Hello, hello, hello my beautiful friends. I’m so happy to be talking with you all today. Especially about uncertainty, one because it is one of the primary things that I talk with my people about. I mean, hello, uncertainty is like hallmark of infertility and fertility treatments. And two, because it is very topical for me. If you’ve been following along the last few weeks, you will know that I have a transfer coming up, and I am in the middle of all kinds of uncertainty. 

This is the last transfer, of our last embryo, for our last cycle of IVF. Before we went into this cycle, my husband and I really spent a lot of time talking about and coming to terms with this being our last cycle. I call it the “fire sale” cycle- everything must go. 

I just turned 37 and hubs will be 40 in just a few months, and this was like a promise to ourselves and our family that we would do one more round and if it’s successful then amazing and if not, we are already in love with our lives and our family and so we feel very at peace with that. 

Now, all that to say, that even as at peace as we feel, we still experience the fear and anxiety that is often associated with uncertainty. I talk about this a lot but there is, like a very specific finality to IVF. 

Right? It’s very binary.  

Either you react to the meds or you don’t

Either you have eggs to retrieve or you don’t

Either those eggs are mature or they’re not

Either those eggs fertilize or they don’t

Either those fertilized eggs develop to blast or they don’t

They’re either chromosomally normal or they’re not

Either there’s implantation or there’s not

And I think it’s that sense of finality that really feeds the discomfort of uncertainty. 

The trick about anxiety is that it is one of the things that the human brain likes the LEAST, and yet it is probably the most prevalent and reliable things in this world- uncertainty. You know the saying that the one thing we can be certain of is that nothing is certain. So we are confronted with uncertainty, literally every moment of our lives. Everything outside of us is uncertain and not subject to our control. And, as many of you have experienced, even things inside of us are uncertain and not subject to our control. It is in the fabric of every part and every moment of our lives and yet our brain despises uncertainty. You would think those two could get along just from the sheer amount of reps they have working together. But alas, here we are. 

So we’re going to talk about what it is, why our brains hate it, and how we can better manage it.

Let’s level-set from the jump that we cannot avoid uncertainty. I know all of us control freaks (myself is absolutely included in that) think that we can avoid it if we can control things. We go through these super-elaborate mental gymnastics to try to avoid uncertainty. We pretend it doesn’t exist or try to control things even though almost all of the things that we try to control can never be controlled.

So, for me, in preparation for our transfer, I find myself trying to control the people. My husband, what he’s doing, how he’s responding to things. Trying to control my kiddos. And finding myself getting SUPER frustrated when the people don’t cooperate- because they’re’ ya know, people. So I started noticing that I was getting a touch controlling and so I started doing some work around that and what I uncovered was that I was feeling uncertain about our upcoming transfer and, because our brains hate uncertainty, I was trying to “create” control in the face of uncertainty. Now, this was a VERY unconscious thing, right. Like it is for most of us. I wasn’t consciously thinking. Wow, I feel really out of control about this upcoming cycle so I’m going to hyper focus on the behaviors of the people around me so that they will behave in the way that I want them to so that I can feel better. Unless you are some sort of, IDK android or something, most of us cannot narrate our thoughts, feelings, and actions like that. But when I sat down and did some paper thinking, that was the think, feel, do cycle that I identified. 

I often compare the IVF process and building a business because they both kind of require us to be committed to believing in the possibility of the goal. Not necessarily complete commitment to the belief that it WILL happen, but certainly in the belief of its “possible.” When you first start a business, you agonize over every potential client. Just like how in IVF you agonize over every potential scenario. Every data point is make or break, every test, every wait- it’s excruciating. When you first start a business, or IVF, in a lot of ways it can be a real rollercoaster of emotions, if you have an unmanaged mind. That was absolutely me, during our first few years of infertility and during our first round. I had just be introduced to coaching a few months before we started and so I was just learning about the things and the frameworks that I teach you all but I was very much on the rollercoaster. 

I share this with you, because I want you all to know that I have absolutely been there. My anxiety used to consume me. Constantly ruminating and replaying things. It’s totally normal for old patterns to come up at deeper and deeper levels of your work. Just because I am much more aware of my thoughts and feelings doesn’t mean that the same patterns don’t come up for me during this IVF cycle, or in my business. We all experience anxiety around uncertainty.

So what is uncertainty? It’s literally not being certain. Not being sure. 

I think for our brains, the really scary part of uncertainty is not knowing what will happen in the future. The fear of the future. I think, intellectually, we all know that uncertainty is a part of our moment-to-moment human experience. The only certainty we have is that we are currently alive and that someday we will die- that’s it. 

Uncertainty is a natural state of life and existence and yet we fight like hell against it. Why?

Because to our primitive brains, uncertainty means that we could die at any moment- which technically is true. But our brains have evolved to avoid death, at all cost. To avoid danger at all cost. Ergo, we are terrified of uncertainty and do all that we can to avoid it. 

