Why Meditation Makes Your IVF Anxiety Worse (and What to Do Instead)

“Have you tried meditating?”

If you’re doing IVF and you’ve admitted to anyone that you’re stressed, you’ve heard it. From your friend. From your mum. From a wellness ad at 11pm. It’s the go-to answer for anyone searching how to manage stress during IVF.

So you try it. You sit down, close your eyes, and try to clear your mind.

And the volume on your thoughts gets turned up.

If that’s you, keep reading. There’s a really good reason meditation makes your anxiety worse right now, and by the end of this, you might be crossing it off your list for good. Without the guilt.

My love-hate relationship with meditating

I’m your typical type A personality. A bit of a perfectionist. I like control. I’ve got an overactive mind. I like to analyse things, strategise things, and overthink things.

At least, that’s how I was when I was trying to conceive. I’ve done a lot of work to soften all of that since.

But back then, like everyone else, I was told to just meditate. So I made it my mission.

I had this whole vision in my head of how meditating was supposed to look. Sitting cross-legged in the mountains with a waterfall in the background. An hour of deep, silent meditation with absolutely zero thoughts. Some kind of out-of-body, enlightened experience.

I was chasing perfection, even in something that was supposed to be about letting go.

What actually happened when I sat down

Every time I sat down, it made me agitated.

The second I closed my eyes, my thoughts got louder. All of a sudden my nose was itchy. My butt was hurting. My leg would go to sleep. I’d remember something I’d forgotten to do that day. I’d be mentally writing my shopping list.

I’d set a timer on my phone, then cave and check it, convinced that surely time had passed.

Two minutes. I’d been sitting there for two minutes.

And the whole time, I’d berate myself for not being able to clear my mind. I’d say to myself, “If I can’t even meditate, how am I going to be able to have a baby?”

I’d get up pissed off and frustrated that I couldn’t even do that.

And I hated running for years for the exact same reason. Everyone swore it cleared their head and gave them beautiful thinking time. For me, it kept me locked in my head and piled more negative thoughts on top.

Different activity, same trap. Being alone in your own head with nothing to interrupt the loop.

Why meditation makes anxiety worse when you’re already stressed

Here’s what I wish I knew back then. My mind wasn’t broken. I wasn’t bad at meditating, or missing some gene for stillness that everyone else seemed to have.

And neither are you.

What was actually happening has a name and a reason behind it. Think of it like an echo chamber.

When you go still, close your eyes and remove every distraction, every noise and every task, you’d think that would create peace.

But if your nervous system is already activated, if you’re already stressed and scanning for threat, all you’ve done is remove everything that was competing for your attention. There’s nothing left to drown out your thoughts. So they don’t quieten down. They bounce around in there with nowhere else to go, getting louder every time they hit the walls.

It’s the same reason your head hits the pillow at night and every thought you’ve been outrunning all day shows up at once. Anyone who’s lived through two week wait anxiety knows exactly what that feels like.

That’s just what happens when you create total silence in a system that’s still sounding the alarm.

Your body is primed for action

It goes further than meditation failing to calm you down. For a lot of us, it can make things worse.

When your sympathetic nervous system is switched on, your fight or flight stress response, your body is looking for resolution. It wants to run. It wants to fight. It wants to do something with all that activated energy.

That’s what the stress response is for. Action.

So when you sit down, close your eyes and try to force total stillness into a body that’s primed for action, you’re fighting against it.

It’s like putting the handbrake on while your foot’s still flat on the accelerator. Nothing eases. If anything, you feel the tension of both at once.

When “failing” at meditation becomes more proof

If you’re wired anything like me, that failure doesn’t sit there quietly either. It turns into evidence.

Proof that you’re failing. One more thing on the list you can’t get right, right when you need to feel like you’ve got some kind of grip on all of this.

And it doesn’t help that everywhere you look, someone’s doing it perfectly. Sitting cross-legged, eyes softly closed, looking completely at peace. They’re on your Instagram feed. They’re in your meditation app. They’re in every wellness ad telling you this is the answer.

So now it’s “I can’t do this, and everyone else clearly can.”

Sound familiar?

Having a baby is something everyone else seems to do quite easily. For you, it’s costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, years of your life, your innocence and your sense of self, just for the chance.

So you don’t want meditation to be one more thing infertility strips from you or proves you can’t do. You push harder. You sit for longer. You download another app. You create more discipline.

You treat stillness like something to master, when it might be the wrong tool for where your body is actually at.

There is nothing wrong with you

I want you to really hear this.

You are not bad at meditating. You are not weak-minded or undisciplined or more broken than anyone who makes it look easy.

Your body is doing exactly what an activated nervous system is built to do. It’s looking for action.

Meditation was never the right tool to hand you in the first place. That’s why it matters so much to get support from someone who understands this specific kind of stress. Generic self-care advice and meditation apps were built for someone with a totally different nervous system to yours.

I’ve spent over eight years coaching hundreds of women through this exact thing. Type A women. High-achieving women who are used to being in control, suddenly thrown into a process where none of that works anymore. I know what helps a body like that because I’ve lived it, and because I’ve watched it play out again and again with the women I work with.

What to do instead: work with your stress

If meditation isn’t it, what actually works?

Anything that works with your body’s need for action.

If your nervous system is primed to do something, give it something to do. If you’re a natural do-er, the one who copes by staying busy and ticking things off, that part of you was never the problem. It just needs the right thing to do.

That might look like:

It’s the complete opposite of sitting still and willing your thoughts away. You’re working with the activation.

A walking meditation for the can’t-sit-still brain

Take walking. On its own, it’s just movement. Pair it with the right guidance and it becomes something else entirely.

Inside She Is... Ready, my online program for women doing IVF, there’s a walking meditation built specifically for the activated, type A, can’t-sit-still nervous system. It’s nothing like the generic version you’ll find in a mainstream app.

Consider this your permission slip

Let’s bring it together.

There is nothing wrong with you for finding meditation hard, especially in the space you’re in right now.

Meditation struggles on an activated nervous system because an activated body is looking for action. Take away every distraction and all that’s left is your own thoughts bouncing back at you. An echo chamber, and not a calm one.

What you need is something that works with that activation. Movement. Breath. Something that gives your body somewhere to put that energy instead of asking it to disappear.

You don’t have to force yourself to sit still and clear your mind. That was never the right tool for where you’re at.

So let’s cross that one off the list.

Want to hear the full conversation? Listen to Episode 17 of Ready. Set. IVF.

>> Listen on Spotify

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