I am reading a book called Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by Robert M. Sapolsky, which is all about stress and our health, and I find it fascinating. There is so much in it that I highly recommend you read it if you haven’t come across it already. But today I want to share something that stopped me in my tracks – his explanation of what stress actually does to fertility.
Sapolsky describes stress as an emergency state. And in an emergency, the body makes ruthless decisions about what to prioritise. This is what he says:
“During an emergency, it makes sense that your body halts long-term, expensive building projects. If there is a tornado bearing down on the house, this isn’t the day to repaint the garage. Hold off on the long-term projects until you know there is a long term. Thus, during stress, digestion is inhibited — there isn’t enough time to derive the energetic benefits of the slow process of digestion, so why waste energy on it? You have better things to do than digest breakfast when you are trying to avoid being someone’s lunch.
The same thing goes for growth and reproduction, both expensive, optimistic things to be doing with your body. If the lion’s on your tail, two steps behind you, worry about ovulating or growing antlers or making sperm some other time. During stress, growth and tissue repair is curtailed, sexual drive decreases in both sexes; females are less likely to ovulate or to carry pregnancies to term, while males begin to have trouble with erections and secrete less testosterone.”
Impressive, isn’t it.
The problem, of course, is that most of us are not being chased by lions. We are sitting at desks, answering emails, managing endless demands — but our bodies do not always know the difference. Chronic, low-level stress triggers the same emergency responses as an acute physical threat. The reproductive system gets the same message either way: this is not a safe time to conceive.
This is why managing stress is not an optional add-on to a fertility journey. It is central to it. When the nervous system is constantly running in emergency mode, the hormonal environment that conception requires simply cannot establish itself.
Yoga works on exactly this. It signals safety to the nervous system – gradually shifting the body out of emergency mode and back into the conditions where the long-term, optimistic work of reproduction can resume. It will not happen overnight. But every practice is a message to your body that the lion is not, in fact, at the door. That it is safe to put down the emergency response. That there is, after all, a long term to plan for.
Photo by Masaaki Komori on Unsplash