I think one of the primary ways that we try to avoid uncertainty is that we make up stories in our brins about how things will be- so that we can pretend we know what’s coming. Think about how much time you spend thinking about the future or worrying about what will come and trying to prepare for it. And all of that is because of your fear of the uncertain, the unknown. 

Here’s the kicker- we are so afraid of uncertainty that we would rather make ourselves miserable NOW with our worries and forecasting and fretting just so we can THINK we are prepared to be miserable in the future! I mean, c’mon brains!

We try to control everything. 

Our bodies.

How we look.

What other people think of us (think people pleasing)

Control our environment

Control friends and family

All. The. Things

All because we fear the unknown. The uncertainty. 

But I’m not going to stop there. Because This is the most important part and the part that we don’t really think about. What we actually fear, is not the thing that might happen, right the situation or circumstance. Circumstance never causes our feelings. A circumstance happens and then we have a thought about it- that’s how it works. So a circumstance is not what we’re fearing. What we fear is what we might think and feel in the future. We are terrified of uncertainty because we are uncertain about how we will think and feel in the future. And because we’re not taught about our thoughts and feelings and we believe thoughts and feelings just happen to us, that our experience of life comes from the outside, so the idea of this feels out of control and so we fear not knowing what we will feel and why. 

In essence, we are afraid of our own minds and bodies. 

We are afraid of the thoughts we may have and the sensations we might feel. 

I’m going to say that one more time, because I think it’s so important to REALLY understand- we are not afraid of the thing happening, whatever it is. WE are afraid of how we will think about what happened and how we will feel about what happened. 

So we’re afraid of uncertainty because we don’t know when or if those things will happen. Yet, nothing in our lives is certain. Our jobs are not certain, our relationships are not certain, our health is not certain, none of this is certain. Getting comfortable with the discomfort of uncertainty is how we start to break through that anxiety and how we manage uncertainty. 

I’m sure you were probably hoping for like strategies to create more certainty, I get it. But the key is to stop buying into the illusion of certainty that many of us have created. This illusion that we buy into so whole-heartedly and yet we still don’t feel any better. We fight so hard to cling to this illusion and end up feeling terrible because we’re trying to control things that are uncontrollable. Uncertainty is an emotion and the first step with any emotion, is to allow it to be there. 

So many of us, myself included, don’t like to be uncomfortable. So when we experience an uncomfortable emotion we try to solve for it immediately. But emotions are not a problem to be solved. They are a thing to experience. If we try to force ourselves to let go of an uncomfortable emotion 1) that shit doesn’t work, at all. 2) usually what happens is when we can’t get to a more comfortable emotion, then we shame ourselves for “not doing it right”- we don’t need that extra garbage in our lives, so we start with processing the emotion that we are currently experiencing.

It’s the NOW process for allowing feelings- I go through it in detail during the Feel better NOW podcast episode- so check that on out.

But the first step is to notice and name the emotion. A lot of us will probably name it Anxiety. Which isn’t wrong. It is a facet of anxiety. If you’re swarming around with a bunch of “I don’t know’s” or “What if’s” that might be a good indicator that uncertainty is underneath that anxiety. 

Second step is to open up to it. You don’t have to act like the uncertainty is your best friend but we also don’t have to treat it like it’s a pariah or leper or something. WE can just sit with it and let the emotion be there. 

And the third step is the witness the emotion- which is to describe to yourself what the emotion feels like in your body. Not what your thoughts are about how the emotion feels like in your body. 

Let me give you two examples: 

1. It feels like I’m never going to take a deep breath- this is a thought about the feeling

2. Theres a heavy weighted blanket of bricks on my chest.

Do you see the difference? When you’re dropping into your body to feel your emotions, to describe your emotions, your brain is not invited to the party. 

You can’t out think an emotion and you can’t out act an emotion. Your emotions are vibrations in your body that need to be felt. Even with someone who self-coaches, daily, like myself I still feel the discomfort of uncertainty. If the nature of life is uncertain and the human brain detests uncertainty, then it’s a really good bet that even with a managed mind, sometimes you’re going to experience discomfort or anxiety around uncertainty. It becomes a problem only when you believe we should NEVER have to feel this way. It’s only a problem if we believe we are entitled to not have to feel it. 

This IVF or IUI process, this infertility journey is very uncertain. We do the thing, we take the supplements, we do what our doctor says, we inject the meds, we do all the things and yet the outcome is completely uncertain. It’s kind of a fantasy to tell yourself that getting pregnant or having the baby will eliminate uncertainty from your life. The uncertainty will just change and morph into another area of your life because that’s what it’s supposed to do.  

So, when I am experiencing anxiety related to uncertainty, I will remind myself that this is how it’s supposed to feel. This helps me a lot with the O part of NOW, the open up to it part. I’m not telling myself that I shouldn’t feel this way, which is what a lot of us do. 

