If you're somewhere in the middle of trying for a baby and it hasn't been simple, you already know the appointments are only part of it. There's the tracking, the timing, the tests, the waiting. And then there's everything you carry in between, the part nobody really prepared you for.

The conversation around fertility tends to stay on the medical side, on what to try next, as if the hardest thing about it were logistical. But for a lot of us, it isn't.

So this one is about the rest of it. And one thing up front: if this is wearing on you, that's not a sign you're handling it badly, because the reality is that this is just hard.

The Feelings Are Real

A 2025 review pooling dozens of studies found that around 41% of women navigating infertility experience anxiety, and roughly 42% experience depression. Whatever you've been feeling, you're in plentiful company, and it was never a failure of coping.

There's an older study that has stayed with people for decades. Psychologist Alice Domar found that women dealing with infertility carried levels of anxiety and depression on par with women facing illnesses like cancer or heart disease. The distress so many of us feel and then quietly apologize for is, by any honest measure, an understandable response to something genuinely hard.

Words From Christy

My background is in science, and more specifically in women's health. This is supposed to be my area. And I still had a hard time finding anything tangibly useful both for understanding what was happening in my own body and for the mental side of it. I can read the primary literature and I was still cobbling it together from scraps. If it was that hard for me, that says something about what's out there for everyone else.

When I was going through my fertility treatment, I felt like I had to navigate the anxiety and mental anguish alone. I wish someone told me that what I was feeling underneath all of that uncertainty translated into a physiological stress response. Which is the same machinery your body runs for any prolonged perceived threat. Cortisol increases, sleep gets disrupted, and the whole system is idling too high for months on end. My shortness or emotional responses were in line with what my body was feeling, and it was responding to something it had correctly identified as hard. Which is also why you can't think your way out of this experience. 

What actually works is more boring. Ask for help, tell people how you’re feeling mentally and physically. Tell people what you need and in what ways. Remove items from your task list that aren’t necessary and take time for yourself. Make sure you’re staying hydrated and getting a balanced diet. None of this removes the feelings entirely, but it helps curb the impact. 

You Don't Have To "just relax"

If you've been trying for a while, you've probably collected the comments, the well-meaning chorus telling you to just relax, to stop thinking about it so much, and that it'll happen when you stop trying. 

Underneath those comments are suggestions that your stress is the problem. But the distress is a response to the situation, not the cause of it. Feeling anxious because something you deeply want has now become uncertain is normal, and it is not why this is happening. Please set that guilt down.

What Tends To Help

None of this comes with a fix, and anyone promising one isn't being straight with you. But a few things lighten the load: talking to someone who actually understands it, whether that's a therapist who works with fertility or a community of people in the same season, letting the people who love you help in specific concrete ways instead of hoping they'll guess, and giving yourself permission to step back from the events and the group chats that take more than they give right now – protect your energy.

There's a practical side to that, too. Some of the weight is the not-knowing, the cost, the question of whether care will be there if you need it. Having that part settled ahead of time is one less thing to lie awake over, and it's a big reason we built FLORA, so the medical and financial side is handled before you're in the thick of it, and more of you is free for everything else. You can look into it here.

We won't pretend any of it is easy. But you don't have to feel okay about all of it to be doing this right. 

Whatever you're carrying that no one else can see, it counts, and so do you.