Have you been on a fertility journey and felt like you were all alone?
Today, Nicole talks with Sophie Byfield, a fertility expert and doula, who shares her own vulnerable, 4-year journey to get pregnant. After spending two years at a fertility clinic without knowing how to advocate for herself, Sophie made it her life mission to help women avoid that same experience.
Join Nicole and Sophie as they dive into the surprisingly lonely world of fertility, the impact of stress on reproductive health, the role of healing in conceiving, and the importance of advocating for yourself in order to get the most out of your fertility appointments and treatments.
So, if you’re on a fertility journey or simply interested in learning more about this often-hidden topic, this episode is for you. Listen now to unlock the secrets of infertility, debunk myths, and reclaim agency over our bodies!
Sophie Byfield is a Fertility Expert and Doula who believes in the power of creating the healthiest version of yourself so that you can finally see those two pink lines. With over 20 years of experience as a nutritionist, personal trainer and yoga instructor, Sophie discovered the secret world of infertility when she finally decided she was ready to be a mom. For the last five years, Sophie has observed the five areas of health that impact your fertility and a woman’s ability to conceive. If we take those areas and heal them ONE at a time, we can create miracles beyond our wildest dreams. Her mission is to help as many women as possible bring babies into the world, so they finally become the mama their heart is longing for them to be.
“They say that someone on an infertility journey or a fertility journey is experiencing PTSD every single month because every single time they get their period and it’s a negative test, they go into this devastation…When you’ve been on your journey for 1, 2, 3, or 4 years and then your neighbor next door gets pregnant at the drop of a hat, the feelings of shame and worthlessness and you’re failing in your body as a woman, it’s just heavy to carry.”
“Until you start talking about it, you don’t realize how many people in your circle have had some sort of experience around trying to conceive.”
“Healing is not only healing your menstrual cycle, and your reproductive system, but also how you’re carrying your stress, because stress is going to be there. The brain…actually shuts down your reproductive system.”
“When women start to decrease their stress or they take their mind off of trying to conceive and just start to enjoy their life again, a lot of them — I’m not going to say all — but a lot of them tend to conceive.”
“Let’s strip away everything that you’ve learned from the Internet. You don’t need to be on every supplement. You don’t need to be doing everything. Let’s look at what your body is telling us and then slowly add things back in…Not everything is going to work for everybody.”
“When you are informed and you walk into the fertility clinic, you get better results. When I say better results, I mean a better experience with the fertility clinic, a better experience with the nurses, and a better experience with the doctors. You may still have to go IUI/IVF/medicated cycles, but you know exactly what’s happening and you understand it a lot better.”
“We don’t know how long it’s going to take, and we don’t know if you need medical intervention. What we do know is that we can find our voice and understand what’s happening and advocate for ourselves to make sure that our treatments are aligning with what our body needs.”
“It’s really looking at what your body needs, figuring out what your body needs, and then supporting it. I believe that you need to be the scientist of your reproductive health and look at it from multiple angles.”
“I would like to say that in the beginning, it was super rough because my expectation was that I was going to get pregnant right away. So when it wasn’t happening month after month, it was really knocking me down.”
NICOLE
Welcome to the School of Self-Worth, a podcast for ambitious women who know they are worthy of an astoundingly great life. Join us weekly as we get on the right side of your intuition, redefine success, and reclaim your self-worth. I’m your host, Nicole Tsong, an award-winning journalist who left it all behind to become a bestselling author of three books and work-life balance expert, helping ambitious women unlock their intuition and step into a life of fulfillment and radical joy.
Every single week, I will bring you diverse and meaningful conversations with successful women from all walks of life who share insight about what it takes to be brave, joyful, and authentic every day. Every episode is thoughtfully designed to leave you feeling empowered with tangible tips and advice that will lead you to your next breakthrough.
