Welcome to IVF This, Episode 103- The drama threshold and Making decisions

Hello, hello, hello my beautiful friends

I hope you are all doing so, so well today! I am doing well, in my little corner of the world. In Texas, where I live, we have a little event that happens every year starting around December, and it’s called Cedar fever. Now, if you’re not familiar with Cedar Fever, that probably means you don’t live in central Texas but if you’re familiar with seasonal allergies then you have a pretty good idea of the sheer misery that cedar fever creates. Starting in Late December every year, male mountain cedar trees release pollen with such effervescent ambition that I can only imagine the intent is for this particular tree is to repopulate the world with ONLY these trees. Like humans, animals, all other organisms be damned. So, I haven’t checked today, but I think the pollen count of Austin is around 50 billion parts per billion, give or take 15 billion, so if I sounds at all like I’m dying- that because it’s true. I am kind of dying but it happens every year and my track record for survival remains unsullied, so I’m optimistic. 

But at any rate, let’s talk about some stuff! Before I get into the topic today, I do want to take a second and remind you all that I still do mini sessions. The mini session is 30 minutes of coaching, on whatever topic that you would like help with. It’s completely complimentary- there’s no strings attached. IF you like the coaching experience, we can talk about what it would be like to work together, logistics and all of that, once that 30 minutes is over but we don’t use the coaching time to talk about that. So, you can find the link to schedule a mini-session on my website, www.ivfthiscoaching.com, under “work with me” or it's listed in the links in my bio on my IG and FB pages, both at @IVFthiscoaching.

Alright, let’s get into today’s topic which is all about making decisions. There are no shortage of decisions to be made during infertility or during fertility treatments. Really there are no shortage of decisions to be made as just a person living your life but I like to keep it focused on infertility and IVF. 

Things like: when or if to see a doctor, when or if to start treatments, what type of treatments, finding a doctor you want to work with, or finding a new doctor you want to work with, clinic shopping, what type of supplemental support you might want (supplements, acupuncture, therapy, coaching, energy healing), you name it- there’s a choice to be made. 

There are some people in the world that describe themselves as “indecisive” just kind of at baseline. Then there are some of us, when dealing with overwhelm, that will shut down in the face of decisions. Maybe you try to bury your head in the sand, maybe you ask someone you trust to take the responsibility of making that decision, whatever the case may be- so I’m going to talk to about WHY we often get paralyzed in our thinking and decision making and how you can get unstuck and feel more confident in your decisions, to help yourself make powerful decision, and I’m going to share with you a brain hack that I actually use for my ADHD to get things done.

If we were to boil everything I’m about to say down to one succinct statement, it would be, the reason you might be struggling with making a decision, whatever that decision may be, is because you want to make the “right” decision. This desire, this need, to feel like you’ve made the “right” decision is so often why we feel stuck. How many of you run through scenario after scenario, after scenario, trying to figure out “if I do this, and then this happens, and then this might be the result?” Firstly, I would guess that is a nearly unanimous human experience. 

Secondly, this is an aspect of Perfectionism. The idea that there is one “right” choice, is inherently flawed. And thirdly, and this should come as no surprise, by decision paralysis is caused by your thinking.

So, the first thing I want to make sure you all understand is that decisions aren’t right or wrong. Decisions just are. Think about it. If there were such a thing as an objective right or wrong decision, then everyone would agree all the time on decisions. But they don’t. What might be a “good” decision for you might be a “bad” decision for me- based on our own physical, emotional, psychological, or financial needs or bandwidth. Good vs bad, right vs wrong is subjective. They are determined by the individual. It’s subject to interpretation. Good or bad, Right or wrong decisions have nothing to do with evidence, with data, with facts. We think they do, but they don’t. And if we want to learn to make powerful decisions, we have to understand this. If there was an objective way to always make a right decision, then we could just document the process and follow it. But there isn’t and we can’t. 

And this might sound like bad news, but I promise you, it isn’t because if decisions aren’t objectively right or wrong, then we can decide even after the fact, even if some people don’t agree, that we made the best “The right” decision for us. We get to be the boss of whether a decision is right or wrong. Since the only way for us to decide if a decision was good or bad, right or wrong, is by judging it retroactively, you can proactively decide the opposite. 

