Have you been struggling to get and stay pregnant?

25% of women who fail to conceive after 2 years are diagnosed with ‘Unexplained Infertility’ according to the NHS. That’s approximately 875,000 women in the UK alone. Is this you? Have you been on a roller coaster of emotion and through a barrage of tests only to be told at the end of it that the medical profession have no idea why you are not getting pregnant. Frustrating?!! Yes!

I have a suggestion that you may not have taken the time to properly consider before. Is it time for you to consider trusting yourself, your mind and your body to find the solution, rather than abdicating responsibility to doctors who are trained to treat symptoms not causes. I know it’s not what we’re used to and doctors and fertility treatments absolutely have their place for some women some of the time, but there may be another way.

Doctors label you with unexplained infertility when they have no idea why things aren’t going to plan. Doctors are trained to recognise disease and treat symptoms with drugs but human beings are more complex than that.  Fertility is more complex than that.  The human race has a very high opinion of itself but we don’t actually know everything! We know what we think we know at this moment in time. Today even doctors are starting to recognise that a holistic approach is best.

Before you surrender yourself for the trials of IVF consider a more natural solution.

Consider utilising the power of your mind body connection. Rather than lose yourself under an onslaught of medications and hormones, consider learning to listen to what your body is trying to tell you. Consider acting on those messages. Consider learning to dialogue with your mind in a way that is aligned with getting pregnant, having a baby, becoming a parent. Consider turning inward for a solution rather than outward.

As a Rapid Transformational Hypnotherapist I have witnessed the extraordinary results that can occur in others, and in myself, when the power of our minds is harnessed to work for us, rather than against us. Our subconscious mind is running the show anyway 95% of the time, so it makes absolute sense to learn to direct it to get the outcomes we want.

If you have been told there is no medical reason for your failure to get pregnant that means the reason is psychological.

Whoa hang on, before you get indignant and irritated that I have the cheek to suggest that you’re not getting pregnant because you don’t want it enough, or you don’t think enough positive thoughts or that it is in some way your fault; I haven’t insulted you. My intention is to give you a cause to feel hope and liberation because your unexplained infertility diagnosis states the problem is not with your body. That’s good news, because with practice you can learn to utilise the power of your mind!

Your mind is so powerful it can block your fertility

but the good news is that your mind is under your control. You just have to know how to manage it and direct it to get what you want, and this you can learn. Once you come off autopilot and start living with awareness of your environment, your body, your thoughts, emotions and feelings, you will be able to steer your thoughts, feelings and actions and therefore your life in any direction you want, including toward parenthood.

Our thoughts, emotions and feelings, beliefs and actions affect our biological functioning.

This is the mind body connection that is the missing link when doctors give an unexplained infertility diagnosis. They are ignoring this vital connection that is not taken into account within traditional medicine in the UK. Our physical state affects our mental state and vice versa. Get yourself back into homeostasis and consider your fertility within the context of yourself as a whole.

The first step is to understand how your mind works. Examples of how the mind affects the body are everywhere and I wrote about them in a previous blog post.

Your mind has the ultimate power because it has the ultimate job.

It works as the control centre for your body and its primary function is your survival. We are using the same brain as our ancestors but the today’s world and the challenges it presents to us are very different. Our primitive brain reacts as if our existence is still at threat every day by wild animals or by being thrown out of the tribe. In reality our challenges are more likely to be a deadline at work or a row over the bins with a neighbour.

There are 3 basic rules of the mind that are very useful to remember when you start to take back control:

1. It works to move you away from pain and toward pleasure. (Pain represents a threat to your survival. You can use this rule to your advantage by learning to see things differently. You can also trick your mind into linking pleasure to something)

2. It does what it thinks you want it to do. (It works out what you want and what you link pain and pleasure to by the words and pictures you show it)

3. It loves what is familiar. (Familiar is safe, familiar is easy. There is an established neural pathway to follow, it is efficient).

What it is important to remember is that your mind works out what you want and what represents pain and pleasure by responding to the words you tell it and the pictures you show it. This comes from your thoughts, your self talk, the continuous narration that is going on in your head creating images in your mind (your ‘chimp’ if you have read the Chimp Paradox by Steve Peters). Your body takes your words and pictures as direct instructions and acts accordingly (e.g. by releasing the appropriate chemicals and hormones to send us into fight or flight response or to take us to a state of bliss).

Once you understand how your mind works you can harness its power by working with it rather than against it to get the outcomes you want.

If you want to get pregnant start to notice your thoughts and what you are linking pain and pleasure to. It’s not about positive thinking it’s much more than that, it’s about actively choosing to change your thoughts, thereby changing the instructions you are giving to your body so that you actively change your physiology. Examine and challenge any regular negative looping thoughts. Just by doing this you are creating a gap between the thought and your subconscious response which enables you to choose a better response and break any negative patterns.

If you realise you are linking pleasure to having a baby but pain to childbirth for example, you can see these are conflicting beliefs. Your mind may be constantly reinforcing these beliefs dependant on when and how the link was made. You have associated pain and pleasure to the same thing so your mind can’t move you toward pleasure and away from pain because you have linked them to the same event. The result is that you go nowhere.

Action point that you can do for yourself:

Focus on noticing these rules at play in your life over the next couple of weeks and write down your findings. See if you are inadvertently linking pain to any element of having a baby, childbirth or parenthood.

1. Your mind works to move you away from pain toward pleasure.
2. It does what it thinks you want it to do using the words and pictures you show it.
3. It loves what is familiar.

Knowledge is power and you have something to work on. Your mind body connection is key.