Welcome to IVF This, episode 32 Catastrophizing

Hello my beautiful friends and welcome to the podcast. 

Before we head into this weeks topic, I wanted to give you all a little update on our own IVF journey for round #2. A few weeks ago I mentioned that we completed our latest round and we had sent 3 little embabies off for genetic testing. Well, of the 3 we had one come back and it’s female!!

We’re honestly still in shock. I’ve talked a lot about it before but our odds weren’t like great due to age and our mutual fertility diagnoses but just having ONE more little shot at this is amazing.

This week, the week I’m recording this episode, I will have my baseline U/S to get my frozen embryo transfer started. We are hoping that we can have our transfer within the first two weeks of July and then all the prayers, wishes, good vibes, warm thoughts, that that transfer will stick and we will get pregnant and welcome another little person into our family. And yes, I’ve already started noticing little mommy and me dresses/ outfits and my best friends keeps sending me tiny little lemon baby outifts and in a stroke of what I believe to be God’s reassurances, because I do have a very strong faith story for myself and my family, I was cleaning out by sock drawer the other day and I found a little girl NEWborn outfit that we had purchased when we were pregnant with our first. 

We did not find out the gender the first time, because I had always wanted to do that and have that surprise so we bought a little boy going home outfit and a little girl going home outfit. I was sure I had lost it in the couple of cross country moves weve done in the past few years but we did not. It was still there, perfectly intact, at the back of my sock drawer (it’s placement in that particular drawer is beyond me but Who am I to question, right?)

So that’s it for us and our latest round. Hopefully in the coming weeks of the podcast I will have more updates to share with you all!

So, onto the topic at hand. 

Catastrophizing.

This might be one of the most common things that I notice my clients doing- some it’s glaring and some it’s very subtle but everyone does this- that’s right ladies, even ya coach. 

When I worked in corporate healthcare and I had a team of people under me, I would call these moments, the catastrophizing scenarios “hair on fire moments” like you’re running around with your hair on fire. Some people talk about it it like running around like a chicken with their heads cut off. These are just descriptors of what is happening which is catastrophizing. 

Catastrophizing is the habit, because yes it’s a habit, of imagining all the potential FUTURE negative scenarios that could happen. When you do this, your brain begins to react as though they are actually happening. That’s why when we start to imagine things that could go wrong, it feels real, it feels like it’s actually happening or it feels almost like a prophecy of what will come to pass. 

I see this a lot with my clients around failed cycles, failed transfers, miscarriage, the idea of having multiples, getting medications mixed up (dosage, timing- not that they’ve actually done anything but imagining doing something). Not eating the “right” diet, not taking the “right” supplements. Like this comes up so often, it’s hard to give just a few examples for the sake of time. 

It can come up outside of IVF- your boss says they want to talk to you and your brain goes to “omg I’m about to get fired, and then I can’t pay my bills, and then I’ll be living out on the streets.” You get into an argument with your partner, and all of a sudden it’s “we’re going to break up, I’m going to have to have my kids alone and I’ll probably die alone”. 

My best friends, whom I love so dearly is a MASTER at this. She can go from I got frustrated with his kiddo because he spilled something all the way down to him being an adult and on a therapists couch recovering from the trauma of his, incredibly loving and dedicated mother, yelling at him for dropping the bowl of fruit loops. 

As always, I like to interweave these things between IVF and the other parts of our lives because I truly believe that how we do one thing is how we do all things. And all of us catastrophize in every area of our lives. 

Again, and I really want to emphasize this about catastrophizing is that when you do this, your brain does NOT know the difference between a REAL threat that is external to you (like a real catastrophe) and the perceived catastrophe that is in your mind. It genuinely cannot tell the difference- it interprets is all the same. Your brain only knows what you tell it. So when you’re catastrophizing, you’re telling your brain that you are not safe and so your brain, doing EXACTLY what it’s supposed to in moments when it thinks safety is at risk, dumps out all of the adrenaline and cortisol – which then reinforces to your brain and your body what whatever it is that you’re thinking is ACUALLY happening to you. The part of your brain that controls this, your limbic system, specifically your amygdala, is responsible for those fight, flight, or freeze hormones. And so when we are catastrophizing, we are actually engaging that very primitive part of our brain that has kept us alive for thousands and thousands of years.

Any and All of this can happen while you’re sitting in your desk at work, laying in bed, or while you’re snuggling on the couch. Because it is all happening in your brain. 

This is, again, why these scenarios are so incredibly powerful for us. That’s why they feel so visceral, so real, so TRUE. Because to your brain it IS true. 