Let me give you an example from my own journey. Many of you know that in May 2021 we went through our second full round of IVF. Previously, we had done one full round and two transfers- one successful and the other not. On paper, this probably didn’t look like a great choice. I had just turned 37, I have one ovary, diminished ovarian reserve, this would be completely out of pocket bc we don’t have insurance that includes fertility treatment. We had just had our hearts shattered about 8 months prior, with that failed transfer. We already had two beautiful kiddos- like I am not immune to the fact that this decision did not make “sense.”

Now most of the feedback we got was good. But there are always those that disagreed. There were many that questioned why. Why would we put ourselves through all of that again? Why would we spend another $30K for a possibility? And, as predictable, many people offered their unsolicited opinions. And we do have the financial means to do another cycle, I mean not just like hanging around, but it was available to us- but I would also love to have paid off my student loan debt with all the money it’s taken us to make babies. But my husband and I spent a lot of time thinking, reflecting, talking about it, and praying about it. It wasn’t a decision we made lightly and a lot of our work around the decision was understanding that we are walking into this knowing, full well, we could have our hearts broken. It was like we were laying down $30k to put our own hearts on the chopping block. 

But even in the presence of differing opinions, even in the presence of, you know, a lot of uncertainty, even in the face of the possibility of a tremendous amount of pain, I just decided (proactively) that I made the right decision- well, “we” mores specifically but you get it. I decided what my reasons were for making that decision and I really liked the decision that I had made. And it was one of those kind of a big moments, I’ve had them before and they are always a revelation for me, but when I truly let that sink in that nobody else got to decide what was right or wrong because it didn’t objectively exist and I could stop worrying about, “Will I make the right decision? I might make the wrong decision.” Nope, it wasn’t even an option to entertain that, inevitable, thought spiral my brain would take me down. That does NOT mean that I never thought, “did we make the right decision?” because of course I did! I’m human and that is a 100% human thought. I just answered the question my brain offered me. “Did we make the right decision?” The answer was “yes,” we did. Because it was the right decision for us. After I’ve made a decision, and maybe my brain is wanting to drum up a little drama about it, one of the most effective ways to kind of turn down the volume on that is to tell myself, “I made the best decision I could, with the information I had available to me. And, I like all of my reasons for making that decision.” 

So you might be asking, well, what if the decision to be made, I don’t want to make it. I had a client recently that had experienced a miscarriage, following a transfer. Then the following month, she did a home pregnancy test and tested positive- she suspected it was a spontaneous pregnancy. So she went to her reproductive endocrinologist that did lab work and an U/S and the doctor concluded it was retained products of conception, and not a new pregnancy and advised my client to do a D&C very soon, so as to avoid any potential complications associated with RPC’s. My client really struggled with this decision. On one hand, she didn’t want to put her health or future reproductive options in jeopardy BUT she also didn’t want to end what might be a possible viable pregnancy. Right, there was no “good” option. And most importantly, she didn’t WANT the doctor to be right. She also didn’t want to have to make a decision like this. This type of decision, and what we talked about during our call, was that there wasn’t a scenario here that she would feel “good” after making the decision. Either choice would have pain. And I think this comes up for us a lot. Even when we talk about maybe taking time off between cycles or if we’re considering stopping treatments- there’s no path there without pain. You will have the pain and uncertainty of continuing on, or you will have the pain and uncertainty that comes with taking time off or stopping treatments all together. 

And what’s so fascinating about making a decision is that, really, the worst thing that can happen after you’ve made a decision is that you’re going to have a feeling. Seriously, the worst thing that can happen after you make a decision is that you’re going to have a feeling. Now that’s not minimizing the feeling you have or the intensity to which you will feel it- but rather an acknowledgement that the mental gymnastics that we do when we are trying to make a decision is all in service to the questions, “how can I do this thing and avoid pain?” And “pain” can look like many different things: grief, physical pain, doubt, uncertainty, an inconvenience- like pain can look like anything. 

BUT,  if you’re all in on feelings, if you’re willing to feel emotions – and remember, by the way, that we create emotions with our thinking – if we’re willing to feel the worst feeling, which for most of us is probably embarrassment, maybe foolish, ashamed, if we’re willing to feel that and we believe in our ability to handle any emotion, then letting one flow through you isn’t really that big of a deal. 

