking an “all or nothing” approach, going from couch potato to HIIT warrior overnight. Not only is this not safe and likely to lead to injury, it’s unnecessary. For centuries, the majority of our “exercise” was simply part of our daily routines and movements. To get places, more walking was needed or even riding a horse, which requires core stability and general balance and focus of the muscles throughout the body. We hunted and gathered our food, roaming about and spending much of the day standing. We carried water and firewood to our homes, tended farms or gardens, “entertained” our children by sending them outside to run and climb and dance. Our lives were full of movement. Now, with so much of our day spent at a desk, behind a screen, or just generally “still”, making movement a part of your life often has to be a conscious effort.

When we think of movement and exercise with a focus on fertility, there a few things to keep in mind. Excess, super high intensity exercise can actually hurt your chances for fertility. It can cause a negative calorie deficit making the body feel like it doesn’t have adequate supplies to nourish and repair your body, let alone carry a baby. It can also increase inflammation (which we’ve already discussed is no good for fertility!), especially if you’re not getting adequate time to rest and repair between exercise bouts. It can stress the system, making hormones go wonky as the body works to repair tissues from intense exercise instead of maintaining other bodily functions. And for some women, can even disrupt their cycles if your exercise intensity, duration, or frequency isn’t properly matched with adequate nutrition and calories.

But, when done “right”, exercise can also improve fertility and pregnancy outcomes! What does that look like? Well, ideally, 3-5 days of at least moderate intensity movement for 30+ minutes per day. This doesn’t have to be done all at once; you could do some yoga in the morning and an evening walk. The goal is for it to be enjoyable, affordable, and pregnancy safe. There’s no point in taking up sparing if you’re going to have to stop by the 2nd trimester. Likewise, don’t commit yourself to a gym membership if it’s not going to be in the bank to do it for longer than a month! And if you hate doing whatever the movement is, that’s unlikely to last long, either! Consistent, regular exercise improves insulin sensitivity (which means better blood glucose levels and reduced inflammation!) and can improve sleep and stress. Additionally, if you’re overweight, research has shown that even a 5-10% weight loss (if appropriate) can have a massively positive impact on conception, restoring your cycle, ovulation, and your fertility. Oh, and while we’re on the topic of weight, underweight is JUST as problematic when it comes to fertility! Like most things in health and wellness, it’s about balance, not extremes.

Stress & Sleep

It’s a catch 22, right? Anyone who’s struggled to conceive has probably been told that stress is “bad” for conception and “bad” for baby. If you’re anything like me, being told NOT to stress made me stress out about the fact that I was stressing out... that’s a fun circle of self-loathing! So, first, let’s understand WHY stress impacts fertility and pregnancy negatively. 

Stress is a physiological response to protect us from harm. The easiest example is thinking of being chased by a bear. If you’re being chased by a bear, your body goes into fight or flight, preparing to defend or to flee. To do this, the body rallies all the quick energy it can, cortisol levels rising and telling the body to release glucose into the blood stream so the muscles have a fast energy source available. This is good. We WANT this. If there’s a bear, we WANT our body to react quickly, effectively to keep us safe. BUT, the “fight or flight” response doesn’t know the difference between a bear and a work deadline or a tantruming toddler fraying your last nerve. The cortisol release, the glucose surge, the rise in blood pressure, the shift in hormones...it’s the same. And with the bear, the chase will quickly end, allowing the body to go back to homeostasis, while the work deadlines and the unhappy toddlers tend to be on-going. When you’re in “fight or flight”, the priority is keeping the body alive, not reproducing. If your body is trying to keep you safe and feels there’s something unsafe in your environment, it’s definitely not going to be keen on bringing a baby into the mix!