Isn’t that so incredibly fascinating?!?! I mean, I think it is. That our thoughts are so powerful we can actually trick our brains into believing we are in danger. 

How many of us, when we were kids would get freaked out running out of a dark room, like actually to the point where we would feel something behind us- THAT is the power of our thinking. 

I think that there are lots of reasons as to why we do this, this catastrophizing. For some of us, it comes from our families of origin. Maybe our parents are “worst-case scenario” people. Maybe you grew up in a household of having scenarios like this verbalized to you and so it was never anything other than second nature. 

There are cultural influences, like actual cultures that tend to have a stronger cultural predisposition to this. There are professions that lean very heavily into this- I’m thinking of medicine, law, engineering- things like that. Things where all angles must be intensely interrogated to avoid injury or malpractice or something. 

All this to say, I want to normalize that this is something all of us do- whether its because of how we were raised or whatever- it is not a fault that you have if and when it happens. 

We just want to be aware that it IS happening and that there are steps we can take to get our logic brain back in the drivers seat. 

So there are some schools of thought that talk about offering your brain reassurances when you’re experiencing this. And I don’t necessarily ascribe to that. I think for most of the time, when we are in the throws of catastrophizing it is almost lip-service to offer your brain reassurances. Now, I’m not saying that by doing that you’re doing it wrong- I don’t believe there are rights and wrongs- I’m just not sure that that’s the most effective mechanism for calming that particular part of your brain down. 

I will say that if you’re experiencing genuine panic, that is not the time to do cognitive work. If you absolutely cannot focus because the emotions that you are experiencing are so powerful then you need to utilize some grounding techniques before you move on to the more cognitive aspects that I am going to talk about in a moment.

I’m going to give you a few examples of grounding techniques to help in those really heightened emotional moments, this is by no means an exhaustive list, mind you.

But try a count down:

5 Things you can see

4 Things you can hear

3 things you can touch

2 things you can smell

1 thing you can taste

You can also mix that up with colors or something else, like:

Find 5 things that are blue

4 things that are yellow

3 things green and so on

These are also great techniques to use with kiddos when they are experiencing really big emotions.

The next two are more tactical ones:

Take off your shoes, go to a patch of grass, backyard, front yard, sidewalk, whatever, and stand in the grass for a few minutes. Allowing yourself the opportunity to feel the grass on your feet a reconnect from there

Running cold water over your hands for a couple of minutes can also help ground you as well. 

If you get on Pinterest and search grounding techniques, you will have SOOOO many options to choose from. 

I wanted to talk about this because I think for a lot of us, we just want to fix whatever it is we are feeling so we try to think our way out of it. But that isn’t going to be effective if you are still deeply locked into that fight or flight instinct

. So that’s why taking a few minutes to ground yourself, if you’re feeling really overpowered, it a great way to re-center and THEN move into more cognitive work.

Ok, so now the cognitive work.

I mentioned earlier that I thik that sometimes offering your brain reassurances can sometimes be lip-service and let me tell you why. When you tell yourself a reassurance like, “it is ok, or it will be ok” that doesn’t really quiet down the part of the brain that is screaming, “but what if it isn’t. But what if it doesn’t” – right, you’re not actually stopping the or calming the brain but you’re unknowingly perpetuating that spin cycle that we get caught in.

My suggestion is to allow yourself to go down the rabbit hole. I’ve talked about the concept of giving your brain equal air time and this is another great example of what that looks like. 

Your brain will always stop you at the part that it thinks is the scariest- which is usually the unknown. That’s where the brain tends to be the most afraid because our brains like processes and procedures, it like to know what to do. So, it’s gonna want to get stuck on the scariest part. 

So let’s take one of the scenarios that I described at the first of the episode. 

The question of, “what happens if my transfer fails?” Most of us will stop ourselves at something like, “I don’t know how I would handle that. I don’t know what I would do. I don’t think I would ever be happy again. I don’t know if I could keep going. What if I fall into the  grief hole and I’m never able to get out”- BTW these are real things that I have either thought myself or have had clients tell me.

Play that scenario out, as fact based as you can. It’s the morning of beta, you do the blood test, then you get the call. You hear the words, “I’m so sorry but the test was negative.” 

What are you going to do? 

When I posed this to one of my clients this is what she told me.

I guess I will cry. Probably run a bath, maybe drink a glass of wine, order greasy food, and go to sleep. 

YES! When she slowed her brain down for a few minutes, stopped the spin cycle of “I don’t know” she was able to calmly guide herself through how she would grieve if her Beta was negative, which we found out a few days later that it was, unfortunately. 