Hello and welcome back to the school of self-worth. Today, you’re in for a real treat. I had a truly beautiful, profound, and expansive conversation with Sophie Byfield, a fertility expert and doula, about the secret world of infertility and what it takes to conceive. Sophie is the type of person you want on your side if you are struggling with infertility, and in this episode, she shares crucial information you want to know. First and foremost, if you’re on a long fertility journey, this is the kind of information that is foundational for any woman who wants to bring a baby into the world. So make sure you tune in, and for any high-achieving career woman who wants to support their journey by getting on the right side of their intuition in 30 days, DM me 30 on Instagram @nicoletsong, I’ve got something for you. All right, let’s get started. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the School of Self-Worth.
I am so excited to have Sophie Byfield with us today. Sophie, welcome to the podcast.
SOPHIE BYFIELD
Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.
NICOLE
Well, Sophie and I were chatting a little bit before we began about this topic, which I feel is one that is often quite hidden, and so many women are traveling through a journey of fertility, and that’s really Sophie’s specialty and expertise. And so, Sophie, I’d love to hear from you if you could share a little bit of your own journey, like, how did you even get to this topic? And if you could share some pieces of your fertility journey that informed where you are now.
SOPHIE BYFIELD
Yeah, so I did this thing where I got married!
NICOLE
That’s funny, right?
SOPHIE BYFIELD
We got married, and we were like, okay, we’re going to have kids. We started trying right away, and all of a sudden, it just wasn’t working. It’s a funny story when I think back to it now, how naive I was to the whole situation. I went off birth control in November, my wedding was in June, and I’m like, all right, I’m going to get pregnant, I’m going to surprise him on our wedding day and tell him I’m pregnant. And that just wasn’t my story. And as I was going through the journey, I didn’t truly understand it. I was trusting my doctors and my specialists and going through all of the steps, and I felt lost and unsupported, and completely overwhelmed with everything. And if I fast forward or rewind, we’ll say rewind. If I rewind a bunch of years from there, I am a personal trainer, nutritionist, and group fitness instructor. As I was going through this journey, I just became obsessed with researching and understanding what was happening in my body and what was going on. I kept moving through it and feeling more and more alone, I was like, I do not want women to feel the way that I feel right now. I felt lost. I remember going through IVF and having so many questions and having nobody to ask. As I moved forward, and we’re talking year one, year two, year three, I just was like, no, there has to be a better way, and I have to help women who are starting this journey not feel the way that I felt. And I became obsessed and researched and researched. I became a doula. Here we are now, four and a half years later, and serving women and helping them understand what they’re going through when they’re struggling to conceive.
NICOLE
Well, I have so many things to say and comment and ask you about, even from that brief intro, because I’ve been on a long fertility journey myself and it’s really, actually fascinating. Once you enter this world, say you’re getting help from fertility clinics or anything else, and there’s just actually not a lot of information. They give you the information about the steps to take to get pregnant through their processes, but they don’t actually tell you what’s happening with your body. It’s weird. I was fascinated, and it has taken me many years to find a really beautiful, amazing acupuncturist who I have learned so much more from, around the processes of our bodies and how women get pregnant than literally anybody else I’ve ever met in all of the fertility world.
There is this woman, with no website, that my acupuncturist had to refer me to who gives me tons and tons of information, and I’m sharing that because it was like, fascinating to me when I met her. How come more people like this don’t exist or more people who don’t educate like this? Because it is a really weird world. You expect that the fertility clinics and the experts would have all this information, but they actually really just try to get you pregnant.
SOPHIE BYFIELD
I truly believe that the doctors and the fertility clinics have an amazing part of this journey for sure, but in the same sense, it’s like my grade five science teacher. She literally said, if you sit on a toilet seat, you’re going to get pregnant. And we go through our lives believing that we can get pregnant at any time, very simply, and yeah, we get older, it changes, but just get off birth control and you’ll be fine. And well, I would say our generation is not truly educated on what our reproductive system is telling us. A lot of women who are in their teens and maybe have acne or have really heavy periods, the first thing that their doctor does to them is put them on birth control, and really doesn’t explain the long-term effects of birth control on our bodies and our reproductive health. I truly, truly believe that our reproductive system is a vital sign of a woman’s body, and it gives us so much more information than we have ever been taught, or that we’ve ever known. And it’s not until you step into this world that you truly understand how important it is.
