The Infertility Stress Series Ep 2: Why "just be positive" is BS (and why it's making your stress worse)

If you've ever Googled "does positive thinking help IVF" at 2am, after another round of people telling you to "just stay positive", this one's for you.

Because I need you to hear something.

Your negative thoughts are allowed. Toxic positivity is the real problem here. And the pressure to stay positive through IVF is doing more damage to your stress levels than your doubts and fears ever could.

Let me show you why.

The 9:47am phone call

Picture this. It's day one after your egg retrieval. Your clinic said they'd call between 9am and 11am with your fertilisation report.

It's 9:47am. Your phone hasn't rung.

You've checked it's on loud. Twice. You've refreshed the patient portal four times in the last ten minutes, even though you know updates don't come through there. You're staring at the clock, doing the maths on how many minutes past nine it is, like that number actually means something.

Your stomach is in knots.

And if you're honest, you're not feeling confident. You're comparing this cycle to the last one. You're planning for bad news. Will you do another retrieval? What would you do differently next time?

Here's what you don't realise in that moment. You're already in a stress cycle. Your body has been in threat mode since you woke up and checked your phone, and it hasn't had a single chance to come back down.

Why "just stay positive" makes IVF stress worse

So you finally say it all out loud to a girlfriend. You share your doubts.

And she says, "Just be positive."

Something happens inside you right then. Emotionally, yes. But physically too.

That advice is landing in a body that's already flooded with cortisol. Your heart is already racing. The rational, thinking part of your brain has already clocked off for the day.

So you don't get calmer. Honestly? It's infuriating.

You clench around the feeling you already had. And now there's a second job on top of the first one. You're still managing the stress, but now you also have to hide it. Fake it. Smile through it.

And on top of all that, you're carrying the guilt of feeling like you're failing at being positive.

That's a lot of jobs for one woman sitting by the phone.

Why people keep telling you to "just be positive"

When your friend says "just be positive", it feels like she's dismissing you.

What she's really doing is managing her own discomfort.

Most of us are programmed to look for the silver lining. Focus on the good. Be grateful. Nobody teaches us how to sit with someone else's pain without trying to fix it.

So when she sees you hurting, it makes her uncomfortable too. "Just be positive" is the fastest way she knows to make that discomfort go away for both of you.

Same goes for "everything happens for a reason" and "it'll all work out in the end". They're all trying to tidy up a feeling that doesn't want to be tidied.

What a grieving dolphin can teach us about support

I recently read a news story about a dolphin in Western Australia called Fraggle. Her two-week-old calf died.

I cried reading it.

For 11 days, Fraggle carried her baby through the water, balancing her on her back and keeping her close.

But she wasn't alone. Her pod stayed with her. They swam close. They checked in on her. They moved through the water beside her while she carried her baby and her grief.

They couldn't fix it. They couldn't bring her baby back. So they did something much simpler.

They stayed.

Humans are often desperate to fix grief or remove fear. That's where all the toxic positivity comes from. But what you need when you're in the thick of infertility is someone to see you in it.

So if you're not feeling positive right now, and you can't fake the silver lining, that's completely allowed.

Faking positivity keeps you stuck in the stress cycle

Here's the bit that matters for your stress.

When the people around you reach for "just be positive" instead of staying with you, you start faking it. For their comfort. For everyone's protection.

But pretending comes at a cost. It takes energy. Real energy. The kind your body just doesn't have to spare during IVF.

Your nervous system is already in threat mode. Cortisol is already pumping through your body. And now you're asking it to perform on top of that.

A healthy stress response goes like this: threat, react, recover.

When you're faking it, your body never gets to the recover part. It becomes threat, react, threat, react, with no recovery in sight.

So "just be positive" doesn't calm you down. It keeps you stuck in the exact cycle you're trying to get out of.

Does positive thinking help during IVF? Here's what your nervous system says

Even if faking it didn't cost you anything, positive thinking was never going to calm your body down. And that comes down to how you're wired.

There's a nerve in your body called the vagus nerve. Think of it as a superhighway between your brain and your body: your gut, your heart, your organs.

Around 80% of the communication on that highway is what's called afferent. It runs from your body up to your brain.

Only around 20% is efferent, running from your brain back down to your body.

So when you try to think your way into feeling calm, you're sending a message down the road that only carries 20% of the traffic.

Your stress reaction is physical. It lives in your body. Trying to fix it with your thoughts means taking the smaller highway in the wrong direction.

Your thoughts were never going to out-talk your body. That's just how we're built.

And the vagus nerve matters so much because it's the main nerve of your parasympathetic nervous system. That's your rest, digest, repair and recover system. It's the exact system "just be positive" is trying to reach.

The thinking part of your brain has already clocked off

There's a second problem.

The part of your brain that does the positive thinking, the planning, reframing and rationalising, is your prefrontal cortex. And that's exactly the part that goes offline when you're stressed.

So "just be positive" is sending a message down a road that only carries 20% of the traffic. And it's sending it from a control room that isn't even switched on.

No wonder it doesn't work.

How to calm your nervous system during IVF

Most of what we're taught about managing stress is top-down. Think different thoughts. Reframe it. Talk yourself into feeling calm.

That has its place. But on its own, it's working against your wiring.

Bottom-up work goes the other way. It talks to your body directly through breath, nervous system regulation, and the physical signals your body actually listens to.

When you work both ways at once, top-down and bottom-up together, that's when things start to shift. Because you've finally given your body a language it can understand.

This is why I work as a mind-body practitioner. IVF is emotionally stressful, and it's physically stressful too. So the way you manage it needs to work with your body as well as your mind.

So you can drop the pressure to stay positive

Let's bring it all together. Here's why "just be positive" keeps you stuck:

It gives you a second job. On top of the stress, you now have to hide it, fake it and change it. That keeps you in fight or flight with no recovery in sight.

It sends the message down the wrong road. Most of the communication between your body and brain runs from the body up. Thinking your way calm is taking the smaller road.

That smaller road hits a dead end. The part of your brain that does the reframing goes offline when you're stressed.

So your negative thoughts aren't the problem. They never were.

You can put down the pressure to think positively when you're stressed. It's a surface-level solution to a much more complex problem.

And if you need someone to stay with you in it, like Fraggle's pod, I'm here.

Want to hear the full conversation? Listen to Episode 15 of Ready. Set. IVF.

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