On an even deeper level, stress damages gut health (further affecting hormone balance), uses up nutrients essential for baby-making (like vitamin C, magnesium, and B vitamins, all of which are not just necessary for baby, but often already low thanks to diet and birth control use!), and raises inflammation (damaging sperm and egg health!). Cortisol also steals from both the thyroid and the sex hormone pathway. In other words, your body has a bunch of “foundation” hormones that can then go through a process to become cortisol, active thyroid hormone, sex hormones, etc. When the body is in “fight or flight”, this dictates what pathway these hormones go down. And as you’ve probably guessed, if the body is stressed, your hormones aren’t going to go down the reproductive pathway! As a woman, you probably already know this. How many times has stress from a work project, travel, illness, or some other source disrupted your cycle? If the body thinks it might need to make more cortisol to respond to a threat, it’s going to hoard the hormones necessary to produce cortisol. For instance, T3, a thyroid hormone, can either move to active T4 (and help with metabolism, bodily functions, etc.), OR can be held in reserve as reverse T3, which can be converted back over into cortisol. Additionally, progesterone is a precursor to cortisol, so if your body feels the need to produce more cortisol, you’re going to have less progesterone! Studies have also found that conception rates are decreased with reported stress levels regardless of the actual lab-calculated cortisol levels!

Another form of stress is lack of sleep. Anyone who’s had a newborn knows this all too well. There’s a reason sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture! Just like any other form of stress, inadequate (quality or quantity) sleep raises cortisol levels and reduced conception rates. Sperm quality, ovulation, and cycle balance are all negatively impacted with inadequate sleep. For adults 7-8 hours of GOOD sleep is recommended. This means not waking up every few hours, waking feeling rested, and getting a good, long stretch of at least 4 consecutive hours. Poor sleep also disrupts gut health and hormone balance. Remember, all the hormones in the body work in concert. Your circadian rhythm is regulated by hormones; if those are off, you better believe your reproductive ones are going to be negatively impacted, too!

 When I work with clients, it’s less about “removing all stress”, and more about learning how to help the body respond less aggressively and “pathologically” to stress. In other words, it’s not the stress that’s the problem, but the systemic reaction to it. We work to slow or mitigate that stress response so the cortisol explosion doesn’t occur (or is limited) and the ripple down effects are prevented!

Fertility Environment

Along with what you eat, how you move, and how you feel, the environment in which you live can have a HUGE impact on your hormones and fertility. The air we breathe, the food we eat, the containers we use, the lotion we wear...all of it can disrupt hormones or support balance. Some call them the 4 Ps – personal care products, pesticides, plastics, and pollution. BHA, phthalates, dioxin, PCBs, parabens and more are all considered endocrine disruptors, meaning they can interrupt our natural hormones and disrupt a healthy menstrual cycle and fertility. Yes, I get it, that plastic water bottle doesn’t seem like that big of a deal and the lotion you love so much can’t possibly be THAT bad. The thing is, it’s about the overall burden on the body. Sure, we can get away with living in a somewhat toxic environment with air pollution or some cookies here and there, etc. The problem becomes when the load is just too high. Not enough veggies, too many pesticides, poor gut health, inflammation, stress, poor sleep, AND plastic. Well, that plastic can be the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak. Your body is really smart and capable; it works so so hard to keep you in balance day in and day out and is actually really good at it...if you give it the tools it needs! So, when you’re struggling to get pregnant or striving for an optimal pregnancy, we want to remove as many extra burdens and obstacles as possible.

EWG can be a good resource for personal care products and cleaning products, DIY options are often great, too (like white vinegar for cleaning!). Air filters and air-filtering plants to help cleanse the air in your home; water filters to reduce the load from the water you drink. Store left-overs in pyrex or mason jars, or at the very least, re-heat them on a non-plastic plate instead of in a plastic container. Try a re-usable glass or metal water bottle. Use natural fertilizers like compost. Choose organic, grass-fed, etc. as much as possible. I understand how expensive that can be and work with my clients to figure out the best way to reduce their environmental burden while not breaking the bank. I get it; as a family of 5, it’s hard to shop organic, etc. all the time. We like the Dirty Dozen/Clean 15 lists, as well. These focus on the 12 types of produce you should really strive to get organic because of the high pesticide load, and the 15 that are very low in pesticides and you can probably save the money and go conventional. You can also think about a backyard/box garden to help support your microbiome with some lovely dirt play, and your nutrition.

I get it, it’s a lot to think about! That’s why we’re taking it one post, one chunk at a time. My goal is to provide the education and then help you create a plan that actually works for YOU. I meet my clients where they are; we don’t suddenly go from all take-out to nothing but homemade salads (we don’t every go to all salads, lol). We’re going to work to craft a plan that’s realistic, individualized, and sustainable for you and your life. I’m here to support YOUR journey!