NICOLE
Well, I think about when I went on to birth control young, I can’t even remember, but I think probably in college, and what you’re taught is to suppress your body’s symptoms. You’re just like, oh, you have cramps. That hurts. Let’s give you birth control to keep that down, and then you won’t get pregnant. That’s literally all you learn. I went off it, I don’t know, like a decade ago, and wonder why I was on it for so long. It doesn’t feel good in your body when you finally get off and you’re like, wow, there’s lots of things happening here.
SOPHIE BYFIELD
I had the very interesting experience of when I was on birth control, I got an IUD, so my periods were like next to nothing. And when I got off of it, they were super heavy. I asked my doctor, is this my body just regulating? Because I truly haven’t had a period in a few years. Only to find out I had the most horrible fibroids, but they were completely masked by the birth control. Yeah, it does a number on our bodies. And I wish that more people would have the conversation to benefit the younger generation.
NICOLE
Well, it’s so funny you said fibroids, because I also had fibroids, and I had surgery to remove them. And when I was trying to get pregnant the first time, it became an issue, and I didn’t understand them, but I knew they existed there. There are a lot of consequences to pregnancy when you have fibroids, and they are really common. So anyone who is listening, I think more than half of women, or something like that, will at some point get fibroids, and they grow in pregnancy. If you don’t know about them or don’t take care of them or figure out some process for them, they actually can really make your pregnancy quite complicated.
This is not the point of the conversation with Sophie, but I’m just saying it, because that’s something I learned as well. Other women would come to me and talk to me about it because they felt really alone in that fibroid journey. And in parallel, often fibroids are happening when you want to get pregnant at that time, right?
SOPHIE BYFIELD
Yes, 100%. For myself, that was a big part of the first half of my journey. Let me take a step back…When you have fibroids, they can be inside the uterus, on the wall of the uterus, or inside the muscle. When I say the wall, I mean the top of the uterus. So when they’re inside the uterus, they do laparoscopic surgery to remove them, to clean out the uterus so that the fertilized egg can implant. So that’s what I had right off the bat. Like, okay, we see six. Let’s go in there and cut them out.
I stayed with that fertility clinic for two years and just wasn’t getting pregnant, was never seeing this positive test. It wasn’t until I switched clinics and I saw a different doctor, and he said I have a lot of fibroids. And I’m like, what? No one ever mentioned this to me. And he told me I will not get pregnant if we don’t do an open myomectomy. That’s an open surgery to take all of these fibroids out, and that’s an extra two years of wasted fertility time. And as you get older, your egg quality starts to decline, so it becomes harder to get pregnant.
I didn’t advocate for myself or ask the right questions or even know the right questions to ask in order to advocate for my fertility, to make that go faster. And that’s what I fight for with these women in my community, just so that they know that they can advocate for themselves and find out more information in order to make the best decision.
NICOLE
I feel like you will always have a lot of work to do because it’s not really common information. I feel like it’s taken me a really long time to learn things and that it’s sort of a word-of-mouth system. It feels like very old school. And I have to say, my fibroid journey at least was before social media was so big. Maybe now with social media, it’s a little bit easier to learn about the people who can educate you or to get the education. But I remember when I was going through it, I really just literally had my doctors, and I am grateful and fortunate I had doctors who knew right away what my issues were and actually helped me address it right away. But it’s interesting when you don’t have that, if you don’t have the exact right people, you can be in the dark like you were for a couple of years.
SOPHIE BYFIELD
Yes. And what I love and hate about our medical system at the exact same time, is they don’t want to scare you with all of the information, but then you don’t get to make informed decisions about your body. Then also on the other side, some of our reproductive specialists are just focused on getting you pregnant. And there’s so much other things going on with your hormones. I think of women who have PCOS where they’re putting them on drugs to help with PCOS but not actually healing the imbalances to fix what’s going wrong. And yes, some women will absolutely get pregnant with these interventions, but until we truly start looking at our body as a holistic system and healing imbalances, we’re going to have women that have secondary infertility. And that’s when they’ve had one child and really struggled to conceive the next.
