Week 16: IVF, Control & Time Pressure: Why You Still Feel Behind During Infertility

I remember a point where doing less didn’t actually feel like relief. It felt like I was doing something wrong.

On the surface, everything looked like it was softening. I wasn’t pushing as hard. I wasn’t overloading my days the same way. I had created more space, more stillness, more time to breathe. And yet underneath all of that, there was still something tight. It wasn’t obvious. It didn’t scream for attention. But it was there in the way I moved through my day, in how quickly I made decisions, in how I felt this subtle pull forward like I needed to stay on top of everything or it might all slip.

At the time, I would have called it responsibility.

I would have said I was just being someone who cared, someone who was committed, someone who wasn’t willing to let things fall apart. It felt mature. It felt like growth. It felt like I had stepped into a better version of myself. But what I couldn’t see yet was how much of that was still coming from the same place. It was just quieter. More socially acceptable. Less chaotic on the outside, but still driven by that same internal pressure.

It took me a long time to recognize that control doesn’t always look like force.

Sometimes it looks like being prepared. Sometimes it looks like being thoughtful. Sometimes it hides inside planning, fixing, anticipating what might go wrong and trying to stay one step ahead of it. And because it looks so reasonable, it goes unnoticed. You don’t question it because it doesn’t feel like the problem. It feels like the solution.

But there is a moment where something starts to feel off.

Not enough to disrupt your life. Not enough to make you stop everything. Just enough to notice that even when you are doing all the “right” things, your body still feels slightly on edge. Your breath is a little shallow. Your pace is just a little too quick. You move through your day like you are managing something that hasn’t even happened yet.

That was the part I had to sit with.

Not fix. Not analyze. Just see.

Because the shift didn’t come from trying to change it. It came from being honest about it while it was happening. Catching the moment where I felt rushed before anything had actually gone wrong. Noticing the tension in my body when I was making a simple decision. Seeing how quickly I moved past things instead of letting myself be in them.

And for a while, nothing really changed.

I still reacted. I still moved too fast. I still found myself back in the same patterns. But there was a difference. I wasn’t fully inside them anymore. I was aware of them as they were happening, even if I couldn’t stop them yet.

That awareness felt small at first. Almost insignificant. Like it wasn’t enough to matter.

But it was everything.

Because it created a space between what was happening and how I responded to it. Not a big space. Not a perfect pause. Just enough to start seeing that I had a choice, even if I didn’t always take it.

That’s where responsibility started to feel different.

Not the heavy kind that blames you for everything. Not the kind that makes you feel like you have to get it right all the time. Something quieter than that. Something more honest. It wasn’t about controlling the outcome or fixing the pattern. It was about how I was meeting myself inside it.

In my breath. In my pace. In the way I spoke to myself when I noticed I had fallen back into something familiar.

There were days I caught it early and everything felt softer. There were days I caught it halfway through and had to sit with the discomfort of seeing it without being able to immediately change it. And there were days I didn’t catch it at all until it was over.

And none of that was a problem.

Because the shift wasn’t coming from doing it perfectly. It was coming from staying present with myself even when I didn’t.

Over time, something started to settle.

Not because life became easier or more predictable. But because I wasn’t holding myself in that same tight grip anymore. The urgency didn’t disappear all at once. It just stopped running everything. My body felt different. My decisions felt different. There was more space, not because I created it intentionally, but because I wasn’t constantly closing it without realizing.

And that changed how everything moved.

Not in a dramatic, life-altering way. In a quieter way than that. The kind of change you don’t always notice immediately, but you feel it when you look back and realize you’re no longer relating to things the same way.

It wasn’t about doing life better.

It was about being honest about how I was already showing up inside it. 

Listen Now: IVF, Control & Time Pressure: Why You Still Feel Behind During Infertility

Week 17: Fertility Burnout & the Trap of Self-Monitoring Your Healing During IVF & Infertility

 Let's Do This Together 💚

Monica 

Listen up, lovelies: Everything I share about health, diet, or fertility magic is my opinion. Yep, it’s all based on years of trial and error, study, reading, listening, and side-eyeing the nonsense out there. What worked for me might be a jackpot for you—or it might be a total flop. Bodies are weird like that. 🤷‍♀️

Let’s get one thing straight: I’m not a doctor, nutritionist, dietitian, or any other kind of licensed health wizard. If you need medical advice, run—don’t walk—to an actual qualified professional. Don’t come back here saying Monique told you to eat kale for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, okay?

As for the products I mention, they’re either what I used during my own infertility rollercoaster or what I wish I’d known about back then. No guarantees, no promises, and absolutely no refunds on your hope budget if it doesn’t work out.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, proceed with curiosity and, above all, discernment. You’ve got this. 💪✨

🌺 Book Your Fertility Breakthrough Session Today 

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Full Transcript:

00:00
Hello beautiful and welcome to the Finding Fertility podcast.

00:10
I'm Monica, your mentor in uncovering the hidden layers of your fertility journey. Together, we'll discover the right path for you within the six essential steps to creating the family of your dreams. We'll ditch the overwhelm, tune into your intuition, and build a vibrant foundation for your fertility. Whether it's through gut health, subconscious healing, or energetic alignment, you can unlock your body's natural power to get and stay pregnant.

00:37
Your fertility journey is all about radical responsibility and deeply believing that your body is on your side. It's time to stay consistent, embrace trust, surrender, and create the transformation you deserve. Fighting fertility does not diagnose, prescribe, or treat any fertility issues. What we do is empower you to take control of your health by uncovering the root causes holding you back. Let's do this together. Happy Frey, y'all. Welcome back to week 16.

