Latest / Finally Get Pregnant Naturally: Holistic Fertility Support To Conceive Naturally and Stay Pregnant After Miscarriage / #259 | The Hidden High-Achiever Habit That's Quietly Wrecking Your Fertility and Making It Harder to Get Pregnant or Avoid Miscarriage

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#259 | The Hidden High-Achiever Habit That's Quietly Wrecking Your Fertility and Making It Harder to Get Pregnant or Avoid Miscarriage · Finally Get Pregnant Naturally: Holistic Fertility Support To Conceive Naturally and Stay Pregnant After Miscarriage

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Katie: In this episode, you will discover why the high-achieving habit you are most proud of may be the one quietly working against your fertility and raising your miscarriage risk.
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Welcome to the Finally Get Pregnant Naturally podcast, the podcast helping women identify the real reasons you haven't conceived or stayed pregnant so you and your partner can finally grow the family of your dreams.
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I'm your host, Dr.
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Katie Wood.
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Let's dive in, shall we?
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Katie: Three things you'll gain from today's episode: why this habit is so hard to see when you are living it out every single day, how this habit overrides your body's signals, leading to disrupted hormones, suppressed progesterone, and increased miscarriage
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Katie: risk, what to start doing differently, not as a personality overhaul, but as a fertility strategy that works with your body instead of against it.
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Katie: So let's talk about the high achiever's habit that nobody names.
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Katie: Kind of like the elephant in the room.
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Katie: I'm sure you've been told once or twice your stress is a problem.
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Katie: You've been told to rest more, track less, and dare I say, relax.
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Katie: And every time someone says that to you, something in you gets triggered because you are not someone who caves under pressure.
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Katie: You thrive under pressure.
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Katie: That is how you've built everything that you have in your life right now, by working hard.
1:43
Katie: So I am not here to tell you to stress less.
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Katie: I want to name something far more specific.
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Katie: The habit I'm talking about is overriding your body's signals while it hides under the identity of discipline.
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Katie: The pattern, the habitual act of receiving a signal from your body and choosing to push through it anyway.
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Katie: You are tired, but you keep going.
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Katie: You are hungry, but you skip the meal because you are on a roll that can't be stopped.
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Katie: Your body is asking for rest, but you go to the gym anyway because the workout is part of your fertility plan.
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Katie: You feel depleted and tired, but you interpret that as a weakness rather than information from your body.
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Katie: If you are raising your hand, I'm with you.
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Katie: I have done every single one of these at some point in my life, and even still now, sometimes I have to catch myself like, "No, Katie, go get a snack, okay?"
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Katie: This is not a character flaw by any means.
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Katie: It's a skill.
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Katie: It's a learned skill that you've refined, and it has created a habit and a pattern in your life, and it has served you in nearly every area of your life.
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Katie: The problem is that your body cannot tell the difference between a legitimate emergency and a habit of pushing through.
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Katie: It just knows the signal was sent and ignored, and it responds accordingly.
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Katie: Essentially, activate survival mode and put reproduction on the back burner.
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Katie: So let's talk about what is happening inside your body when you're overriding these signals.
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Katie: Every time you push through a signal that your body has sent you, whether it's fatigue, hunger, or the need to slow down, your nervous system reads that as a threat that was not responded to.
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Katie: Not a big dramatic threat, a small one.
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Katie: But small threats that are chronically ignored compound into a nervous system that is running a low-grade alert state all the time.
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Katie: And a body in a low-grade alert state is a body that has activated its HPA axis, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal cascade that governs both your stress response and your reproductive hormones.
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Katie: So here is what that means for your fertility specifically.
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Katie: When your HPA axis is chronically activated or in fight or flight, your body produces more cortisol, and cortisol competes directly with progesterone for the same precursor, pregnenolone.
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Katie: When the demand for cortisol goes up, progesterone production goes down.
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Katie: This is called the pregnenolone steal, and it is one of the most common patterns I see in high-achieving women trying to conceive.
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Katie: It was definitely one of my issues as well.
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Katie: When signals are ignored, symptoms show up for you, such as a short luteal phase, spotting before your period, difficulty sustaining an early pregnancy, all potentially driven by the same root pattern, a body that has been overridden so consistently
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Katie: that it has redirected its hormonal resources toward keeping you alive, surviving rather than thriving to create or sustain a pregnancy.
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Katie: And it goes beyond progesterone.
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Katie: Chronic cortisol elevation blunts your LH surge, the hormone signal that triggers ovulation.
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Katie: It disrupts the circadian rhythm that governs melatonin, which we talked about earlier this month, which is the primary antioxidant protecting your developing eggs.
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Katie: It impairs digestion and nutrient absorption, meaning even your best eating habits are not gonna be fully absorbed for your body to utilize.
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Katie: It raises reverse T3, which then blocks your active thyroid hormone.
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Katie: The override habit does not just cause stress, it quietly reshapes your entire hormonal landscape.
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Katie: So let's talk about what listening to your signals actually looks like, and I wanna be very direct about what I'm not saying here.
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Katie: I am not saying you have to stop being driven.
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Katie: I'm not saying that your ambition is the problem, because you can still be ambitious and driven and still listen to your body's signals.
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Katie: And I know that for a fact, because I have changed that habit within myself, and I'm still very driven and very ambitious.
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Katie: I'm saying that the same drive you apply to your career, your health research, your fertility protocol, needs to be applied to the same signals your body is sending you with the same level of respect you give to data
7:07
Katie: or information from any other source.