NICOLE
Yeah. I feel like it’s such a long, complex process, and sometimes women have had an easy time getting pregnant and sometimes they don’t. And then it can be really hard because you’re like wondering why you are depending on your age and where you’re at? Why am I having such a hard time getting pregnant? Or also not understanding there’s all these sort of, what I term doomsday ages and dates out there, about your fertility that are actually pretty inaccurate. They make you feel anxious and nervous. I felt like I had to get married and have a baby by 35, or I was screwed, pretty much, which is not actually true, but it’s still what’s sold out there. I don’t even know where that line came from, but it’s repeated all the time.
SOPHIE BYFIELD
There’s so much shame that women have around not being able to get pregnant. And a lot of it is generational. I know it’s very cultural for me, where as soon as you get married, you’re expected to reproduce like you’re expected to. And I think of my grandma, who was like, ‘When are you going to give your husband a baby?’ It’s this expectation. Then when you can’t do it and you feel so much shame around your infertility journey, that you’re not sharing it, it’s like you’re in this constant battle. They say that someone on an infertility journey or a fertility journey is experiencing PTSD every single month because every single time they get their period and it’s a negative test, they go into this, I want to say ‘devastation’ as the best word. It’s like, ‘Why am I not getting pregnant? What am I doing wrong? Is it a decision I made in the past?’ All of these things and thoughts and feelings, although some women are able to pull themselves out of it.
But when you’ve been on your journey for 1,2,3,4 years and then your neighbor next door gets pregnant at the drop of a hat, the feelings of shame and worthlessness and you are failing in your body as a woman, it’s just heavy to carry.
NICOLE
Well, even like your grandma said, you give your husband a baby because it’s about the worth and value, right? That’s what we talk about on this podcast all the time – your worth and value is inherent to your ability to reproduce. And I know that I’ve had to really work on that this is just a function of my body and it has nothing to do with who I am as a human, my value in the world, or what I bring to relationships and people. And I work on myself a lot. I’m a coach, right? I’ve had a lot of resources to help myself separate that out so I can be on the journey and be good with where the journey is at. And that’s okay because it can be really long, and mine has been long as well. But it’s interesting because I think for most women, those resources aren’t available. So every time you’re getting your period, instead of being able to feel the emotions move through it, it can just become this ‘thing’ then, that not even something your partner may be able to relate to, especially if they’re a man, about what it’s like to go through that cycle.
SOPHIE BYFIELD
What I found for me personally, when I was in the first half of my journey, before I started sharing it, is until you start talking about it, you don’t realize how many people in your circle have had some sort of experience around trying to conceive. And you were stuck in this dark place because you were unable to have this one thing that you want. It’s like you’re trying to crawl yourself out and be positive because they say it’s your mindset, and you need to manifest this baby when the weight of your world is on your shoulders. It’s heavy. What I have found is male partners tend to not completely understand. It doesn’t mean that they’re not going through it, it doesn’t mean that they don’t see it, but they don’t know how to support you in it.
NICOLE
Yeah, I can definitely see that. I feel what you’re saying, we’re experiencing this over and over again. One of my friends was telling me, there are so many of these stories, like someone who is adopting a baby or about to adopt a baby, and they find out they’re pregnant. Right, because it’s like the stress of wanting to conceive can be so intense and so prolonged, and then all of a sudden you take your attention off, and then boom, you can get pregnant.
SOPHIE BYFIELD
Right.
NICOLE
I’m curious for you then, you must work with women so much on that initial experience of the stress of the fertility journey. And I’m curious if you could share more about that.
SOPHIE BYFIELD
So for me, it’s about healing to conceive. And healing is not only healing your menstrual cycle and your reproductive system, but also how you’re carrying your stress, because stress is going to be there, and the brain is stuck in the reptilian era, and it doesn’t know the difference between a saber-toothed tiger and being stuck in traffic. What it does then, and most women don’t understand, is it actually shuts down your reproductive system. So, your hippocampus, which is in the back of the brain, stops hormones from being reproduced when you’re stressed out. But when women start to decrease their stress or they take their mind off trying to conceive and just start to enjoy their life again, a lot of them, I’m not going to say all, but a lot of them, tend to conceive.