Plus, truly, and this is for real, if we’re the ones creating the feelings with our thinking, meaning that feelings only happen to us when we have a thought that creates them, the story we tell ourselves about the decision we made, will be the only reason we feel the way we feel. So we actually get to determine how we feel based on how we choose to think, no matter what. We can always choose to think that we made the best decision for us that we could at the time. 

When we make that choice, when we decide that we’ve made the best decision we can with the information we have available, that is the epitome of having your own back. And that’s what we’re here to learn how to do- to love yourself through the hardest of hards. 

So, let me tell you this brain hack that I use when I make a decision. I call it the “drama threshold,” which is like a categorization of things I am willing to manage my mind around, vs things I am not willing to manage my mind around. 

So, if I go back to my own personal example from earlier. I was willing to manage my mind around all of the uncertainty, the physical discomfort associated with an IVF cycle. That was something I was willing to do. I was willing to allow all of those feelings, all of those thoughts that inevitably float in. I was willing to hold the potential for enormous pain, should things not work out the way I hoped they would. 

What I was not willing, or rather less willing to manage my mind around, was the idea that we would walk away from the family of our dreams, that image that we had in our heads, without giving it one more try. 

Now that was us. 

It might be that you’re more willing to manage your mind around what it would look like in the reverse scenario- there’s no right or wrong. 

When I am describing the drama threshold to my clients I tell them, what is the threshold for your brain to not throw SUCH a fit that you cannot move forward with a decision. 

And my example is usually, when I set out for a run, there are some days that I want to run, say 5 miles, but my brain is kicking up ALLLLLL kinds of drama, “that’s too far,” “it’s too cold or hot,” it’ll take too long” whatever. Right like I can pretty much set my clock to my brain offering me all of this BS when it comes to my run. So, I establish a drama threshold. So maybe my brain will howl at the idea of 5 miles, but maybe it is more willing to accept 3 miles. So three miles is my drama threshold. It’s the point at which I can still make a decision, that supports the type of life that I want, but I don’t have to wade through a bunch of drama to get there, I don’t have to white-knuckle my way through it. Now, there are sometimes when I get to the 3 miles and I’m done. And that’s fine. Because when you set your drama threshold, you are also recalibrating the expectations you have. There are also sometimes that I can talk to myself as I am approaching that third mile and say, “well, since we’re already out here, we might as well just do the other 2 miles.” Either way is fine. 

I’ve used this hack for a long time, for many different things, because a huge part of ADHD is executive dysfunction, so I can glitch out when I am about to start something bc my brain goes through all the necessary steps to do the thing and it can become very overwhelming. 

So another example from a client is a woman that I’m working with, she’s gone through several rounds at this point and has had a lot of disappointing news come from her doctor and their office, to the point where she sees the office number pop up on her caller ID and she starts getting nervous, having heart palpitations, sweaty palms, the whole nine. And it got to the point where it was really challenging for her during stim cycles bc you get so many calls/ emails following your egg retrieval- the Day 1 fertilization report, some clinics do a day 3 blastocyst report, most do a day 5, 6 or even 7 report and then if you do chromosomal testing- and when you’re seeing the natural attrition or dwindling of your numbers, it’s really hard. So when we were talking about this, she decided that her drama threshold was that she was willing to manage her mind around waiting until ALL the information was available, rather than getting it piece by piece over several days. She liked her reasons, and when she went through her next cycle, she didn’t get a call from the clinic until her blasts were sent off for testing- she got all of her numbers right then. That was her drama threshold- finding it out all at once.

Now, all of that to say, no matter WHAT, I want you to decide you’ve got your own back. Making decisions around fertility treatments is tough. But it gets easier when you decide you won’t be mean to yourself afterward. No matter what happens as a result of a decision, beating ourselves up is optional. Your friends might not like it. Your family might not like it. You might be tempted to tell yourself you should have done it differently. Remind yourself that you aren’t psychic.  You made the best decision you could at the time. And with new data you can make a new decision. We live life forward. Be your own champion as you make whatever decisions are in front of you this week. That is what I want for each and every one of you. 

Ok, that is what I have for you this week. Have a great week and I will talk to you soon.