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Katie: When your body sends a signal, that is data.
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Katie: That is raw, real data in live time.
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Katie: Fatigue is data.
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Katie: Hunger is data.
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Katie: The need to slow down is data.
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Katie: And just like you would not ignore a lab result or a clinical finding, you do not or should not build a root cause fertility protocol while systematically ignoring the signals your body is generating in real time.
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Katie: And this is really big.
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Katie: I could be working with a client, and I could lay out the perfect protocol for her to follow, but if she is ignoring her body's signals, that protocol is not gonna hit.
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Katie: It's not gonna land.
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Katie: So let's talk about what listening looks like in practice in real life.
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Katie: Eating when you are hungry.
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Katie: The first sign of hunger that you get, whether it's just like that little ping in your stomach, a growl, you need to be thinking, "Okay, where can I find a healthy, wholesome snack or meal?"
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Katie: So if that means maybe you're working on the go, have healthy snacks with you.
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Katie: Bring, something with you.
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Katie: Like that...
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Katie: When I have to go and run errands with my kids, we are at least 30 minutes away from, like, anything.
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Katie: So I am always packing a little cooler bag with something that contains protein, fat, carbs, a few different types of snacks because I know that hunger is going to strike at some point.
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Katie: So specifically protein and fat, and you wanna hit it before that hunger becomes an emergency, like when you get in that red zone, hangry state because then your adrenals have to come in and manage, and that's when your
8:56
Katie: cortisol spikes.
8:58
Katie: And stopping work at a consistent time, even if the task isn't finished.
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Katie: So there just needs to be boundaries, right?
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Katie: Between work life and home life.
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Katie: Leaving work at work.
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Katie: And taking rest days from exercise, and the least intense exercise, right?
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Katie: Maybe you're walking on these rest days.
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Katie: Even when your identity resists it, right?
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Katie: "Oh, I am someone who works out every day," or five days a week, six days a week, whatever the story is that you're telling yourself.
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Katie: Going to bed when your body is tired rather than when your to-do list gives you permission.
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Katie: And just a reminder, none of this is weakness.
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Katie: All of it is fertility strategy Your body is not working against you.
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Katie: It has been trying to tell you something, and it wants to co-create with you.
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Katie: It wants to co-create a state of overflowing fertility so you can create and sustain life.
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Katie: The most advanced fertility protocol you can run right now is one that actually starts with listening and responding to your body's signals and cues.
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Katie: If you're listening to this episode, I need you to hear this.
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Katie: I know so far you feel like you've done everything right.
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Katie: You eat clean, you track everything, you've asked all the right questions, done everything your doctor recommended, and still you're not pregnant or you struggle to stay pregnant and no one can tell you why.
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Katie: So you keep going.
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Katie: Another cycle, another supplement, another expert, another month of piecing it together alone, hoping that every new strategy will be the thing that finally works.
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Katie: And the hardest part isn't the effort.
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Katie: You've never been afraid of effort.
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Katie: It's that for the first time, effort isn't enough, and no one will actually look deeper to tell you what's really going on.
11:02
Katie: You're not missing something obvious.
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Katie: What you've been offered so far by your doctor is missing something.
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Katie: That's exactly why I built Decode Your Fertility, the exact root cause fertility testing framework I use with my private one-on-one clients.
11:22
Katie: Everything a conventional fertility workup misses.
11:26
Katie: Finally, in a DIY program designed to get you personalized answers and action steps.
11:33
Katie: This testing is not available to the general public, and for the first time, you can get access to it without working one-on-one with me.
11:42
Katie: Doors officially open this fall, and I'm giving my waitlist ladies early access with benefits, if you know what I mean.
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Katie: Be sure to get on this list now and you'll be the first to know the moment the doors open before anybody else, because you deserve real answers, not another everything looks normal or one-size-fits-all protocol.
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Katie: The link is waiting for you in the show notes.
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Katie: And to recap this episode, the hidden high achiever habit is overriding your body's signals, the pattern of receiving a signal from your body and pushing through it anyway.
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Katie: It looks like discipline.
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Katie: Inside your body, it reads as a chronic low-grade threat that activates your HPA axis, steals your progesterone, blunts your LH surge, and reshapes your hormonal landscape in ways that make getting pregnant harder and increase your miscarriage risk.
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Katie: Listening to your body is not the opposite of being productive.
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Katie: It is the most advanced fertility strategy available to you.
12:50
Katie: Your body has been sending signals.
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Katie: This is your invitation to start hearing them.
12:56
Katie: I wanna thank you so much for listening to today's episode.
13:00
Katie: If you enjoyed today's episode, definitely tune into this Thursday's Fertility Weekly Prescription because it is the counterpart to this episode.
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Katie: So I will see you on our next episode, released every Tuesday and Thursday.
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Katie: Have a beautiful day
13:17
Are you ready to finally discover why you haven't been able to get or stay pregnant?
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The Ultimate Fertility Blueprint is a quick, insightful quiz designed to reveal your overall capacity to conceive and help you discover potential root causes and areas to address to improve your fertility so you can finally get and stay pregnant.
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You'll find the link in the show notes.
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As a quick reminder and disclaimer, this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical advice.
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Always consult your doctor or healthcare provider before starting any new supplement or protocol, especially if you're actively trying to conceive or undergoing treatment.