3. Are you stressed or extremely tired? If you are stressed, and/or not getting enough sleep, you are putting stress on your body and reproductive system. Stress can interfere with ovulation, and if you are not sleeping properly your body is unable to recover from stress very easily. Stress also leads to poor eating habits and less time to take care of yourself properly.

As women, we tend to put others’ needs before our own and be harder on ourselves than we need to be. Using diet and exercise to try and achieve a model body type, or allowing ourselves to get stressed because of work and family obligations, can lead to poor health even if you don’t feel sick or unhealthy. Your reproductive system is sensitive to all sorts of stress, whether dietary, physical, or emotional. Taking care of yourself now will ensure that you will be happy and healthy once your baby finally arrives!

1. You could be exercising too much. If you are worried about your weight or how you look, you could be overdoing it in the gym. Even if you are eating enough, if you are expending too many calories it could be affecting your fertility. If you are working out strenuously for more than an hour at a time, more than 3 days a week without giving yourself rest days, you could be putting your body into starvation mode. This can affect ovulation and fertility because your body doesn’t think there are enough calories coming in to support a baby.

Many couples try to get medical assistance to force their bodies to conceive, by taking fertility drugs, or Assisted Reproductive Technologies like IVF, but this often results in long term side effects, miscarriages, disappointment and wasted money.

You would get better results by nurturing and caring for your mental and physical health, and working on activities to build a stronger and closer relationship between you and your partner. The reason I say this is because stress is one of the biggest causes of unexplained infertility, and putting a timetable on your body can make this stress worse.

Stress isn’t just the feeling of nervousness you get just before you do something nerve-wracking like public speaking. Stress is the pressure that the body is under as a result of a number of factors – both physical and mental. The problem with stress is that it can block your fertility by increasing your body’s production of stress hormones, and creating an unhealthy environment for your eggs to develop and be fertilized.

So, what causes your body to become stressed, and what can you do about this?

Inadequate nutrition is a common cause of stress to the body, as it has to keep the vital organs working even when there are insufficient vitamins and nutrients needed for specific metabolic processes to take place. When your body isn’t given all the nutrients it needs, it is more likely to focus on keeping itself alive than reproducing. As a result, reproductive health and egg quality suffers.

Although many of my clients already have a good diet, and take supplements, this is not enough to increase their fertility. Even the best organic diet does not contain the nutrients everyone is required to eat every day, and most vitamin and mineral supplements cannot be fully absorbed by the body. This is why my clients take a powdered superfood supplement called “AlkaGreens Plus” which supplies the essential nutrients in a form that the body can assimilate within minutes.

A lack of rest is another cause of stress, as the body needs its regeneration cycle in order to repair its tissues, digest and assimilate the nutrients eaten throughout the day, and to nourish developing egg and sperm cells. Many people do not get adequate rest, and even if they are sleeping 8 or 9 hours a day, it could be in a room that is too brightly lit, or a noisy environment, such as near a busy road or on a flight path. A common complaint among my clients is that they cannot get their minds to stop chattering at bed time, and even if they do sleep, it is not a deep and restful sleep, and they do not wake up feeling refreshed.

My suggestion is to ensure that your curtains block out all the light, and you do not have any electrical gadgets in the room that have LCD lights, such as digital alarm clocks. If you live near a busy road, use earplugs when sleeping – even if you don’t notice the noise. To shut off the mind, listen to “Quantum Relaxation” CD’s, before going to sleep which put the brain in a deep relaxation state, similar to meditation.

I hope this has helped to give you some practical advice on increasing your chances of conceiving. There are more subjects I would like to discuss with you on the topic of “Why can’t I get pregnant?” and you can find out some more reasons and tips at my site: http://naturalfertilityetc.com/why-cant-i-get-pregnant/