You
may already know that sleep is important to your health, and surely you’ve
experienced how vital it is to your state of mind. As it turns out, it is also
key for fertility.
Sleep helps restore and rejuvenate your brain and all your
organ systems, including the reproductive system. Yet according to the National
Sleep Foundation, 70 percent of Americans don’t get enough sleep.
Over
the long run, insufficient (in quantity or quality) sleep affects your mood and
your immunity. Sleep deprivation also alters your hormone balance and
encourages other fertility-disrupting lifestyle factors such as weight gain,
overuse of caffeine, and tension with your partner. Lack of sleep can lead to
irregular menstrual cycles and affect ovulation, making it harder to conceive.
When researchers surveyed women in notoriously sleep-deprived
professions—flight attendants and nurses working the late shift—half reported
irregular cycles (compared to about 20 percent in the general population). Some
had stopped ovulating altogether.
What You Can Do About It
When you don’t get enough sleep, you’re adding to the list of stresses you and your body have to deal with. Six hours a night just isn’t enough. Seven is better, and eight is better still. One of the most enjoyable ways to improve fertility is to spend more time in the sack—asleep! If you have trouble sleeping, even once you’ve made room for it in your life, seek advice on strategies for getting a good night’s sleep.
STOP SMOKING
Nobody
really needs more information to convince them that smoking isn’t healthy, do
they? No one should smoke, period, end of story. But in case you have the habit
and you want to conceive, you should know that, in addition to all its other
negative effects, smoking has been linked to infertility in couples where one
or both partners smoke. Research shows that it slashes a woman’s odds of
conceiving by more than a third. One study found that women who smoke are
almost three and a half times more likely than nonsmokers to take more than a
year to conceive. Another study showed that smokers took twice as long to get
pregnant as nonsmokers and were much less likely to be able to get pregnant at
all. Smokers also have a greater risk of miscarriage.
Toxins
in cigarette smoke is one of the main problems. Nicotine is just one of those
toxins. It decreases blood flow to the uterus and placenta, which could cause
implantation problems or miscarriage. Smokeless tobacco will do the same thing.
There is evidence that smoking impedes the action of the tiny hairs (cilia)
lining the inside of the fallopian tubes, interfering with their ability to
sweep a fertilized egg along to the uterus. Smoking also meddles with women’s
hormonal balance and at the extreme can even bring on early menopause.
Smoking
can decrease sperm count, make sperm more sluggish, increase the number of
abnormal sperm, and impair the sperm’s ability to penetrate an egg. In men, the
more cigarettes smoked per day, the greater the impact on fertility is.
Smoking
by men and women also significantly decreases the success rates of ARTs. Female
smokers tend to have fewer eggs retrieved and fewer eggs fertilized in IVF, and
intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) success rates drop in women whose
partners smoke. Genetic changes in sperm related to smoking can also lead to
ART failure.
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