I decided in December of 2022 that I was going to go on a completely healing journey. It was really funny. It started with the smell of eggs. My husband made scrambled eggs and they stank, and they were the most disgusting thing to me. I stopped eating eggs, and then I slowly removed meat. I started working out again. I was journaling. I was doing my self-care; I was taking care of myself. And I got pregnant! So now we’re about 20 weeks along, and it really was me healing parts of myself that I was still holding on to, that I didn’t know were there, taking up space.
NICOLE
Well, first, congratulations. That’s incredible. After all these years. Just amazing. I know that probably is just so deeply close and held in. So really amazing.
I love hearing what you’re saying about when we’re just focused on that healing journey and healing yourself. And I’m curious because you must still have been doing things related to the fertility journey while you were also doing that healing. Could you talk about what it’s like to do that dance?
SOPHIE BYFIELD
You know, what’s so interesting about my kind of steps to conceiving and what I now teach my Ladies in the Heal to Conceive program, is I go back to the basics. Like, let’s strip away everything that you’ve learned from the Internet. You don’t need to be on every supplement. You don’t need to be doing everything. Let’s look at what your body is telling us and then slowly add things back in. For myself, when we were on the journey between December and March, I went back to the basics. I went back to using ovulation sticks and tracking my temperature, looking at my cervical mucus. I actually went from ten different supplements to four. I just took it back to the basics and was like, what does my body need? What is my body telling me it needs? Let me feed it that. That’s what I’ve been finding – a lot of these women that come into the program really are doing everything, like, ‘I’m taking all the supplements, I’m going to all the doctor’s appointments, I did take acupuncture, I’ve done this, I’ve done that, and it’s still not working. Why isn’t it working for me?’ And not everything is going to work for everybody. We really need to strip it back down to the basics in order to figure out what works for you.
NICOLE
Right. And that’s such an interesting practice because it also depends on what age you are, how long you’ve been trying to conceive, and what your partner is like. There are so many different pieces of it.
SOPHIE BYFIELD
I can imagine 100%.
NICOLE
It takes two.
SOPHIE BYFIELD
One of the very first things I say is, has your partner been tested? Because you don’t want to be four years into this journey and you actually have marrow factor infertility and that’s why you’re not getting pregnant. Something else which is very interesting is a lot of women don’t get their AMH tested, and it’s one of the key factors in knowing where you are in terms of your egg reserve and how close you are to menopause, because then we may need to be more aggressive with our treatments. We may need to scale back. If you’re far away and you’re going to have lots of eggs prepared, and this isn’t something that necessarily the fertility clinics either request, ask you for, or even look at. If you’re under 35, they’re just like, hey, you’re under 35, you should be fine. But we’re learning more and more that women are going into menopause earlier and earlier.
NICOLE
Oh, that’s so interesting. Would you talk a little bit more about that? What is causing that? And how do women even start to know or understand that that’s happening?
SOPHIE BYFIELD
It’s a very loaded question. You know what the best indicator is to talk to your mom, your grandma, and your auntie, and really find out when they went into menopause and actually start listening to your body because we’re on so many drugs that actually hide symptoms of things that are happening. When you start listening to your body, it will tell you and become the master of your menstrual cycle. That means if you come to see someone like me, I want to know, how long is it on average? When do you ovulate? Are you seeing cervical mucus? I want to know those things. When you’re on your fertility journey and you’re handing over that information to the fertility specialist, you lose control, and it’s not control in the sense, like, I have to control every single thing, but you’re not empowered to make the decisions that best affect you and your body.
I was talking to this young lady, and she was asking me about having certain surgery done. And I said, have you done your research? Do you know the pros, the cons, the ins, the outs? Because at the end of the day, only you can live with the results of what’s happening. So, you need to understand what is going to happen, how it’s going to happen, and what the outcome could be before you make an informed decision. Doctors don’t talk about it like that anymore.
