What IVF success rates don’t show you & what the research on emotional health & fertility actually says.
A while ago I had a conversation with a woman I’ll call Marta.
She was 41 and had already been through three rounds of IVF. Behind her were years of appointments, tests and consultations, and every clinic had told her the same things. Her AMH was low. Her egg reserve was not where it needed to be. Fertility treatment was her only realistic option, and even then, the numbers were not in her favour.
She had heard this so many times, from so many different people in so many different rooms, that it had stopped feeling like a medical opinion. It had become the truth about who she was.
When we spoke, she wasn’t someone who had given up. She was still fighting, still researching, still doing everything she could. What I noticed was something different. It had become very hard for her to hear anything outside of what she’d already been told. Not because she didn’t want to. Because she had been living inside the same story for so long that another one felt almost impossible to take in.
That conversation is why I’m writing this article.
There are two sets of numbers in fertility. Most women going through treatment know one of them very well. The other one almost never comes up in a clinic appointment. I want to put both of them in front of you today, so you can see the full picture.
1. What the treatment numbers actually say
When women come to speak with me, most of them already know their numbers. Not because they went looking for them. Because they’ve been told them, repeatedly, in clinical rooms, by people they trust.
The percentages. The AMH levels. The success rates per cycle. The age brackets.
Marta knew hers by heart. She had heard them so many times they had stopped feeling like information and started feeling like a verdict.
There are two treatments most women navigate before or during their journey. IUI, which is a less invasive procedure where sperm is placed directly into the uterus and IVF, which is a more complex process where eggs and sperm are combined outside the body. Both are part of the path that many women I speak to are already on.
For IUI, the live birth rate is generally between 5 and 20% per cycle, depending on age, health history and other individual factors. For women under 35 it sits closer to 15 to 20%. After 40, it drops to around 5% or less. For IVF, the global average live birth rate is around 25 to 30% per cycle overall. For women under 35 using their own eggs, that figure can reach closer to 40 to 50% depending on the clinic. By the early forties it drops significantly.
What those numbers mean in practice is that most women go through more than one cycle. Research consistently shows that most successful IVF pregnancies happen somewhere between cycle two and cycle six, with cumulative success rates building over time. Most clinics recommend reassessing after three cycles if pregnancy hasn’t happened.
That’s a lot of rounds. A lot of appointments. A lot of hope placed on a single percentage each time. And a significant financial investment, each cycle costs thousands of euros or dollars, varying by country, and most women carry that cost more than once, often without any guarantee of the outcome.
Nobody talks about what it really costs her. Not the financial part, though that alone is significant. The emotional part. The physical part. The part where she keeps going back, keeps hoping, keeps absorbing the weight of it with nowhere to put it.
Which is why what I’m about to share in the next section matters so much. Because there’s research showing that what happens emotionally during treatment doesn’t just affect how a woman feels. It affects those numbers directly.
2. The numbers that rarely come up in clinic appointments
Nearly 8 in 10 women going through fertility treatment experience significant stress. More than 4 in 10 have clinically measurable anxiety. More than 4 in 10 have depression. Most receive no support for any of it.
Not because their doctors don’t care. The emotional side simply isn’t built into standard fertility care. It’s treated as separate. Personal. Something to manage on your own time.
The research tells a different story.
A study led by Alice Domar at a Harvard-affiliated centre, published in Fertility and Sterility in 2011, looked at women going through IVF. The women who took part in a structured mind-body programme had a 52% pregnancy rate in their second IVF cycle. The women who had no support had 20%. An earlier study by the same researcher, published in 2000, followed a broader group of women through fertility treatment and found the same pattern: 55% versus 20%. Two completely different groups of women. The same result, twice.
In 2023, a review published in Human Reproduction Update looked at the evidence across multiple studies. Women who received psychological support during fertility treatment were 25% more likely to get pregnant than those who didn’t. This wasn’t one study making a claim. It was the weight of accumulated research confirming it.