Once you’ve allowed for and processed those emotions, then you can start digging into what is really causing it. I mentioned it before but I think it bears repeating, but we’re never really afraid of the things happening or not happening, we’re always afraid of how we will think or feel. 

For so many of my clients, they fear what they will think and feel about themselves. That they’re losers or failures or something like that. Whatever mean thought you can think of. Some are overt mean thoughts like I’m a piece of shit or I am too selfish to have a kiddo. Some are more insidious, like “I jinxed myself when I (whatever)” That’s like a really sneaky thought that says “I’m to blame for this thing that happened.”  I think a lot of us use that kind of sneaky language but it’s still a way to blame ourselves for something we had no control over. This was one that came to me after our failed transfer. The time leading up to the transfer and while we were in the 9 day wait for the blood test, I kept feeling like something was off. I would push past that thought because I was so hopeful that it would work. Then when we got the news, I remember thinking, “See, I knew something was wrong and I should’ve trusted my gut.” That thought PLAGUED me for weeks. It took several coaching sessions to root it out, too because it was so deeply ingrained.  I blamed myself. I genuinely blamed myself. And this was my brains back-door, sneaky way of reinforcing that blame.

I’ve come to realize that I think I need to know what is going to happen, that its vitally important for me to know the outcome- or at least that’s what my brain tells me. Because if I guess wrong, then I am going to blame myself. Or another one is that you had an idea to do or try something, maybe it was a test you wanted to ask your RE about, or doing acupuncture, or hell even during a test in high school and you had a thought but you didn’t follow it, only to find out that the first thought was right. Then you get the crap prize of shaming yourself and beating yourself up for not “trusting” yourself. 

You tell yourself, I should’ve trusted myself.” That sounds like a nice thought. But it’s like pretty poison. So many of us struggle with trusting our bodies. Women are socialized to distrust their bodies. We follow diets that tell us to eat when we’re not hungry to avoid eating when we’re about to pass out. Then we go through infertility and we feel like we’re at constant war with our bodies because we blame our bodies for miscarriage, or failed cycles, or failed transfers. Almost as if our bodies are outside of us. Because we’re not connected to them. This that we are not connected to, are VERY easy to blame.  

So we already distrust our bodies, we are constantly blaming, shaming, and judging ourselves and we think we’re collective evidence in our brains for why our bodies need to be shamed, blamed, and judged.

But all of this evidence is really just your thoughts. Then when another opportunity presents itself to do the judgments, blame, shame game we continue to build the evidence. Then we go back and analyze and reanalyze our “so called evidence”

So while I was self-coaching on the failed transfer and when I am confronted with uncertainty, like right now, right before our next transfer, and I want to get out of this back and forth, push and pull- I had to really questions the idea that it would be better for me to know the outcome ahead of time. 

And I think that’s the idea that underlines SOOO much of this process. I think that’s why we have those Pee on A stick addicts- full disclosure I am not one but if that’s you boo, you do you. 

BUUUT the question I keep coming back to is why do I need to know the outcome ahead of time? The only reason that I would need to know the outcome ahead of time is if I was going to leave myself at the mercy of my unmanaged mind. 

If I know that I can feel any emotion, that I have agency over my thoughts and I can choose how I want to think and feel in any situation, then I don’t have to try to avoid a particular outcome. I don’t have to try to control things in an effort to manipulate things to feel better. 

In preparation for our final transfer, I am allowing myself to really go down the happy path and what I will think and do, but also the scary path and what I will think and do then. I’m giving myself several thoughts that create comfort and safety within myself should we not get the outcome we hope. 

Thoughts like, “I know how to take care of myself no matter what happens.”

“It is ok to grieve right now.”

“I am sad and I’m capable of feeling sadness.” 

Notice how there’s no sweet pretty, daisies, and unicorns with rainbows coming out of their asses thoughts. 

Just acknowledgment of what I could be thinking and feeling. That if we don’t get the outcome we hope for, it doesn’t mean there is something fundamentally wrong with me. It doesn’t mean I have to turn on myself, which makes the grieving process infinitely more painful, when you add dirty pain into the mix. 

And I think this is so important to know, If I choose to feel an uncomfortable emotion if we do not get the outcome we hope for, and yes I said “choose” because I get to choose how I feel. If our transfer doesn’t stick or if there’s a miscarriage, I will choose to feel sadness and grief. I want to feel sadness and grief over that. And because I am reminding myself of that now, I don’t have to fear that they’re going to happen to me. I’m not willing them into existence, that’s not how that works. But I am creating safety within myself that if that comes to pass, I will know I can handle it. It stops being something I fear because it’s not something that is going to happen to me against my will. 

That’s the little places, these little moments where we get to choose our power. WE get to choose. I get to choose ahead of time, without knowing the outcome then I have taken complete ownership of the one and only thing I have control over at the time, myself. 

And that is what I wish for all of you too.

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

I’ll talk to you soon.