Stress and infertility are connected— but 4 mindfulness strategies can help with both

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When the COVID-19 pandemic was starting to take off, Alice Domar, Ph.D., had a hunch her clients with infertility were still more stressed about getting pregnant than the deadly virus that was spreading around. She was right.

“We did a study of about 3,000 patients and they said that infertility was harder for them [to manage] than COVID,” says Domar, an expert in mind-body medicine, author, professor and chief compassion officer at Inception Fertility, an fertility services provider. “We know that infertility causes a tremendous amount of stress, so the question becomes does stress cause infertility? With most species, if you stress them out, they stop reproducing. So it intuitively makes sense that stress would decrease fertility.”