Why Can’t I Stop Thinking About Getting Pregnant? The Anxiety of Trying to Conceive

If you’re trying to get pregnant and feel like you think about it constantly, you’re normal! Trying to conceive can turn something you deeply want into a cycle of tracking, waiting, checking, Googling and trying to interpret every sensation in your body. You might know (cognitively) that worrying won’t change the outcome but that doesn’t make it any easier to stop.

Why am I so anxious about getting pregnant?

Trying to conceive asks you to care enormously about an outcome you have very little control over. Of course there are things you can do. You can track ovulation, take your vitamins, make appointments, follow your doctor’s recommendations, have sex on the right days or show up for the blood draws and ultrasounds.

But then you just have to wait. That combination of high stakes and low control is very good at creating anxiety.

All brains prefer to solve uncertainty, where possible, so it looks for information that might tell you what’s going to happen. Was that cramp implantation? Should the line be darker today? Could I have ovulated later than I thought? Am I pregnant or is my period coming (funny how the symptoms are THE SAME)…

Before long, trying to conceive can start taking up far more mental space than you ever intended to give it.

Why can’t I stop Googling fertility and pregnancy symptoms?

Because googling works, temporarily. You find an explanation that makes you feel (a little) better. Someone on Reddit had the same symptom and got a positive pregnancy test three days later. You read that your follicle count is within the normal range. You find a study that makes your odds look a little better. Relief.

But then another question appears. This is one of the frustrating things about reassurance when you’re anxious. It can calm you down without actually making you feel safer in a consistent way.

The goal isn’t necessarily to stop Googling everything or throw away your ovulation tests. Information can be useful. Tracking can be useful. It may be worth paying attention to, though, when checking stops helping you make decisions and starts becoming something you need to do to feel okay.

Why is the two-week wait so hard?

Because there’s nothing else to do!

For much of the month, trying to conceive gives you tasks. Track this. Schedule that. Take the medication. Have sex tonight. Go to the appointment. Then comes the two-week wait, when the thing you want most may or may not already be happening inside your body, and there is remarkably little you can do to find out sooner, so your attention turns inward. You notice your breasts, appetite, cramping, fatigue, even a lack of symptoms.

It makes sense that your brain is looking for clues. Unfortunately, bodies are noisy. Most of those clues can’t give you the certainty you’re looking for.

How do I stop trying to conceive from taking over my life?

You don’t have to stop caring. In fact, I’m generally skeptical of advice that asks people going through fertility struggles to “just relax” or distract themselves. You desperately want a baby. You’re allowed to be sad when your period comes. You’re allowed to hate baby showers (or even other babies or parents) for a while.

The work is learning how to make room for uncertainty without organizing your entire life around trying to make it disappear. That might mean noticing when you’re seeking reassurance and asking yourself whether more information is actually going to help. It might mean deciding ahead of time when you’ll take a pregnancy test rather than renegotiating with yourself every six hours. It can mean making plans during the two-week wait instead of treating those days as a holding period before your “real” life resumes.

Sometimes it means grieving because trying to conceive for longer than you expected involves losses even before anyone uses the word infertility. The timeline you imagined. The pregnancy announcement you thought you’d make. The age gap you pictured between your children. The assumption that when you were ready, your body would cooperate. These are losses worth grieving.

Can therapy help with fertility anxiety?

Yes. Therapy can’t tell you whether this cycle will work. What it can do is help you live through the uncertainty without feeling consumed by it.

In fertility therapy, we can work with the anxious thoughts and checking behaviors, but we also make room for what’s underneath them. Fear. Grief. Anger. Jealousy. The strain fertility can put on your relationship. The strange experience of having something so intimate become medical, scheduled and public.

The goal isn’t to convince you that everything will work out, it’s to help you feel like yourself while you don’t know yet.

At Seattle Reproductive Psychotherapy, we work with individuals and couples throughout trying to conceive, infertility and fertility treatment. If getting pregnant has started to occupy more of your life than you want it to, you don’t have to wait until you’re completely overwhelmed to get support.

Schedule a consult with one of our experts today. We’re here to help.