Pregnancy after Infertility or Miscarriage: Do You Worry About Worrying?

A Self-Coaching Exercise

 

We women who have been through the Infertility Wars can really beat up on ourselves. After worrying for so long about whether we could conceive a healthy pregnancy, once pregnant, many of us can't stop worrying.  We begin to worry about the health of the baby; our ears perk up when we hear anything about someone else's miscarriage, a new finding about vitamin supplements or an addition to the list of foods we can't eat.  We worry about whether we are exercising too much, or not enough, about that one glass of red wine the night before we conceived, about how much coffee or chocolate we can get away with or whether our remaining frozen embryos will be thawed by accident. 

 

Many of these thoughts are absolutely legitimate, especially given your fertility hisory.  Others have some validity, but have a risk factor that is fairly low.  You may be taking the anxiety a little too far when you find yourself worrying about how much you worry.  Why is this bad?

• It is a waste of time and mental energy.
• It can snowball into a state of anxiety, which will show up as stress.  That stress is no good for your pregnancy; the very thing you want to protect.
• You will be unable to enjoy your pregnancy, which is an irreplaceable time.
• The negativity associated with your worrying can seep into other areas of your life, for example; relationship with your partner, mental exhaustion and/or indulgence in unhealthy habits like overeating or not eating at all.
• The most useless of all is worrying about what others make of your worrying.

How - Try this little brainstorming exercise that can help you reduce your anxiety.  You will need a piece of paper and a pen or pencil. *Do this while alone; it's not meant to be a discussion in which you get someone else's opinions or suggestions.

1. Give yourself a defined period of time, like 5  or 10 minutes.
2. Write down everything that is worrying you. Don't stop and think hard about it, because no one will see it but you. Just spill, and then stop.
3. Leave the paper for twice the amount of time you used to write it, i.e. 10 minutes and go do something busy, like vacuuming, making a cup of tea or taking a shower.
4. Then go back to your list and read it through. 
5. Pick out anything you need to do today and rewrite it on clean paper.
6. Write down what worries you about each of the things on the new list; then cross out anything that has no, or little, basis in fact.  Think about whether your worry for each individual item is based in reality or whether it is conjured up out of the "worrying about every worry" state of mind you were in (e.g. the needle will hurt, the nurse will be mean, the scan won't show a heartbeat, something will go wrong, test results will tell me something I don't want to hear, etc...).
7. Do you have control over the outcome of an item?  Then, write down the action you will need to take to have a positive outcome.  Is there an item over which you have no control? Repeat this thought: "I don't have any control over this, so I can't predict or influence the outcome.  I am strong; I will be able to handle the outcome, whatever it is."
8. If you can be honest with yourself, you will hopefully have a shorter list, at this point, than the one you started with.
9. Write out and then say, out loud, "I only have to worry about these (1, 2... 6,) things today."  Whenever any other worries pop into your mind, chase the thought away by saying "It's not on today's list, so I will not worry about it today." 
10. Then write down, next to each item on the list, what you can do to cope with your day's worries. Get the facts, distract yourself with something that requires close attention (knitting, reading, baking, sodoku, crossword puzzle, etc.), call someone who understands, change my focus, go for a complementary therapy (coaching, massage, acupuncture, reflexology, etc...).
11. You may have certain milestones on your list, such as 10 weeks pregnant, 2nd scan, amnioscentesis. Once a milestone is reached, remove it from your list.

This self-coaching exercise is based in compartmentalizing.  You know that cliche, "you can't see the forest for the trees?"   If you have so many individual concerns that you are completely overwhelmed, breaking them down into compartments will relieve that feeling.  Your compartments can be labeled "today, tomorrow, this week, this month...." or "health, 1st trimester, relationship, job..." Once split up, they will not seem so scary or overwhelming.

At the end of the day, cross out anything on today's list you will not need to revisit. You can literally package it up in an envelope and put it on a shelf if that will help.  The next day, repeat the exercise with the original list and carry on.  Within a day or two, you could be feeling a lot calmer and more focused. Don't worry if it takes you a few days; it needs repeating every day to establish it as a habit.

Why? - You may wonder why you have to write your concerns down on paper, cross some of them off and talk out loud to yourself.  If you just think of something, you can also forget it among all the day's thoughts.  When you think it and automatically engage your hand in writing it, then read it back to yourself and repeat it out loud, you are imprinting that thought with the use of your visual, auditory and tactile senses. Repeating the exercise could be difficult if you don't have notes to jog your memory; then, worrying about what you have forgotten or neglected to do, could throw you into a chaotic, worried state all over again.