IVF Anxiety: What It Actually Takes To Get To This Place
By Alexia Leachman, founder of Fear Free Childbirth. Alexia healed her own tokophobia and developed the method she used to do it, and has helped women clear their reproductive fears for over 10 years.
This piece is about IVF, fertility grief and years of trying for a baby. It’s shared with permission and the woman in it has chosen a different name. If that’s tender ground today, look after yourself while you read.
The thing she said that I can’t let go of
Ellie told me this near the end of our work together, and I’ve been chewing on it ever since.
She was at work, eating her lunch. She does some casual admin at a maternity clinic. And one of the midwives started chatting about the women they had in at the moment, how many of them were anxious, and there was this one in particular, she’d had IVF and she was really anxious, and the midwife kept telling her it was okay.
Ellie carried on eating her lunch. Said nothing.
She was, at that point, several cycles into her own IVF.
What she was thinking, she told me, was: you’ve got no idea what it’s taken to get to this place.
I have thought about that sentence a lot.
Now, I’ve never done IVF. I can’t even imagine it, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise – from what I can gather it’s one of the most intense emotional rollercoasters going, and I’ve only ever watched from the side of it. So take this as an outsider’s account. I’m writing it because the insider’s account keeps not getting told, and because Ellie’s is the clearest one I’ve heard.
What it takes to get into that clinic
Some numbers first, because Ellie wanted other women in treatment to have them. Ten cycles in two years. Five egg collections. Seven embryo transfers.
And here’s how she described the difference between her pregnancy and somebody else’s.
You do the injections. Then the egg collection. Then you wait to hear how many eggs. Then you wait to hear whether they fertilised. Then whether any of them became embryos. Then the transfer. Then you wait for the pregnancy test. Then you have another pregnancy test, just to be sure about the first one.
And somebody else, in her words, “just goes, oh, look at that, I’m pregnant.”
Every one of those is a gate, and every gate can close. By the time a woman on that path is standing in an antenatal clinic being told it’s all okay, she has been through a sequence in which the thing she desperately wanted was taken away from her at one gate or another, possibly several times over.
So of course she’s anxious. In her mind, she’s standing at another gate that could quite easily slam shut in her face. She’s not catastrophising. Her nervous system has learned this by direct experience, repeatedly. What reads from the outside as a woman “being anxious” about her pregnancy could easily be a woman remembering what it took for her to get there.
And it gets into everything. Before her most recent cycle, Ellie stopped doing the grocery shopping. She did that because of what she might catch off other people in the shop. Catching a cold could mean the transfer doesn’t happen. No-one sees this bit. The way an ordinary Wednesday evening gets rearranged around a risk that would never cross most people’s minds.
We’ve built a fertility pathway that is brilliant at the clinical bit and pretty useless at the rest. And then we’re surprised the women coming through it are worn out.
The bit she couldn’t say to anyone
There’s a second layer underneath, and it’s the one I want that midwife to hear.
Ellie couldn’t really talk about any of it. Not out of privacy. Because of what happens when she tries:
“It’s not something you can always talk openly with people about, because people have so many preconceived ideas. How can anybody be helpful? Your friendship group and your family, it’s not, it doesn’t quite cut it.”
And about her partner, the one person properly in it with her: “you do go through enough without having to explain things.”
So she carried it inside. Mostly on her own. For years. And then the one professional who you’d expect to have some level of understanding around the women in their care told someone just like her it was okay.
The midwife wasn’t being unkind, by the way. She thought she was helping. Nobody has explained any of this to her either, and that’s not her fault, it’s a training gap and a system gap. But it’s a hell of a thing to be sitting in a staff room hearing someone like you discussed as an anxious one by someone with no idea what you did to get there.
“My womb is dying”
When Ellie and I started working together, ahead of her ninth cycle, she could barely speak without becoming tearful. She’s a hypnotherapist, so she’s not new to any of this, and she’d already been doing plenty of her own work. She’d just hit the end of what she could reach on her own.
What she needed from me was not to reduce her anxiety. It was to increase her capacity. To give her enough bandwidth to get through the next cycle.
In our work together, what came up was hardly ever about IVF.
