How Does Your Sleep Impact Fertility?

My partner and I are planning for our first child, and I came across a study that says sleep disturbances are linked to infertility. Now I’m wondering if my awful sleep skills are going to affect my ability to get pregnant. Is this something I actually need to worry about? What steps should I take to make my sleep better?

—Your sleepiest reader

In order to answer your questions, it’s important to really understand what that study says. The study is a meta-analysis of other studies that look into the relationship between sleep quality (by various metrics) and fertility. In some cases the outcomes researchers are studying are a diagnosis of infertility, and in others they are studying the outcomes of IVF directly.

The studies covered in the analysis find a mixture of effects. Some of them do not show reductions in fertility, some of them do. On net, as the study abstract suggests, the correlations suggest lower fertility for women with more sleep disturbances.

However, there are two important caveats. First, this is a correlation, not an obviously causal impact. There may be other differences across groups with different sleep patterns. Closely related: in many cases, the sleep disturbance is a side effect of another health issue that may itself be the problem. For example, in many cases the issue with sleep is that individuals have sleep apnea. This condition is more common for women with PCOS, which is itself a common cause of infertility.

The upshot is that if your only issue is poor sleep, the data here may not be very informative about the relationship with fertility. So to your first question, it’s not clear how much you need to worry about this (also, worrying is rarely productive).

You might want to improve your sleep for other reasons, which would be reasonable, if challenging. Your best bet for that is probably self-tracking. Get something like a Whoop tracker or an Oura ring and do some self-experimentation to see what improves your sleep. You might find something surprising!