How to find hope when your last IVF cycle failed

If you have a rocky relationship with hope, or even hearing that word makes you cringe or roll your eyes, you are not alone. When you start trying to conceive, you feel hopeful. Then month after month, or round after round of IVF, it dwindles. And what makes it worse is that everyone around you keeps telling you to just have hope.

So you go out searching for it, like it's something you can pick off a shelf. Instead it becomes one more source of tension. One more thing you're supposedly getting wrong in this process.

If you're trying to figure out how to stay hopeful during IVF, or how to find hope after a failed cycle, I want to bust four myths about hope with you. Not so you can chant an affirmation in the mirror or buy some lucky IVF socks, but because the logic underneath these myths doesn't actually hold up once you look at it properly.

Myth One: Hope Is a Warm, Fuzzy Feeling

This might be an unpopular opinion, but it's not. Brené Brown talks about this in her book Atlas of the Heart, drawing on research from psychologist C.R. Snyder. His research found that hope isn't a feeling at all. It's a cognitive process, a way of thinking.

So yes, emotions play a role, but hope is actually built on three things: a goal you're working towards, a pathway or plan to get there, and a sense that you have some agency or control to act on it.

That makes complete sense of why hope gets harder to hold onto the longer you're trying to conceive. Right at the start, you've got the goal, having a baby. You've got a pathway, changing your diet, doing acupuncture, starting supplements, choosing a clinic. And you feel like you've got some agency or belief that you can control the process.

But the longer it drags on and the more rounds that don't work, that sense of a clear pathway and that agency starts eroding. It's not because you've become a negative person. It's that the actual ingredients of hope are harder to access.

So instead of chasing the feeling, it's about creating smaller goals that are actually in your control, that have nothing to do with the outcome of your next cycle or your fertility at all. Things that give you a sense of agency and forward movement.

Myth Two: If You Don't Have Hope, It Won't Work

This is where manifesting and jinxing come in, which is really a whole separate conversation. But in short, let's debunk this one properly.

Say in your first round of IVF you had hope, and it didn't work. In your second, third, or fourth round, you started losing hope, and yet you're pinning the failure of those rounds on your lack of hope. Do you see the flaw in the logic here?

Hope failed to produce a result once, but somehow the absence of hope gets blamed for failing to produce a result now. You can't be on both sides. It's easier to believe your negative thoughts have an impact than to accept that your positive thoughts didn't, because it's easier to blame yourself, and because you want to believe you have some element of control.

But if you don't have hope, it's okay. It won't change the result. There is no causal link between one or the other. You know that because when you go in for your debrief after a failed cycle, your doctor doesn't ask if you had hope or not. They look at the clinical side of things.

Myth Three: You Have to Go Out and Search for Hope

Just have hope, we get told it all the time. I get why people say this to you. You do want to feel hopeful, because the flip side is feeling hopeless, defeated, and powerless, and no one wants that.

But here's where it gets mixed up. We confuse hope with optimism, and they're not the same thing. Optimism is the belief that the future will turn out well. It's blind faith, she'll be right energy. Hope is different. Hope is the idea that the future could turn out well, or at least better than it is right now, but you genuinely don't know.

And here's the thing. The fact that you're doing IVF at all is proof that you already have hope. You wouldn't be doing it otherwise. Your clinic wouldn't recommend these steps if they didn't think they could produce a result. You're doing this because you believe it could improve your chances more than trying naturally could.

But you don't know that it will. That uncertainty is exactly what hope is. So you don't need to go hunting for it. Your actions are already showing that you have it. When people tell you to have hope, what they're really asking you to be is optimistic, and that's not something you can just decide to do, because you know the stats.

Next time someone tells you to have hope, you can tell them you're doing IVF, and that is hope enough. You can tell yourself that too. You don't have to strive for it or go out in search of it. You already have it.

Myth Four: It Hurts More If You Let Yourself Hope

You might be nodding right now, thinking an unsuccessful cycle definitely hurts more if you went in feeling hopeful. I don't believe that's true, and here's why.

Say you take your pregnancy test before your official blood test at the clinic. You see the negative result. It hits you in the gut. That's the pain.

But then the narrative starts. You feel foolish for hoping. "Of course it didn't work," you tell yourself. And then you start listing every single thing you did wrong, or everything you didn't do that you should have. That's not pain anymore. That's self-punishment and suffering, and that's where the additional hurt actually comes from.

Here's an analogy. Two people break their arm the same way, same fracture, same X-ray, same physical pain in that first hour. One person deals with the break, ices it, gets it set, moves through recovery. The other spends the whole six weeks in the cast replaying the fall, telling themselves they should have seen the step, that they're always so clumsy, that they're an idiot for running in the first place.

Same break, wildly different experience of pain. That extra pain isn't coming from the arm. It's coming from what they're doing to themselves on top of it. We do the exact same thing with hope. We link the suffering to the hoping and tell ourselves it hurt more because we let ourselves believe. But the pain of the disappointment was the same either way. It's the suffering layered on top that makes it harder.

Self-compassion is a skill we need to learn and give ourselves, rather than layering on suffering, guilt, and self-punishment. This is already hard enough. You don't have to make it harder.

Where This Leaves You

So let's recap. Hope isn't a warm, fuzzy feeling, it's a way of thinking, and we can cultivate that from the ground up, built on something real and something in your control. Hope isn't the reason your cycle didn't work, and it isn't proof that it will work either, there's no causal link there. You don't have to go hunting for hope, doing IVF at all is proof you've already got it. And finally, it doesn't hurt more to have hope. What hurts is the story you tell yourself afterwards.

Hope doesn't need to go on your to-do list. It's not something to strive for, and it's not something to resist either. You can build it bit by bit, without the pressure.

Links Mentioned

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Want to hear the full conversation? Listen to Episode 11 of Ready. Set. IVF.

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