But when she was able to logic her way through the steps that she kept telling herself she didn’t know, she found that the other side was not as scary. Obviously the scenario is the LAST thing we WANT to have played out but it doesn’t mean that we cannot handle what could come to pass. 

Break down, step-by-step how you think you will handle or manage a given situation. You don’t have to know the entire process, like down to the organic minucia lever- just enough to know what that first, or maybe even second step would be. It kind of reminds me of that song from Frozen 2 sung by Kristen Bell who I one day pray I get to meet – called, the next right thing. In the song, she is in the grips of despair, grief, and loss and she is reminding herself that she doesn’t HAVE to know the exact path next. IN fact, that would be too overwhelming for her, so she just needs to take the step. That’s all that we’re talking about here. 

 What I think you’ll find, and certainly what I have found is that when you start doing this, your brain will calm down enough to actually believe the smaller step thoughts like, Oh, well, I’ve felt grief before. I don’t like it but I didn’t fall into any kind of grief hole that I couldn’t get out of then so maybe that’s the same thing now.” 

Your brain might also start to realize that the terrible outcomes that you think could happen, logically probably won’t. 

One of my clients, she told me she was so scared of their IVF cycle failing because in her mind the reason they had to do IVF was “her fault” -because she had endometrioses. And that her partner will want to leave her if they couldn’t have kids together. 

So, 1) we spent a lot of time on releasing her guilt and shame around her diagnosis and 2) when we really started breaking down the intricacies of their relationship, they actually have an incredibly strong bond that supersedes IVF and family planning which is I think what the vast majority of us have with our partners and yet, I think that catastrophe of partner abandonment is a very real fear. 

But when we spent time together talking about it, she realized, “oh wait, we’ve actually had that conversation before and he outright told me that nothing would change between them if they never had a biological child and the most important thing in his life was HER. Whatever that looked like.” But because of her catastrophizing, she wasn’t even able to give space to the truth of what her partner had told her about his perspective of their relationship. 

But she couldn’t get there, until we slowed down a little bit. Until we played the scenario out to the worst possible outcome and what she knew to be true in her relationship. 

Once that happened, her brain calmed down enough about the threat to see that it was actually a very UNLIKELY scenario and not longer worth her time, energy, or peace to focus on. 

And that is absolutely something that you can utilize in ANY situation. 

A big part of mindfulness is slowing down, being very intentional with your thoughts and actions.

This is NOT somethgn that comes naturally to me- TO BE SURE.

I am sojmeone, like most of us I guess, that tends to get very impatient if things take too long. 

When was working on my bachelors degree, I worked at Hobby Lobby as a cashier. Say what you will, and I could say plenty, having those guaranteed Sunday’s off was NICE.

Anyway, I would pride myself on how quickly and efficiently I could ring up a transaction and get the next person and then next ansd so on. 

I would even have this vague sense of superiority toward other cashiers that I deemed “slower” 

This is obviously not like a point of pride NOW but I wanted to give this example beacues I am someone that likes to do things quickly. 

I dislike traffic, So SO very much because I feel like there’s other/ better things I can be doing with my time- traffic is inefficient and it’s a wastwe of time. 

I have specific steps that I take when I clean or prepare food or soemthgin that I have deemed efficient and therefore the best.

I know I am not alone in this! 

But THIS, this desire for urgency and efficiency is EXACTLY what our primitive brains are for. That function of your brain is how and why you can do all of those things so efficiently and knock out 3 work assignements in 45 minutes when it might take others double that to do. 

So it’s actually a really amazing facet of our incredible brains. 

It’s just a little problematic when it comes to these catastrophizing scenarios because our primitive brains doesn’t WANT us to slow down. Slowing down is inefficient. And our brains LOVE to be efficient. 

That’s why the catastrophizing can almost feel like a cascade, like an avalanche that you feel like you can’t even get out of. That is part of your habit brain- it’s doing what it does best, it just doesn’t know that what is doing is creating suffering. 

When you slow down. Literally, physically, mentally, you are bypassing that part of your brain. Your habit brain. And that takes WORK and focus. 

It won’t happen 100% of the time. No one bats 1,000. But the more you practice it, the better you will get at it. Often times, being able to notice what your brain is doing is much more helpful than the flawless execution of something. 

When we NOTICE what our brains are doing, when we can catch on to its bullshit, then we know where to look for it in other ways. Right? Your brain is ALWAYS looking for those loopholes so even stopping to notice, “whoa there brain, we ratcheted that up fast. Ok, let’s take a beat. What do we actually KNOW.” Start the conversation with yourself from there. And I promise you, you will change the outcome too. 

Alright, that is what I have for you today my beautiful friends. 

Remember, you have got this ad I’ll talk to you again soon.