TWO IDEAS THAT POWERFULLY AFFECT YOUR FERTILITY.
Well, Hello everyone. This is Ben from My-Fertility.com. I want to go through an overview today of two ideas that powerfully affects your fertility. The first of those ideas are your health. Having a solid foundation of good health is something that powerfully affects your fertility, and secondly, stress. Stress is something that negatively affects your fertility, and actually undermines your attempts to conceive and get pregnant.
So we can just go back to a really basic understanding of us, if you remember this is where we came from. We didn't live in cities, we were in the natural environment in competition with other species for resources, and constantly exposed to threats to our existence, and this is the environment in which our reproduction systems were actually formed. So if you weren't healthy here, you are either going to be eaten or you would be ostracized by the group you are a part of, and you would just be left to die.
So it was the healthy animal that survived and got a chance to reproduce. So in this context our reproductive systems have evolved to function properly in a healthy body, and when we have a solid foundation of good health, everything in our body, all of our systems work properly and everything starts going our way. But the less good health we have, the more we start swimming against the stream, and the less likely it is for us to actually conceive and get pregnant.
So our health is a very important piece of the puzzle, for obtaining high fertility and getting pregnant. The second thing, that is the major element as we mentioned, is stress and how it undermines your fertility. So unlike earlier times, in modern life, in a modern civilization, we've developed a society to protect us from mortal threats. It's very unlikely that we are going to be eaten. We are taken care of things like foods, so that we are not so much in competition, actually we are not in competition at all. We have got very highly developed systems of agriculture, which provide a surplus of food for us, and we has social support systems, so even if we do get sick, or if we are disabled in any way, we have support systems to take care of us. So as many benefits as this gives us though, there are new threats that have emerged with our civilized society, and those come with technology. So the more technology is developed, we have things like TV, and most recently gaming, where we are not outside so much, we are actually inside, and we don't move as much. We are either sitting down or are on the sofa, on the sofa, and the result of this is obesity. Greater and greater prevalence of obesity.
Additionally, we have more pressures on us. Many women work full time as well, and then coming home there is still all the pressures of home, the responsibilities of home. In addition, we have a changing society, because of technology and all of the new ways of doing things, and the new ways of getting what we need and interacting with people that comes with that. Our societies are being remade before our eyes, and the way things are done, is changing rapidly, which creates a lot of uncertainty. With this comes time pressure, because there is less time for us to get everything done, than there is more for us to do. This often results having a poor diet or when we do prepare food, it's done with processed food, and in addition, lack of exercise, with the lack of time. So stress is ever present in modern day life, and it's probably affecting you, whether you are aware of it or not.
Why is this important? So you are probably asking yourself, what has this got to do with increasing my fertility anyway? Well, it has this to do with it. Even though, reproduction is necessary for our survival as a species, as individuals, on the individual level, reproduction is a lower level function. What that means is that, when our individual survival is threatened, when we are threatened as individuals through -- for example, malnourishment or poor diet, or we come under extreme physical stress from something. Our reproductive system is one of the first systems to stop functioning.
So under stress, it's the reproductive system that is not needed, so it's shuts down as the body focuses all of it's energy on the areas that are needed for survival. Now the best way to understand this, is to look at fertility on a continuum. At one end of the continuum you have good health, low stress, and with these two things present, you will have high fertility. On the other end of the continuum you have poor health, high stress, and when these two things are present, you have low fertility or no fertility at all. So somewhere right now, so right now you are somewhere, your fertility lies somewhere on this continuum, depending on how good your health is, and what level of stress is in your body. So you are either highly fertile, or you are less fertile, depending on how good your health is, and how much stress there is in your body.
So to clarify this a little, I just like to give the example of a female athlete, specifically a female athlete running a marathon. I chose marathon, because this is something where for short periods of time, there is this extreme stress, extreme physical stress that's put on the athletes body, and in the case of female athletes, they are generally in very good health. When they are not competing, they are not under much stress. So in any given circumstance, they are generally with very high fertility, and if they wanted to get pregnant, they usually can, without much trouble at all. But when they compete, and they reach the level of training where they have high, high levels of physical stress on their body, like as their training reaches at peak, they are running sometimes a 100 miles a week to get in the condition to try and win the race.
This puts extreme stress on their body, and they get to the point where they go from this end of the continuum where the physical stress reaches its peak, they go way, way down to the point where they actually stop, their cycle actually, their period stops, and for all intents and purposes, their fertility is -- they are infertile, for the period that they are going under this training, and they are experiencing this level of stress in their body. It doesn't come back until after they have finish their race, and they have finished their training, and they are no longer stressing their body so much, then the stress goes back down to this end of the continuum, and they get their cycle back, and for just about everyone after they retire, and they finish their career as athletes. They go on to have families and multiple children, many times.
So hopefully that illustrates, just the relationship between stress and fertility. So your overall health and the level of stress you live with each day, are two major influences on your fertility. If you are having trouble conceiving right now, if you are trying to get pregnant, and it's not happening for you, take a step back and examine the state of your health. Look at what you are doing, day-to-day as far as diet, exercise is concerned, and ask yourself what can you do to improve it? What can you do to improve your health? Likewise, take a step back and look at what is it that's causing you so much stress in your life, and ask yourself, what changes can you make to decrease stress or even remove stress from your life altogether? And hopefully that will help you to shed some light on the current situation and gaining an awareness of these two elements, and how they affect your life, and how they are affecting your efforts to currently get pregnant.
So I hope this has been helpful and if you'd like to learn more about increasing your fertility, go to www.My-Fertility.com, that's www.My-Fertility.com. Thanks a lot and we will talk again soon, bye now.
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