Besides the obvious, there’s one other thing you have to do in bed to make a baby: sleep!
Plenty of good-quality sleep may be one of the keys to conception. Turns out that if you want your nine months, you’d better get your eight hours.
When you’re trying to conceive, the excitement about getting pregnant—or the worry that you won’t—can certainly keep you wide awake or tossing and turning at night. The sleep disruption may seem like a minor inconvenience; after all, the real sleep disruption will occur when you’re waking up every night with a baby. In fact, nearly two-thirds of Americans have a sleep problem. So it might surprise you to learn that sleep deprivation can make getting pregnant more difficult.
The link is far from well-established, but we do know, for starters, that a lack of sleep disrupts a woman’s circadian rhythm, the 24-hour internal clock that helps regulate all the body’s systems. Studies suggest a complex connection between sleep and fertility, not least because people can vary considerably in the amount of sleep they need and their sleep schedules. But there does seem to be a relationship between getting enough shut-eye and getting pregnant: “Research shows that 80 to 90 percent of ovulation occurs between midnight and 4 a.m. That’s not a coincidence. How can lack of sleep not affect the body’s ability to conceive?” asks Robert Greene, M.D., a reproductive endocrinologist and medical director at the Sher Institute in Sacramento, California, and author of Perfect Hormone Balance for Fertility: The Ultimate Guide to Getting Pregnant (Three Rivers Press, 2008). Adds Eve Feinberg, M.D., a reproductive endocrinologist and fertility specialist at the Fertility Centers of Illinois, in Chicago, “When your body is sleep-deprived, it wants to preserve its necessary functions, like strengthening the immune system, to take care of those things, rather than conception.”
While it’s not clear exactly how much sleep deprivation might compromise fertility, research does make clear that excess weight, chronic stress, and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) do affect the odds a woman will get pregnant. And sleep deprivation contributes to, or is influenced by, these very same conditions, increasing the likelihood that sleep and fertility are connected. Here are three factors—all of which you can do something about—that can help beat the vicious cycle of sleep deprivation, and possibly improve your chances of conceiving. Says Dr. Greene reassuringly, “You may not be able to control how many eggs you have left, but you can influence how well you’re sleeping. It’s something you can do something about.”
Your Menstrual Cycle
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“We know that women’s menstrual cycles are influenced by circadian rhythms, since menstruation for the average woman runs on a 28-day cycle, the same as the lunar cycle,” says Tracy Latz, M.D., M.S., a psychiatrist in Mooresville, North Carolina, who treats women struggling with infertility and stress. You may even recall times over the years when you’ve been seriously stressed at work or with a personal problem and your sleep suffered—and then your period got out of whack, too. “The menstrual cycle is very sensitive to sleep patterns. If something is tremendously off-balance, the menstrual cycle is one of the first things to be thrown off,” confirms Dr. Feinberg.
One of the ways that scientists study how too little sleep affects people is to look at the effects of sleep deprivation on shift workers. In one 1997 study of 31 nurses, age 20 to 40, who weren’t taking any hormones (including birth control pills), the researchers found that 55 percent experienced menstrual changes (compared with 20 percent of the general population). The changes included increased or decreased flow, irregular cycles, shortening or lengthening of flow, and increased pain. Since changes in menstruation can reflect changes or problems in ovulation, simply working at night, when our bodies are wired to sleep, may hurt some women’s odds of conception.
Luckily, relatively few of us need to work the graveyard shift. But if you’re a shift worker, or have an erratic work or sleep schedule and you’re having trouble getting pregnant, it’s worth making regular bed and wake times a priority, and perhaps switching to something closer to a 9-to-5 workweek, at least for a while. (And if you think stress is affecting your menstrual cycle, read on for more on that below.)
Your Weight
Besides the obvious health risks of excess pounds—namely, increased odds for heart disease, stroke, and diabetes—it’s also clear that excess weight and obesity can hinder a woman’s ability to conceive. A body mass index (BMI) of 25 or higher is linked to difficulty getting pregnant. (A BMI of 18.5 to 24.9 is considered normal.) A 2007 study that followed more than 3,000 couples who were having trouble conceiving, found that when a woman had a BMI of 35 or higher she was 26 percent less likely to conceive naturally than a normal-weight woman.
In addition to the link between weight and fertility, there’s one between weight and sleep: In a 16-year study of more than 68,000 women, researchers at Harvard University found that women who slept just six hours a night were 12 percent more likely to be 30 pounds or more overweight, and those who snoozed for five hours or less nightly were 32 percent more likely to have gained the same amount. “If you sleep less than seven hours a night, you increase your risk of gaining excess weight,” says Sanjay Patel, M.D., M.S., lead author of the study.
Though it’s not understood why less sleep can equal more weight, we know that being overweight affects how efficiently your body is able to use insulin, a hormone made by the pancreas to convert glucose (blood sugar) into energy. Too much body fat makes your body resistant to the good work insulin does, so the pancreas has to keep churning it out. That’s not good for fertility. “Insulin poses a problem to ovulation,” says Dr. Greene. In short, higher levels of insulin are linked to PCOS, “a hormonal imbalance of high insulin and testosterone [androgen] levels,” he explains. That excess insulin is, in fact, the likely cause of the increased production of androgen, too-high levels of which impair ovulation. (PCOS is typically associated with being overweight, though not all women with the condition have a high BMI, and it’s also characterized by irregular periods, so there’s often a tie to a woman’s menstrual cycle as well.)
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