NICOLE
That’s interesting because I am somebody who talks a lot about intuition. Part of it for me is always like, how do I intuitively feel? And I found out over time, that it also really helps to have the data right. You need both of those things, because I think about what you’re talking about, tracking your temperature, seeing where your cycle is at, you actually really need to know that information to figure out if you’re capable of conceiving in the situation you’re in now. No matter how much you might trust that you’re going to get pregnant, you might still actually need some additional support.
SOPHIE BYFIELD
To actually get pregnant, 100%. And when you are informed and have that information and you walk into the fertility clinic, you get better results. When I say better results, I mean a better experience with the fertility clinic, better experience with the nurses, better experience with the doctors. You may still have to go for IVF medicated cycles, but you know exactly what’s happening and you understand it a lot better.
NICOLE
What it sounds like you’re doing with women is, you understand really what’s happening, but you’re also helping them advocate for themselves in this process.
SOPHIE BYFIELD
100%, because we don’t know how long it’s going to take, and we don’t know if you need medical intervention. What we do know is that we can find our voice and understand what’s happening, and advocate for ourselves to make sure that our treatments are aligning with what our body needs, not the step-by-step. You’re in a fertility clinic. You’re a number-type process.
NICOLE
It’s really interesting. And this is a slightly different direction; I don’t know if you have spent much time in there, but I’ve been working with an acupuncturist who also talks a lot about how Western medicine doesn’t really always address the heart of what the issues are. When the way the protocols that she puts me on are not ones that I’ve ever experienced anywhere else, or that anyone else even knows about. And it’s interesting because it’s really separate. It’s its own thing. I’m curious if you’ve seen a lot of that too, like other protocols that make a big difference for people that are really outside the Western medicine model?
SOPHIE BYFIELD
Absolutely. It’s all about peeling back your body’s onion and listening to what it’s actually saying at the heart of it. I have a love/hate relationship with acupuncture. I love it for everybody else.
NICOLE
You personally have a love/hate relationship? I personally do.
SOPHIE BYFIELD
I’m not someone that can lay still. I remember on my fertility journey, she’s got all her needles in, and I’m lying there, and my brain is spinning. I want to be doing something else, anything else. I have clients who advocate for it, and it works for them, and I 100% believe in it, but I am not the one, and that’s hilarious.
NICOLE
I’ve actually turned it into for myself because I’m like, ‘Okay, Nicole, you need the parasympathetic nervous system to relax and calm down. You’re going to take your weekly snooze here, just do that’. But I can understand why, because at first, you’re just like, there’s really nothing to do.
SOPHIE BYFIELD
That is exactly it. But honestly, I truly believe that Western medicine has shifted to just healing symptoms and not healing the cause. Until we turn back and start healing the cause, we’ll see more and more women struggling to get pregnant.
NICOLE
Well, it’s interesting, and again, not to dis at all the fertility clinics, because they do really magical work, but I also have that experience. There’s not a lot around what’s happening outside. It’s just the science versus how are you taking care of yourself? What are you doing on all these other levels to help that happen? And I’m curious, what do you advocate for people in terms of how do you actually build that whole team? Or is that something you really support women with, building your full medical team when you’re wanting to get pregnant?
SOPHIE BYFIELD
Exactly. What we start with is understanding our body and moving through what your reproductive health is, what is going on there? Looking at your nutrition, looking at your stress management. And then one of my core modules is how do you build your team? What does your team look like? Is it the fertility clinic, your general practitioner? Is it an OB? Is it a fertility coach and a fertility nurse? Is it an acupuncturist? We really look at what you need. Some people will need the therapist and the coaching. Some people need the fertility clinic route because they need more of a medicated system. Some people are fine with just their GP and acupuncture and a Naturopath. It’s really looking at, and figuring out, what your body needs and then supporting it. I believe that you need to be the scientist of your reproductive health and look at it from multiple angles.