During our work she became aware of a sentence she’d been repeating to herself in low moments since long before any of this began: I’m never going to find someone who loves me, I’m never going to have a baby. Years had rolled by of carrying that around without once saying it out loud.
At one point, she found she couldn’t locate her own womb. She described it as a blank area inside her, a place she couldn’t feel or connect to. Halfway through working on it she realised she genuinely didn’t know where her womb sat in her body, went off and looked at some anatomical images, and came back to it. Afterwards: “There’s no blank area. It feels connected to my body.”
And she found this one, which I suspect a great many women in their forties are carrying without ever having looked at it. She’s 42. She’d been hearing the conversations about declining fertility for years, the way we all have. Somewhere in there it had set into: my womb is dying.
No doctor had actually said that to her. It’s just what a true (and fairly brutal) fact turns into once it’s been processed by a nervous system that’s been braced for bad news for years. By the time she’d finished working with it, it had shifted to “my womb is changing, which it always will. That’s natural.” Nothing about her age had moved. Only the dread that had wrapped itself around it.
Then the one that got me. Near the end she noticed she’d been holding back her own excitement about being pregnant. Damping it down, so the fall wouldn’t hit so hard if it didn’t happen.
“I got a sense of releasing all these stoppers in me and letting all the love, joy and excitement of being pregnant and having a baby come rushing out. I didn’t realise I’d been holding back SO much.”
Nine cycles of protecting herself against her own hope, and she hadn’t realised she was doing it. If you’ve been doing that too, you have my whole heart.
The train coming through the station
Something I said to Ellie on our last call, trying to describe what had shifted. Picture yourself sat on a platform at a railway station. Every so often one of those enormous coal trains comes thundering through without stopping – noisy, dark, dusty, goes on forever. Hormones do that. Grief does that. Bad news at the clinic does that. Bad feelings come rushing in out of nowhere and it’s overwhelming while it’s happening.
A lot of us jump on the train. We climb aboard and start looking for reasons: well no wonder I feel like this, look what’s going on in my life, and here’s a memory from four years ago that fits, and here’s another. We add carriages to a train that was going to pass through anyway.
Ellie stopped getting on the train. She stayed in her chair and let it come through, and then it was gone and she was still sat there.
That’s what three weeks of clearing her head trash did. She stopped needing the massage gun she’d been using on her shoulders morning and night. She got through her fifth egg collection without the spiral. She held a small ceremony for her previous cycles and embryos and instead of the grief she’d braced for, what she felt was acknowledgement: that it happened, that it wasn’t anybody’s fault, that everyone had done their best.
And she told me something else. In the past, she said, she’d had to mentally prepare for being one of those people who doesn’t have children. That was a job she was doing, in the background, on top of everything else. Rehearsing a life she didn’t want, in case she ended up living it.
She’s not doing that any more. Not because she’s decided it’ll all work out but because “I’m just going through the journey and seeing what unfolds.”
The morning her period came, the day before she started her ninth round of injections, she told me: “It feels like we can start this cycle fresh and clear now.”
She went into cycle nine carrying just the one cycle instead of nine. And after eight previous rounds I think that’s the best thing she could have done for herself. We can’t change what happens to us, but we can change how we respond to it.
Ten days of not needing to know
That was two months ago. Let me tell you what’s happened since, because the tidy version of this story stops there and the real one doesn’t.
She’s been through another cycle. Number ten.
The difference she noticed most was in the ten day wait, which is the stretch after the transfer while you’re waiting for the blood test. If you’ve done it, you know. If you haven’t, picture ten days in which the only thing you want to know is the one thing you can’t.
“Normally I’d be wanting to do an at home test or checking in with my body to notice any different ‘signs’. This time I felt calmer and no need to have to know. I got on with work, enjoyed social catch ups and let each day happen.”
Ten days of letting the days happen, after nine cycles of needing to know.
And then, she found out the transfer hadn’t worked.
Here’s what she told me:
“I feel tired and drained. There was a bit of sadness but mostly tiredness, followed by a feeling of wanting to do something which brings me joy and have a break from IVF.”
I’m not going to pretend this is a happy ending, because it isn’t. She didn’t get her baby. She’s tired, there was sadness, and both of those are real.