Then there’s a study I come back to often. Researchers at Soroka University Medical Centre looked at what happened when hypnosis was used specifically during embryo transfer. The women who underwent hypnosis during the procedure had a clinical pregnancy rate of 53.1%. The control group had 30.2%. The implantation rates told the same story: 28% with hypnosis versus 14.4% without. Hypnosis at a single point in the process nearly doubled both rates. That study was published in Fertility and Sterility in 2006. It has been available for nearly twenty years.
It still doesn’t come up in most IVF consultations.
There is also emerging neuroscience that helps explain why any of this works. In 2021, researchers published findings in the Journal of Neuroscience identifying specific neurons, known as RFRP neurons, that appear to directly link psychological stress to the suppression of reproductive function. The effect was found to be specific to females. In simple terms: when the body is under sustained stress, something biological happens that can interfere with the reproductive system. This research was conducted in animal models, so I’m not presenting it as proven human biology. What it does offer is a scientific explanation for something many women already feel instinctively: that what’s happening emotionally isn’t separate from what’s happening in their body. That the two are one system.
That’s the biology. What I see in practice is the human version of exactly that.
3. What the research has known for a long time
The studies I’ve shared in this article are not new.
The Domar research showing that mind-body support more than doubled pregnancy rates was first published in 2000. The Levitas hypnosis study was published in 2006. A second larger Domar study confirmed the same findings in 2011. The neuroscience identifying the biological link between stress and reproductive suppression followed in 2021. And the 2023 review in Human Reproduction Update didn’t introduce a new idea. It confirmed what had already been accumulating for over two decades.
That’s not emerging evidence. That’s a body of work that has been sitting in peer-reviewed journals for over twenty years.
Twenty-six years of research. Still not a standard part of the fertility conversation.
It’s a question I keep coming back to: if this research has been sitting in peer-reviewed journals for twenty-six years, why is it still not part of what women are told when they walk into a clinic?
I’m not saying this to criticise anyone. I’m saying it because I think it matters for you to know. Not as a source of frustration but as a source of permission. Permission to take this seriously. Permission to include it in your own thinking about your journey, not as a last resort, but as something that belongs at the table from the beginning.
From the time most of us are very young, we are taught that the doctor knows best. That the person in the white coat has the answer. That we hand our bodies over, follow the protocol and trust the process. For many situations in life that trust is well placed. I’m genuinely grateful for medicine. I needed it directly to bring my three babies into this world.
What I see again and again in my work, though, is what happens when that trust becomes the only voice a woman listens to. When the numbers she’s been given become the ceiling of what she believes is possible. When she stops questioning, stops feeling into her own body, stops trusting what she knows from the inside.
You wouldn’t believe how often this comes up in sessions. A woman goes back to a moment she hadn’t thought about in years. An appointment. Something a doctor said. A number. A word. When we find it, it’s still there, fully intact, still shaping how her body responds today. She didn’t know it was there. Nobody told her that what she heard in that room had become a kind of instruction. That her subconscious had taken it in and built a programme around it. That her body had been running that programme ever since, quietly, without her permission.
Marta had heard the same things so many times that she had stopped asking different questions. She wasn’t lacking information. She was lacking permission to look somewhere else.
The doctors who told her what they told her were not wrong. They were giving her the picture they had access to. What they couldn’t give her was the other half of it. The part that research has actually studied and confirmed, that almost never makes it into a clinic appointment.
That’s where I work.
4. What I see in my practice & what I want to say clearly
Six years ago, the women who came to find me were most often in their early to mid-forties. They had already been told there was no clear reason. Unexplained. They had gone through multiple exams and treatments looking for an answer their body never gave them. Round after round. Still nothing. Still no explanation.
Today I’m having the same conversations with women a decade younger. Women in their late twenties and early thirties being told that fertility treatment is the best next step, sometimes after very little investigation. The script hasn’t changed. The women arriving are younger.
