Talk Therapy. For Fertility.

“Just relax! It will happen when it’s meant to happen.”

Those must be the most infuriating words any couple trying to conceive have ever heard.

Unfortunately, there might be something to this insensitive remark.
It’s a study of just 16 patients, but apparently some women who experience infertility are being successfully treated, not with hormones, but with talk therapy. According to an article in the Irish Independent (free registration required), researchers have found that cognitive behavioural therapy, a method that focusses on changing how people respond to events, helps women with functional hypothalamic amenorrhoea ovulate. FTA is the more severe form of a condition in which periods and ovulation just stop for more than 6 months. It is experienced by as many as 10% of women whose weight is in the normal range at some point in their childbearing years.

Professor Sarah Berga of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who conducted the study of 16 women says that stress could be a factor is making women less fertile.

• “The condition is caused by a prolonged reduction in a hormone produced in the brain which should stimulate the release of further hormones into the bloodstream that trigger the ovaries to ovulate. The women also have high levels of the stress hormone cortisol,” the Independent says the study found.

• “Women living a stressful life tend to compensate by dieting or undertaking vigorous exercise, which can lead to loss of weight and anovulation – the failure to ovulate,” the report concludes.

Stress is a strange collection of emotions and responses, and I wouldn’t be surprised if reducing its influence made our reproductive systems function more efficiently. Afterall, relaxation helps the heart, blood pressure and a host of other health problems. Some yoga centres offer gentle classes for those specifically under fertility stress and participants claim they were helped by as a result of the postures.

Plus, I am thinking of couples I know who conceived their first child with intervention after infertility problems and then conceived their second child without and help (or planning). Then there are stories about the occassional couple who conceive after adopting. The new old wives tale says that love for the child unblocks whatever was causing the infertility. Maybe the new old wives aren’t too far off. Maybe removing the stress of trying to have a child, by having one, brings about improved fertility?