But look at what arrives in the same breath. A woman who knew straight away what she needed, and it wasn’t another round. It was joy, and a break.
So she and her husband are stopping for six months and going travelling. There’s a frozen embryo waiting and she isn’t hurrying towards it:
“I don’t feel a fear or pressure of my biological clock ticking. Instead I feel the need to focus on restoring my energy and doing something that’s awe-inspiring and going to connect me to the joy of living again.”
Forty-two years old, an embryo in storage, and no clock ticking at her. A few months ago she was rehearsing for a life without children in case she ended up living it. Now she’s booking flights.
The bit I didn’t see coming
The thing she wrote that I want to draw attention to is about her marriage.
For the first four or five cycles, having to explain and re-explain how she was feeling to her husband was one of the most draining parts of the whole business. All those hormones, all that not knowing, and the same conversation on a loop. Her words: surely he gets this by now????
These last two cycles she was still repeating herself. What changed was what happened in her while she did it:
“I didn’t get agitated or irritated. It was great not to have to deal with that on top of everything else. Instead I just found myself thinking ‘oh right, he’s forgotten about that’ and then say a simple sentence to explain what was happening during the cycle or how I was feeling.”
And here’s the part that I love. He changed too, and nobody asked him to. He started sharing more of how he was feeling, asking more questions, offering to do more to help out.
Clearing does that. It shifts the whole field around a person, so people who haven’t done a scrap of work themselves start behaving differently in it. She stopped bringing the friction into those conversations, so the conversations went differently, so he turned up differently.
Then she wrote this, and I’d have been proud to write it myself:
“I used to wonder how people could say IVF made them come closer as a couple. I understand now. This journey is about more than having a baby. It’s about living, whatever the outcome of IVF is. The healing I’ve done has helped me do this in a conscious way. It’s helped me resolve fears and see life in a broader way. I feel at peace with myself and whatever the outcome of IVF is.”
At peace with whatever the outcome is. And she still doesn’t know what the outcome is.
Back to the lunch break
Here’s my favourite part, and the reason I wanted this to be the piece that opens our fertility section.
When Ellie told me the midwife story, she wasn’t telling it as a complaint. She was telling it as something she’d clocked about herself. Because in the moment, she’d said nothing and carried on eating her lunch.
Now, she reckons, she’d say something. Nothing dramatic. Just something along the lines of: it is a pretty intense journey, actually.
That’s a woman who has got enough of herself back to be a voice in a room where she’s the only one who knows what she knows. Honestly, after everything that journey asks of a person, I think she’ll be able to handle just about anything now. And if a few more midwives and counsellors and well-meaning friends heard that sentence from a few more women, we’d all be a good deal further along.
The midwife thought she was helping. She just had no idea what it had taken that woman to get into her clinic at all.
Now you do.
If fertility is your territory, this section is new and it’s open. Practitioners, researchers, and women who’ve lived it. Nothing polished required, and “I’m still in it but I understand it better” is every bit as valuable here as a tidy ending. Write for us.
And if you recognised yourself in any of this, the free Tokophobia Test is the simplest way to see what you’re actually carrying. It’s built around fear of pregnancy and birth rather than fertility treatment, so some of it won’t be yours, and it’ll still show you more than you’re expecting. It’s run by our partner site Fearless Birthing, founded, like Fear Free Childbirth, by Alexia Leachman. Take the test.
Keep reading
- Spirit Babies: Exploring Fertility and Conscious Conception
- Recurrent Miscarriage, with Naava Carman
- Should I Wait Until I’m Pregnant to Address My Fears?
- How Puberty Trauma Shapeshifts into Fear of Pregnancy and Body Image
- Matrescence: The Identity Shift No One Can Prepare You For
Alexia supports families planning pregnancy and birth. She helps them to overcome their fears and feel calm and confident about birth and pregnancy.
Alexia also trains birth professionals in the Fearless Birthing, a unique approach to birth preparation that is ideal for those who have fears around birth.
- IVF Anxiety: What It Actually Takes To Get To This Place - 23rd September 2026
- Matrescence: The Identity Shift No One Can Prepare You For - 24th August 2026
- Society Has a Plan for You the Moment You Become a Mother. You Didn’t Agree to It. - 23rd July 2026