01:07
where you are becoming the conscious mama you are born to be. And if you are showing up for yourself, continuing to show up for this work, no matter where you are in your journey, I am so proud of you because this goes so much deeper than a fertility journey. Yes, I'm here to get you the hell out of this phase, get you into the loving, joyful phase of trying to conceive.

01:36
of pregnancy, of motherhood. But if you're showing up for yourself despite wherever you are in this journey, be very proud of yourself because you are wanting to know how I am the ultimate creator of my reality. We are now entering the final phase of this series, but over the past 15 weeks, I hope you might have been learning something a little bit new, but really a lot of you, you're not learning anything new here. You've been seeing something familiar.

02:06
just a little bit more clearly. You've started by noticing your patterns, especially control. Not the obvious, yeah, I know I'm over controlling, the quiet ones, the easily hidden ones, the hidden ones in responsibility, fixing, planning, and managing. Then you saw how control turns into overdoing and how movement has become a way to cope, how doing becomes identity.

02:35
how pace replaced presence. And then we started getting into noticing how time has controlled you, not the clock, but that internal pressure of being behind, how that pressure became personal, how it rushed decisions, tightened your body, and narrowed your world. And hopefully slowly but surely without forcing anything, something has softened. Your pace has shifted.

03:04
urgency has loosened and stillness became less threatening. And hopefully none of this required heavy lifting. You became the ultimate observer. You gained the awareness and then you use your modalities and your practices that you already had and started linking that frequency, emotion, and the physical all together and really moving these patterns and getting out of the loops.

03:34
that you have been stuck into and they've been highlighted as hell through this journey. So now as we move forward, we're gonna turn towards responsibility. And I'm not gonna lie, some of it is gonna feel heavy because of the old patterns. People, we've got lots of patterns, okay? And some of it's gonna feel heavy because you already feel so responsible and you might even blame yourself for what is happening to you right now.

04:01
But I truly want you to know that radical responsibility with grace and kindness and love should not feel this heavy because you're gonna take that blame and that shame. You're gonna alchemize it and you're just here to take ownership of the present. You by now have seen how control over doing time pressure has been shaping your pace, your choices, your body.

04:30
So taking that radical responsibility now with not only awareness, but potentially action is the moment you recognize that you are not responsible for everything that happens, but you are responsible for how you meet it, how you react to it in your pace, in your breath, in your intention, in your stories, in the way you move, the way you react.

04:58
So this isn't necessarily about doing life better. It's about being honest about how you're showing up inside of life right now. Remember, the joy doesn't come when the baby comes. You have to trust me when I say this. Yes, they're going to bring you joy in ways that you've never felt joy ever before, but they are also going to highlight all the BS.

05:25
that's been repressed for years and you didn't even know was there. So this week, I want you to notice the moment you feel pulled forward, rushed, pressured, frustrated, and take radical responsibility without judgment of how you move through that or how you want to move through that. Maybe you do pause. Maybe you're like nervous as a- Hold up. I know the old way we would have done this, but we're not going to be that way anymore. We're going to do this. Or if you-

05:55
Forget, because remember I keep telling you the hardest part of this journey is to remember to break the pattern. If you forget and you move through that pattern like you used to, even if it's better, like you were at 100, now you're at 80, but you watch yourself move through that pattern at 80 and you're like, okay, here we are. No judgment. That's what I did. No one died, I didn't hurt anyone. Maybe I was just a little dick. Like maybe I just...

06:21
I mean, I lost my cool, but that's okay, I'm not gonna judge myself. If you're present with yourself and you're radically honest, you'll start responding instead of reacting. You'll start to make choices instead of just being at that default frequency. You'll start listening instead of pushing. And it does take effort. That radical responsibility of being the ultimate observer, gaining the awareness without judgment is effort.

06:51
at first because it feels unsafe in every aspect of your body mentally, emotionally, spiritually, frequency, in your nervous system, in your fascia, in your bones, in your breath, everything. It does take effort to shift, but eventually it just becomes coherence. It becomes the norm. Your default frequency is just different. Your reaction is different, but it is going to take effort to get there.

07:19
So this week, stay present, stay the observer, don't over judge yourself. If you do react instead of respond, if you respond instead of react, give yourself a hug. Be like, girl, you got this. And if you react instead of respond, give yourself a tighter hug and say, girl, you've got this next time. Keep grounding down into this new reality, one little minute step at a time. Bring in those practices.

07:49
on a fertility journey, on the physical side, there's nothing more powerful than your diet, than your gut health to make sure that you have regulated hormones, healthy endocrine system, and then the stress is just as important. So keep going. Next week, we are staying with this, but we're gonna go a little bit deeper into regiment.

08:14
because girl we be judging ourselves but the less that we can do that the better because the difference between noticing and criticizing is uh huge like Grand Canyon huge so have a beautiful week and we will see you next Friday for week 17. Thank you once again for tuning in and becoming the conscious mama you were born to be.

08:37
Remember, I wasn't some magical unicorn who stumbled into fertility success. I stayed consistent. I put in the work and I made it happen. And guess what? You can too. Remember, this transformation happens when you stay committed to yourself. Trust your body, follow your intuition, make it possible. The links that you need are down below. And if you are still here and you absolutely love this podcast, please take some time.

09:05
and leave me a review and help other women like you find this podcast to get the support they need. Help a sister out. Leave a review today.