Infertility Stress Series Ep 5: How to Recover from IVF Burnout (and Why Pushing Through Makes It Worse)

Should you take a break, or keep pushing through?

If you’re trying to work out how to recover from IVF burnout, or wondering if you should do back-to-back IVF cycles or take a break, I want to start with something nobody told me while I was in it.

Pushing through is how you’ve survived this far. But your body has been keeping count.

When the stress of IVF never has anywhere to go, it stays in your body and keeps draining you, cycle after cycle.

Why IVF stress stacks up

Every step in IVF is a threat your nervous system has to respond to. And because there’s no gap in between, the stress never gets cleared. It stacks.

First, the follicle scans, where you hold your breath to find out how your body is responding. Then the egg retrieval, where you wait to hear how many eggs were collected. Then the call to find out how many fertilised. Then the daily updates on how your embryos are growing. If you do PGT testing, that’s another verdict to wait for.

Then the lead-up to transfer, wondering if your lining is thick enough. Then the two-week wait, on high alert, monitoring every twinge, cramp and change. And finally, the beta.

Every one of those is a verdict you’re waiting on. One wait after another, and your body never gets the chance to come down.

The back-to-back IVF cycle trap

Then the beta comes back negative. Your world crumbles. You want to curl up in a ball and sleep.

But the next day your doctor calls to book the WTF appointment, just to discuss the results. So you go. You sit there nodding, and 15 minutes later you walk out with a new protocol and a new schedule in your hand.

You haven’t had a moment to think. You haven’t had a moment to feel or process any of it. But you’re terrified that if you stop now, you won’t start again.

So you book your next cycle and tell yourself you’ll deal with all of this after this one. Or maybe you won’t have to, because this might be the one that works.

What your body needs to finish the stress cycle

A healthy stress cycle goes threat, react, recover.

Picture seeing a snake. Your body floods with adrenaline and cortisol and you run. Once you’re safe, your parasympathetic nervous system kicks back in and you come back down.

Running got you away from the snake, and it gave all that stress energy somewhere to go. Your body got the message that you were safe, and the cycle finished.

Emily and Amelia Nagoski explain this beautifully in their book Burnout. Dealing with what’s stressing you and dealing with the stress itself are two separate jobs. You can solve the problem and your body can still be running the stress response.

Now put that into IVF.

What’s stressing you never fully goes away. There’s always another scan, another call, another result. And the one time something does end, often with a negative pregnancy test, there’s grief on top and you’re straight into the next protocol.

You can’t run from any of it. Nothing tells your body you’re safe. So it goes threat, react, threat, react, and the stress never gets to finish.

That’s what I mean when I talk about discharging stress. It’s giving your body a way to finish what it started.

Why we push our feelings down during IVF

Here’s the part that makes it harder. Even when we get the chance to let it out, most of us hold it in.

I did it too. These are the two reasons I hear most.

“If I let it out, it’ll get bigger”

This came up recently in the chat community inside my program, She is... Ready. One of the women hadn’t been sharing how sad she’d been feeling because she didn’t want her sadness to get bigger.

But here’s what I told her when she eventually did share. Your sadness gets lighter when you talk about it. You’ve given it somewhere to go, and you’re no longer alone, because someone replies “me too”. And someone did.

One caveat. This only works when you share in the right place. A random Reddit thread or Facebook forum, where one stranger’s story can send you spiralling, won’t do it. It has to be somewhere safe, with people who understand, where you can say it, be heard, and put it down.

“I can’t change it, so what’s the point?”

A friend said exactly this to me recently. She was frustrated about something she couldn’t do anything about, so she didn’t say a word. Not to her friends, not to me, not to anyone.

But she was carrying that frustration around in her body. She had a short fuse. She was snapping, and she couldn’t manage her emotions the way she normally does.

Talking about it might not change the situation. What it does is deal with the stress itself. What’s stressing you and the stress in your body are two separate things, and talking is how you get the second one moving.

What infertility burnout looks like: the pot on the stove

Think of your body like a pot on a stove. Every scan, every call, every wait turns the heat up a little. And in IVF, the burner never gets turned off. It just keeps simmering.

The water in that pot is everything you’ve got to give. Your energy, your patience, your ability to cope, your hope.

A pot on a simmer is quiet. From the outside it looks completely fine. It looks like you, holding it together and getting on with it.

But water is leaving the whole time. Slowly. So quietly you don’t notice.

Until one day you go to the pot and there’s nothing left in it.

That’s IVF burnout. It comes from months and cycles of heat that never got turned down, with nothing to top the water back up.

My burnout didn’t end when IVF did

I know what this looks like from the inside, because I was that pot.

I did cycle after cycle after cycle. I kept pushing through because stopping felt harder than carrying on, and I told myself I’d deal with it all after this cycle. By our second pregnancy loss, I was completely empty.

After never came.

When I finally got pregnant with my daughter Sophie, I couldn’t be present. I couldn’t enjoy the pregnancy. I was on edge the whole time. In motherhood, I was anxious, hypervigilant and controlling.

I was finally off the fertility rollercoaster. I had exactly what I wanted. But my body didn’t know that. It was still running the stress response, because it had never had the chance to finish.

It took me years to unwind what all that pushing through did to my nervous system. Burnout doesn’t end when your treatment’s over. It comes with you.

How to recover from IVF burnout

Here’s the good news. A pot can be topped back up.

The water dried up slowly, and it can come back. Your energy, your patience, your ability to cope, your hope. None of it is gone for good.

It refills when your body gets to finish what it started, when it finally gets the message that you’re safe. The Nagoskis call this completing the stress cycle. Pushing through and waiting until this cycle is over won’t get you there.

Your body needs four things.

To be seen. People who can stay with you in it, without trying to fix it or making you feel like you’re doing it wrong.

To feel safe in not knowing. That comes from feeling grounded in yourself and being around people who are in it with you.

Tools that speak to your body directly. An activated body is primed for action, which is why sitting still and trying to meditate often doesn’t touch the sides. Somatic, body-based tools work directly with your nervous system.

Somewhere to say it all out loud. The sadness, the frustration, all of it, said to people who understand, who won’t judge, and who you don’t have to justify it to.

Connection, tools for your body, and a safe place to speak. Put together, they tell your body the cycle has finished. That’s what refills the pot.

It’s what helps you pick yourself back up after a failed IVF cycle. It’s how you hear a pregnancy announcement without spiralling. And it’s what will help you cope with whatever comes next, including pregnancy and motherhood after IVF.

So, should you take a break?

You don’t need to stop IVF to stop running on empty. You need to give your stress somewhere to go, and you can start that now.

You don’t have to wait until this cycle is over. For me, that day never came.

Want to hear the full conversation? Listen to Episode 18 of Ready. Set. IVF.

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