Your Stress Bucket - Lifestyle Change without Perfectionism

One thing that I’ve seen more times than I can count is striving for perfection when making lifestyle changes to improve fertility. Let me paint you a picture: you decide that you’re going to start trying for a baby. At first, you take things pretty chill, trusting that it’ll happen when it happens and it’s exciting at first. A couple of months pass by with no positive test and you start to worry that it isn’t happening quickly enough. You start researching ways you can improve your fertility and start making changes to your life – fertility yoga, supplements, special fertility diets, swapping out your cosmetics and household cleaners for non-toxic ones, trying to get more sleep, trying to stress less while actually feeling more stressed because it seems there’s a million different things you should be doing that you didn’t know you should be doing before. Sound familiar? Maybe your story isn’t exactly like this, but feeling like you have to make a lot of changes to improve your chances of a successful pregnancy is incredibly common. It’s also incredibly overwhelming! Further, if you’re one of those unfortunate people (like me!) who is doing everything imaginable to improve your chances of finally bringing home your baby while watching others around you fall pregnant easily or accidentally while living less than ideal lifestyles, it can be maddening. We need better ways of approaching lifestyle changes for fertility that don’t add more to our stress and end up making us feel inadequate or, worse, like the reason we aren’t getting pregnant is because we aren’t trying hard enough.

So, let’s reframe. How can we think about lifestyle change in a way that opens up possibilities for self tending without leading us down the troublesome path of perfectionism? To start, we’re going to borrow a concept you probably learned in high school biology class – homeostasis! Simply put, homeostasis is your body’s way of keeping itself in balance. Your body has a bunch of different set points where it likes things to be in order to be happy and healthy. When one of those things is out of balance, your body makes some adjustments to bring those things back into balance. For example, your body likes to be within a set temperature range and if it starts getting too cold, your muscles will contract (shivering) to bring your body temperature back into its happy range. Your body is really good at doing this, but it’s true that depending on how we live, we can make things easier or harder for our bodies to balance. Our modern world has many things to be grateful for but it also has a lot of things that disrupt our body’s inner balance. Modern conveniences may make our lives a lot easier but may also expose us to chemicals that disrupt our delicate hormonal system. Being capable of financial independence and growth in my career as a woman is something I’m grateful for, but it might also come with added stresses and worries that don’t do my body any favours. It’s impossible to avoid a lot of the things that might have our bodies working extra hard to restore balance, which is why so many of us end up in an unbalanced state, constantly trying to get back to center. For a lot of us, having our bodies working on overdrive to keep us afloat is so normal for us that we barely notice it.

Our reproductive system is one that works best when a lot of different components are working optimally. Our hormones exist in a delicate balance and, when imbalanced, can impede or outright inhibit reproduction. Keeping this balance typically requires rest, decent nutrition, detoxification pathways that are working adequately, and a body that feels safe. So given that we are experiencing a lot of different stressors that throw our system out of balance, it shouldn’t be too surprising that many people are struggling with subfertility. If we try to change or adjust all the factors that are throwing our bodies out of balance, we’re bound to drive ourselves crazy. Sadly, there are too many things that affect our fertility and our health that are outside of our control. And of the things that are inside our control, we can easily get bogged down and overwhelmed trying to manage too much, which in the end just adds to our stress.

But I have a trick: the stress bucket. I’d like to propose that it can be helpful to think about your stress bucket when making lifestyle changes for fertility. What is your stress bucket? Imagine that each of us has a bucket that slowly fills up with stress (like water) over time. There are things that we can do to dump some of the stress out and reduce the amount we are carrying – things like eating nutritious foods, going for walks, spending time with people we love, getting good sleep, etc. There are also things that cause our stress bucket to fill up faster than it might otherwise: not getting enough sleep, working a high-stress job, blood sugar imbalances, inflammation, exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals, etc. When we’re on a fertility journey, the goal is not to have a stress bucket that we keep completely empty. I would argue that this isn’t a realistic goal for any of us and that making it a goal is counterproductive, because the frantic struggle to keep the bucket empty is actually filling it up. That doesn’t mean that we don’t make any changes – especially if we know that some of our lifestyle habits create more work for our bodies and, therefore, add to the bucket.

Where do we begin when we want to start offloading the stress in our bucket? The trick is to seek out the low-hanging fruit: what are the changes you can make that aren’t too difficult or that you can comfortably make one at a time to slow the flood of stress into your stress bucket? What are the simple or easy things you enjoy doing that help to offload some of the stress from your bucket? When you start with those things, you can shift the balance in favour of your fertility without feeling overwhelmed or like you need to life perfectly in order to get pregnant. The key is to start small. Take things one at a time. Gradually, with time and practice, you may realize that some bigger changes need to happen to make a real dent in your stress bucket. But you’ll have established a more stable foundation to build on if/when that time comes. And this approach doesn’t require that you do everything perfectly all the time either. Maybe one of the big things you do to reduce the amount of stress being added to your stress bucket is adding a vegetable to every meal so your body has a better time balancing your blood sugar. Does that mean everything is ruined if you have a day when you’re eating on the fly and you have a meal or two without? Of course not. Especially because, as you slowly work through changes, you get a stacking effect. Yes, you may miss adding a vegetable to each meal one day, but you still managed to get in that after dinner walk or a quick 5-minute meditation. Things balance each other out. Let the little things add up in a good way and stop expecting yourself to have everything figured out all the time with no ‘slip ups.’

One of the hardest things about making changes to support your fertility goals is the lack of clarity around why you must do all this work to begin with. You might feel like, why do I have to make all these changes to get pregnant but other people don’t? I wish I knew. I don’t really think anybody knows for sure. Part of it might be that we are carrying stresses that impact us that we aren’t really aware of (ex: you may have a health condition undiagnosed that adds to the work your body has to do to keep balance). Some of it is likely also genetic: maybe some of us are born with smaller buckets that get overfilled too easily, whereas others have bigger buckets that can handle more stress without filling up. We may never know the answers, and it’s understandable to be frustrated when you feel like you’re working hard to reach your goals but that others get there before you with less effort (at least that you can see). Even though it feels unfair, the work you do to tend to yourself now doesn’t just support your fertility goals, it also supports a future pregnancy that you might have. It gives you time to practice using the tools you might rely on to help you get through the challenges that come with your body changing rapidly or the demands of labour and birth. It’s completely okay if you aren’t feeling optimistic and like looking for the future benefits right now. It’s okay to just say: I am worthy of care whether I conceive or not. Taking care of your stress bucket matters because you matter. You matter.

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