If you’ve already tried therapy, if you’ve sat in sessions for months or years and understood your situation intellectually but felt nothing shift at a deeper level, I’m not talking about that. What I do goes to the layer underneath the story. Not the coping strategies. The origin. The place where the pattern started, before there were words for it. Clients describe leaving the first session with answers they had been searching for for years. One described it as: “I got to the root of my issue in one session. This is something I had worked on with therapists for about two and a half years. This did it in one session”.
That’s different from managing symptoms. That’s the difference between knowing something is there and finally giving it a place to be seen.
I know this because I’ve been somewhere I couldn’t explain either.
In 2017, my second son was born. He lived seven days. In that week we understood love in its fullest form and then we said goodbye. Everything I had been doing, performing, achieving, pushing through, stopped making sense. My body wouldn’t continue the way it had been. Something needed to be seen that I had been moving too fast to look at.
That experience is why I do this work and it’s why I recognise something specific in the women who come to me. Not weakness. The opposite. The kind of strength that has been carrying too much for too long without anyone looking at what’s underneath it.
When a woman has tried everything available, the supplements, the dietary changes, the acupuncture, the tracking, the multiple rounds of treatment and her body is still not responding and medicine still has no clear explanation, I don’t ask what else needs to be done.
I ask what needs to be seen.
What I find, in almost every case, is something that has been there for a long time without ever being fully acknowledged or given a place. A nervous system that learned early on that it needed to stay on guard.
The part of her that wants this is real and it’s strong. What she doesn’t know is that there’s often another part, one she has never met, that has been running quietly underneath all of it. Protecting her the only way it knows how. It doesn’t ask permission. It doesn’t announce itself. It just acts. Through the body, through the nervous system, through responses she can’t explain and her doctors can’t find a reason for.
Sometimes what needs to be seen didn’t start with her at all. Through systemic work, I’ve come to understand that the challenges we carry today can have roots that go back much further than our own lives. Over the last three years, I’ve had countless women share with me patterns they recognise running through their feminine lineage. Their mother. Their grandmother. The women before them. Ways of relating to the body, to fertility, to loss, to worthiness, that have been passed down through generations without anyone ever naming them. Until now. Until she sits in a session and something in her recognises it.
These aren’t abstract ideas. I watch them surface. I watch them shift.
I’ve worked with women who had been through years of failed treatment and conceived after this kind of inner work happened. I’ve also worked with women who did the same work and didn’t conceive, and who told me it was still the most important thing they did for themselves throughout the whole process. Both of those outcomes matter to me equally.
The whole picture has always been available to you
Marta didn’t contact me looking for a miracle. She contacted me because something in her, underneath all the noise of what she had been told, still believed there was something she hadn’t yet looked at.
That belief, small and quiet as it was, is where everything starts. It’s the part that hasn’t given up. The part that knows, even when nothing else confirms it, that the full picture hasn’t been seen yet.
This conversation stayed with me. This article is for her & it’s for you.
The numbers in this article are real. They come from real research, published in real journals, some of it for over two decades. They deserve to be part of the fertility conversation from the beginning, not after everything else has been tried, not as a last resort, but as an equal part of the picture.
You were never only a set of percentages.
You were never only what a clinic could measure and the conversation about your fertility was never meant to begin and end in that room.
If you’ve been doing everything right and something is still not shifting, there may be a layer that hasn’t been looked at yet. That’s where your next conversation starts.
Ready to take the next step?
Sources
Domar et al., Fertility and Sterility, 2000 and 2011
Levitas et al., Fertility and Sterility, 2006
Journal of Neuroscience, 2021
Human Reproduction Update, 2023
IVF and IUI success rate data: ESHRE European IVF Monitoring Report; CDC Assisted Reproductive Technology National Summary Report. Figures represent global averages and vary by country, clinic and individual circumstances.
All images created using AI
About the Author: Anne-Marie Pereira
