Yes, I have said this before but it is so important and so easy to ignore that I want to keep saying it. When the body is stressed, it stops trying to conceive.
Ovulation is governed by a conversation between the brain and the ovaries. That’s the hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian (HPO) axis. The hypothalamus signals the pituitary gland, the pituitary signals the ovaries, and the ovaries send hormonal signals back up the chain. This loop has to run smoothly, in the right rhythm, for an egg to mature and release.
Stress has its own loop, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. When the brain registers a threat, it releases corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), which triggers a cascade ending in cortisol releasing from the adrenal glands.
These two systems don’t run in parallel. They compete.
The Two Systems Competing for Your Body’s Attention
CRH doesn’t just start the stress cascade, it also suppresses the pulsatile release of GnRH, the hormone that drives the whole HPO axis. Without a steady GnRH rhythm, the pituitary doesn’t get the signal it needs to trigger the LH surge, and without that surge, ovulation doesn’t happen, or happens late, or happens weakly.
The research here is mostly about chronic stress. This is sustained, ongoing activation of the HPA axis and in truth, we’re still not exactly sure how much stress, sustained for how long, is required to meaningfully disrupt a given cycle.
So this isn’t a case for treating every stressful moment as fertility-threatening. It’s a case for taking the nervous system seriously as a genuine physiological input into reproductive function. The two axes share circuitry. When one is chronically active, the other pays a cost.
Coming Back to Baseline
So the question is how much recovery a nervous system gets between activations. A body that returns to baseline between stressors is telling a different story to its HPO axis than one that stays keyed up for weeks or months at a time.
Coming back to baseline is what we do in fertility yoga. We pair movement and breath. We focus on activating the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the physiological counterweight to the HPA axis. Practised regularly, it’s a concrete way of giving the nervous system somewhere to land.
Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash