Is Your Work Stress Affecting Your Fertility?

Getting pregnant isn’t as easy as people often think. To enhance your chances, the conditions should be kept ideal by having sex at peak ovulation and taking care of your body. However, women who are trying to get pregnant have to keep in mind that stress is one of the factors that lower a woman’s fertility. That’s a little troubling, since trying to conceive, itself, can already be stressful ⁠— especially if months pass and you still haven’t gotten pregnant. And if you’ve got a job, you could have an even more difficult time with conceiving since work isn’t exactly a relaxing activity.

In fact, Forbes points out that Americans are constantly overworked and are subsequently more susceptible to stress-related complications. Some 30% of legal and management employees work for almost 45 hours a week, as well as 20% of those who work in fishing and farming industries. Meanwhile, those who work in finance, advertising, and engineering industries all note that long hours are a part of their job. And on top of being overworked, trying to meet deadlines and coping with bad management practices can make work stress chronic.

Moreover, the current global crisis has pushed people to transition to a remote working setup, making them bring their work stress home. In fact, Very Well Mind notes that 41% of work-from-home employees consider themselves ‘highly stressed’. That's because despite its benefits, remote working hosts a different set of problems compared to the conventional office setup. This may further aggravate the stress you get from work, and in turn, deter your chances of conceiving.

A study published by the National Institutes of Health reveals that women who experience more physical and psychological stress are less likely to get pregnant. They discovered this because women who had higher levels of a substance called alpha-amylase had their chances of conceiving during their cycles reduced by 12%. Reading alpha-amylase levels has long been used to measure the body’s response to stress, further cementing the link between stress and infertility.

Moreover, there are some studies that show that infertile women benefited greatly from doing group therapy and relaxation techniques as this doubles their likelihood of conceiving a child. Overproducing stress hormones like cortisol also directly disrupts the communication between a woman’s brains and ovaries and suppresses your hormones, leading to irregular ovulation cycles.

If you’re trying to get pregnant and want to curb work stress, it’s important that you actively seek out measures to make working more comfortable and use techniques to help you cope. One way of doing this is by relieving the psychological stress that poor posture at work brings. Pain Free Working highlights the importance of ergonomics in your home office setup — a comfortable chair with adequate back support and an adjustable desk can do wonders for your posture. This, in turn, can help keep your stress levels down and relieve the pain from bad posture. Other than that, our post ‘Can Meditation Improve Fertility?’ recommends doing at least 10 minutes of meditation during your work hours to help alleviate your stress.

However, dealing with a horrible boss or heavy workload may need other ways of adjusting. The Harvard Business Review advises steering clear of an overbearing boss by making yourself indispensable, and you can do this by producing quality work.

Overall, there are a lot of factors that affect infertility, but it’s best to take action on what you can control like managing work stress. If you really want to have a bun in your oven, you should try your best to keep yourself stress-free and worry-free.

Article specially written for texasfertilityacupuncture.com by Andrea Parham