Ask any infertility patient their least two favorite words and I betcha, dollars to donuts, you’ll get the same two words every time:
“Just relax!”
Yes… let me just relax and all of my biological reproductive issues will just magically resolve themselves, right? I know, it’s maddening.
It’s such a common piece of usually well-intentioned advice, but let’s face it: “just relax” does a lot more harm than good. But yet we hear it all the damn time.
I recently wrote about my frustrations with “just relax” for The Seleni Institute. I talked to mental health professionals who work with infertility patients about why just relax is so damaging.
I also had a great conversation about the seemingly never-ending back-and-forth chicken/egg scientific debate about whether stress causes infertility and vice versa:
“My take is that the research about the relationship where stress causes infertility is really inconsistent,” says Elisabeth Morray, PhD, a consulting psychologist for the Harvard Vanguard Center for Fertility and Reproductive Health in Boston. Morray warns against rushing to find a causal relationship between stress and infertility based on the conflicting current research. Instead, she encourages her patients to focus on using stress-relief techniques as a way to deal with the inherent stresses of a lengthy treatment process.
There’s a lot more in my piece talking about some of the complicated relationship between stress and infertility.
Here’s another tidbit about why “just relax” can be so painful to hear:
Even worse, the expression transforms infertility from a medical disease into a goal someone hasn’t tried hard enough to achieve. “Telling someone to ‘just relax’ implies that they’re doing something wrong,” says Kristen Darcy, a fertility coach, motivational speaker, and author of Love and Infertility: Survival Strategies for Balancing Infertility, Marriage, and Life.
Ultimately, even if the comment came from a place of compassion and is meant to comfort someone, it usually does exactly the opposite.
I’ve also got some great advice on how you and your partner can deal with and respond to “just relax” out in the wild. You can read the full piece, “Just Relax” Is the Worst Thing You Can Say, at Seleni.org.
As someone who is dealing with infertility in our family, I find your article about stress and fertility confusing and contradictory. If research indicates that “The women who participated in some kind of group psychological interventions — especially those in the mind-body program — experienced increased rates of pregnancy during their fertility treatments compared to the control group who did not participate in any stress-relief support groups.” Why is it that a well intention comment (advise) to a love one be interpreted in such a despicable way. Obviously, it is very difficult for the average person to come with up with the “right” answer for someone who is distraught . Maybe an article on what to say might be more appropriate, but something tells me that unfurtunately there isn’t really anything one can say to sooth that kind of pain. It isn’t fair that when someone says to try and relax, that they are “implying that infertility is your fault”.
Perhaps it is best to not comment at all.
I do hate “just relax”, but honestly, I hate “just adopt” even more. Both are based on a ridiculous set of assumptions that have very little to do with the reality of the experience of infertility and everything to do with distancing the listener and trivializing the problem.