Managing Fear and Anxiety

It is possible that you have some fears and anxiety about the outcome of your IVF journey. Many people come to IVF after having exhausted numerous other fertility treatments and are experiencing some grief and possible losses. It important to remember that if you need time to grieve then you can take that time, and this is going to look different for each person.

But catastrophising is not useful in this situation. Our human brains will focus on a negative bias, meaning that it will usually focus on the negative aspect of a given situation in order to assess any potential dangers or threats and then protect us from it. Our brains like to create the illusion that we can control our future by knowing it and fixating on things out of our control. We will then fixate on this potential danger or threat until it has passed or been resolved.

This is potentially a great thing to have to keep us safe, but the downside is that we are incapable of accurately predicting the future. Think back to the beginning of 2020, who knew how the events of that year were going to play out!

It is possible that your fears and anxiety about your IVF journey may be coming from thoughts about the potential negative outcome of your treatment. It is important to look at and examine what this means to you. We think about the journey before us and we feel anxiety or fear because we have a story about what this will mean for us in the future. What it will mean for how your family will look like. It is possible that your fear is not actually based on the IVF process itself, but the potential future circumstances you create in your mind. As we discussed, we cannot predict the future or know for certain how things are going to play out. So, it is possible that what you are doing is fixating on a perceived threat of how you are going to feel in the future – the negative emotions that you anticipate having if IVF isn’t successful. We fear the emotional experience, the feeling of powerlessness and the belief of a potential future where we experience emotional suffering.

Consider this: It is not your circumstances or situations that cause your feelings, but only the way you react to them. The world is full of people who react to things differently in the same situations. For example, one person may see that losing their job is a serious and stressful event, whereas another person may be excited for new possibilities and new adventures ahead. The same situation can be seen and experienced in any way we choose to, and this is where your power lies.

It is entirely up to you as to how you want to feel. What you want to experience. What do you think would be more helpful to feel in this situation? What do you think would be more enjoyable? If you are the one person who gets to create your feelings with the thoughts you bring about in your mind, then give yourself a beautiful, positive outlook. By learning to think and feel mindfully and on purpose, by harnessing your own self-efficacy, you can show up with hope, courage and bravery knowing that you are the only one who has control over your mind. By learning resilience skills and allowing your emotions to flow, you can be confident that if there is suffering, that you are not powerless to it and you have a say in how you respond.