NICOLE
Well, I love what you’re saying, too, because I think sometimes my expectations (and I see this for other women too), is that your one clinic will have all the answers. And I think it’s really hard because the investment in the fertility is so high, right, that you feel like it should be the one-stop shop for everything. And the truth is, and this is true of so many things in life, that we often need multiple people doing different things to support you, so that you can actually get through to the other side, versus thinking that it’s all going to be in one place.
SOPHIE BYFIELD
Yes. What I have found now, working with clients for two or three years, is we go into the fertility clinics with the best of hopes, and it is a huge investment. There are people that get pregnant right away with a fertility clinic. Totally. And that is amazing. And I don’t want to knock them, because I do believe that they have an amazing place in this journey. But it really is something to be said when we’re looking at the whole system and not just reproduction.
NICOLE
Right. It’s like we really actually want someone to be asking, like, ‘How’s your sleep? What are you eating? What are you doing to relax? How do you spend your time? Are you on social media constantly?’ Whatever. You know what I mean? Even though those are questions you and I might ask our clients, it’s funny the doctors don’t and actually, it could be worthwhile, right, for us to start?
SOPHIE BYFIELD
To take those into account 100%. But I also think that with women that are on a fertility journey, we can also go too far the other way, where we can become obsessed with everything that we eat, everything we touch, everything that happens. There really is this fine line, and I’m an advocate for, you still need to enjoy your life while you’re on this journey, because you have no idea how long this journey is going to take. One of the clients in the Heal to Conceive said to me, ‘Sophie, should I stop hot yoga while I’m trying to conceive?’ And I said, ‘Well, we don’t know how long it’s going to take you, so do you want to stop it?’
In my situation, it took me four years. So, is that something you want to stop for four years, or are you still experiencing benefits? Can we set up a schedule where you enjoy it at certain times in your cycle and then don’t do it in other times, do regular yoga in other times. We really created that for her because we’re told, you can’t drink, you can’t do this, you can’t do this. Then there are women who get pregnant by accident, and they were out partying the other day, right? And they have healthy, amazing babies. So, I’m not saying that you should be drinking and partying all the time, but there is a nice fine balance to also living your life when you’re on this journey, and it helps with your self-esteem and your mental health every step of the way.
NICOLE
Well, when you said four years, this brings up a question for you around how did you stay in that faith and that hope that you would get pregnant? Because I’m assuming that whole time you were like, ‘I want to have a baby, I want to have a baby in some fashion.’ And also probably thought of all the alternative ways you could be a mother, outside of having your own child. What really kept you sustained on that journey for yourself?
SOPHIE BYFIELD
I would like to say that in the beginning, it was super rough just because my expectation was that I was going to get pregnant right away. So when it wasn’t happening month after month, it was really knocking me down. What I started finding was exercise helped me release those emotions. Sometimes I needed to use a parasympathetic nervous system and calm my body down and do yoga. And sometimes I was like super stressed, and I needed to burn the energy off and go for a run from there.
There was a lot of journaling, support groups, and my therapist. A lot of women don’t like to lean on a therapist during this time, but I think it is so important to make sure that they’re in your team because there are highs and there are devastating lows. And I know women that have gone through four to five miscarriages and don’t have a therapist, and it can get very dark and very hard. So just being able to have someone that can listen and support you and be able to really help you transition through the journey or move through the journey, and also learn that it’s not your fault.
NICOLE
We haven’t really spoken about miscarriage, but that is a journey because I lost a baby and I feel like many women don’t understand that there is actually a way through that, but they carry it for so long because it is literally a death, it’s a loss. And our society doesn’t really treat it that way typically. They don’t understand that there are resources for it. They just struggle with it on their own, and their partners don’t understand. And there’s so much in there. I don’t know that we have to go anywhere with it, but for any of you who are listening, and that has occurred for you, I just want you to know that there are resources available and there are really powerful ways to move through it for yourself so that you don’t have to carry it in a really heavy way.
SOPHIE BYFIELD
And for anyone that’s going through it right now, I’m sending you baby dust and lots of love and healing, because I know how hard it is on your heart, and there is another side.
