3 Switches That Helped My Mental Health Through Miscarriages and IVF
I'm not going to pretend I handled it beautifully. I didn't. There were stretches of time during my miscarriages and IVF where I was Googling whether pineapple core improved implantation at midnight, cancelling on friends because I couldn't face explaining why I wasn't drinking, and treating work like a threat rather than somewhere I could actually function. None of that is a criticism of myself, it was survival mode, and survival mode looks however it needs to look. But when I eventually came up for air, I noticed there were a few things I'd actively switched that had made a difference, not because they fixed anything, but because they gave me somewhere to put the nervous energy that was otherwise going to eat me alive.
The first was moving from constant rumination to what I'd call mindful distraction. I am, by nature, a person who wants to understand things, research things, find the answer. Fertility treatment is a really terrible context for that particular personality trait because there often isn't an answer, and the internet is extremely willing to pretend there is one. So I started signing up for random craft courses instead. Mosaics, terrariums, things that required my hands and my eyes to be somewhere specific and left no bandwidth for an internal monologue about what I could have done differently. It sounds almost comically simple but helped more than almost anything else.
The second was getting out rather than hiding away. I'd got very good at say no to invites. After-work drinks, birthday dinners, anything that involved other people being happy and normal and not in the middle of a crisis, I'd find a reason to skip. What actually helped was replacing some of that with things that got me outside and moving — walks with my closest friends, exercise, sunlight in whatever quantity the British weather was willing to offer. The connections that worked during that time were the ones that didn't require me to perform being fine. A walk is good for that. You're looking forward, not at each other. There's somewhere to be going. And when I needed to recharge rather than connect, I got much better at just letting myself do that without guilt.
The third shift was the one that surprised me most, and it's the one that's most relevant to the work I do now. I went from fearing work to leaning into it. For a long time I'd been treating work as a source of additional stress, something else to manage on top of everything else, another place where I might unravel if the wrong person asked the wrong question at the wrong moment. What changed it was a conversation with my MD where I asked for support rather than white-knuckling through on my own. Reframing work as something that could actually be a useful structure, a place where I was good at things, where the outcome wasn't dependent on my hormone levels or my egg quality, where I had some control. That year I was promoted to Director of Marketing and Communications. I got top review scores and a full bonus. The bonus paid for IVF, which felt appropriately circular. The confidence it gave me was something I hadn't expected to feel in the middle of all of it.
None of these were magic. They didn't make the grief smaller or the waiting easier or the losses less real. But they were things I could actually do, and in a situation where so much was out of my hands, that mattered more than I can really explain.
If any of this sounds familiar, I'd love to hear how you're navigating it — or what's helped you. You can drop me a message any time at jen@jenniferelworthy.co.uk
