What is stress?
Stress can be termed as a body’s physical, chemical, and emotional reaction to any overwhelming situations. It arises from any event that makes you angry, frustrated or nervous. Stress, at times, can be positive as it helps an individual to avoid danger or meet deadlines, while on the other hand, its prolonged existence can be harmful to the individual.
What is infertility?
Infertility means the failure to conceive or get pregnant. In general terms, infertility means the inability to conceive a child even after one year of regular sexual intercourse, without any protection.
Relationship between stress and infertility
Stress and infertility share a direct relationship, i.e. when you get stressed up more, the chances of infertility also is more. Generally, when a woman undergoes a lot of stress, she may experience an irregular menstrual cycle. This means the ovulation period is not exactly known, and so there are chances of high infertility.
Studies show that women, who have a high level of alpha-amylase (an enzyme which marks stress) in their saliva, take 29% more time to get pregnant, compared to those who have less. On the other hand, stressed women tend to have less sex, and also engage in habits like smoking and drinking, which further establishes the relationship between stress and infertility.
It is not only that stress causes infertility. It works vice versa too, i.e. there are cases where infertility leads to stress. People tend to overthink about their inability to conceive, and it stresses them out. This stress, then again acts as a barrier for them to conceive and the problem of infertility just arises.
Stress and infertility share a two-way relation, where, if one of them exists the other is bound to be present. It is important to tackle stress and not let anything bother you in order to boost your fertility and increase your chances of conceiving or getting pregnant.