NICOLE
Yeah, absolutely. Well, Sophie, this has been such a fascinating conversation and so fun. I’m curious, if there is someone listening who has been struggling with their fertility or wanting support, what’s one tip you would give them to start to say, okay, am I doing all that I need to right now? I mean, you’re dealing with a really complicated subject. I know. I’m asking you to distill it down to one thing. Is there a way you could just even start to give the next step for somebody who’s facing something like this?
SOPHIE BYFIELD
I would say the very first step is to make sure both you and your partner get tested, so male factor is huge. And get an AMH test, because that will really tell you your egg quality and your reserve, and let us know how close you are to menopause and how aggressive you need to be. And this is going to be very controversial when I say this: Stop googling supplements. Stop googling supplements because you do not need every single supplement that’s out there. Talk to a naturopath, talk to a fertility specialist, and let’s decide on what’s best for your body.
NICOLE
Good to know. It’s true. Sometimes you can just be like, these are insane, so stop googling the supplements. I love that. All right, well, Sophie, are you ready for our rapid-fire questions?
SOPHIE BYFIELD
I don’t know. Feels like a lot of pressure.
NICOLE
These are very light. They’re very fun. Okay, here’s our first one. What was the last thing you watched on TV?
SOPHIE BYFIELD
Star Trek.
NICOLE
Oh, you’re a Trekkie. Awesome. Okay, what’s on your nightstand?
SOPHIE BYFIELD
Prenatals. So right now, I have prenatals, my puffer, the book I’m currently reading, which is ‘The One Thing’, and water.
NICOLE
What’s ‘The One Thing’ about?
SOPHIE BYFIELD
It’s actually a really good productivity book, in that you need to narrow down the most important thing. So asking yourself, if my goal is three months out, what is the most important thing I can achieve today that moves me closer to that goal, instead of trying to do a little bit of everything.
NICOLE
Cool. I love that. This is why I ask about what’s on your nightstand because then I get book recommendations. Okay, when was the last time you tried something new and what was it?
SOPHIE BYFIELD
That is a great question. There hasn’t been a lot of trying new with being pregnant.
NICOLE
Well, being pregnant, I would say, is probably a good ‘trying new’.
SOPHIE BYFIELD
Okay. If I was to say being pregnant was a good ‘try new’, I would say that. But outside of that, I don’t know. When was the last time I tried something new? Oh, I tried a white chocolate chip macadamia cookie. I’m not a big macadamia fan, but I was pleasantly surprised.
NICOLE
I think that is bold because I’m not a white chocolate fan either. So that’s awesome. Okay, last one. What are your top three most used emojis?
SOPHIE BYFIELD
The check mark. So the check mark, the happy face, and the laugh. Because I’ve got two amazing nephews and my sister sends me parenting faux pax’s all the time, and I die of laughter.
NICOLE
I love that. My niece cracks me up, too. She’s four and just doing the silly things you do at four all the time.
SOPHIE BYFIELD
Jeremiah is four and it’s just insane, the things that they do are so cute.
NICOLE
They’re so cute. Well, Sophie, what a delight to have you. We’ll link everything to reach you, but if you could just let everyone know what’s one of the easiest ways to reach out to you if they’re really wanting some support on their fertility journey?
SOPHIE BYFIELD
Actually, I’m most active on TikTok, so you can find me there. And it’s fertility coach Sophie, and my podcast is dropping in the next couple of weeks. Super excited. It’s called Heal to Conceive. So you can find me on Heal to Conceive.
NICOLE
Okay, so we’ll definitely be linking this because it will be coming out by then. We’ll link to all of that stuff in the show notes, everyone. Check it out. Screenshot if you love this episode and tag Sophie.
Thank you, Sophie, so much for being in this rich conversation. It’s such an important conversation for women. And thank you for opening it up. I really appreciate you coming on.
SOPHIE BYFIELD
Thank you so much for having me.
Coming Soon: Heal to Conceive Podcast
Discover the blind spots holding you back and take the Boundary Tendencies Quiz
Subscribe to her newsletter
Discover the Blind Spots Holding You Back with Boundaries
© 2024 Nicole Tsong | Designed with by Digits
Photos by Marcella Laine
