Why I don't have a protocol
Two couples come to me the same month. Same age, same diagnosis, near-identical food and sleep on paper. They need different plans.
This is usually the conversation I have with couples who are preparing for another IVF cycle—especially after a previous cycle left them wondering what, if anything, they should do differently before trying again.
Not because I like to complicate things. Because what separates them isn't in the food or the sleep. It's in what has happened to their life since this started — and no protocol contains that.
I have never met a couple in this who wasn't stressed
Fifteen years. Not one.
So when someone tells you to reduce your stress, they are naming a destination without giving you a road. You already know you're stressed. You have been told to relax by people who love you, and it made you want to throw something.
Here is what I think is actually true.
It is about knowing how to break the loop.
Stress in this isn't a level sitting there waiting to be turned down. It's a circuit that keeps re-firing — the same thought at two in the morning, the same arithmetic, the same search history. You can't lower it by deciding to. You can interrupt it.
That distinction is most of my work, and it changes what a plan looks like.
The part nobody says out loud
When you can't control the outcome, you control the inputs. That isn't a flaw. It's what people do.
But watch what it turns into.
You cut the coffee. You stop drinking. You cancel the dinner. You start training harder, because at least that's doing something. Every one of those feels like taking care of yourself, and one or two of them might be.
The wine wasn't really about the wine. It was two hours with people who make you laugh. And now, when you wave off a glass at your friend's birthday, you either explain or you lie — and either way you've just paid for it.
The coffee wasn't about caffeine. It was the ten minutes before the house woke up.
And the hard training that's supposed to be relieving the stress: past a point it stops relieving and starts adding. He knows he's handling it. He's handling it in the way that costs the most.
So the loop tightens. You gave up the things that were steadying you in order to be good, and being good made it worse.
Those restrictions were never nutrition decisions. They were coping. That's why telling you "you can keep your coffee" doesn't fix anything on its own — permission is useless to someone whose restricting is how they're holding on.
You break the loop first. Then the coffee stops being a moral question.
What breaking a loop actually looks like
It's smaller and stranger than people expect.
It isn't an hour of yoga you now have to feel guilty about skipping. It's something that occupies the part of your mind running the circuit — counting up in sevens from thirteen while you're lying there, because you cannot do that and rehearse the same conversation at the same time.
It looks like nothing. It isn't impressive. It doesn't go on a plan you'd show anybody. And it's more useful at two in the morning than any supplement I could name.
Different loops need different interrupts, which is the other reason I can't write you a protocol. The thing that breaks his isn't the thing that breaks yours.
The six questions
A form can ask what you eat. A form cannot ask you these.
Walk me through your day.
From waking to bed — the ordinary version, not the good one.
Tell me about your social life.
Who do you still see. Who have you stopped seeing.
What did you change when this started?
This is the one that moves the plan most. Almost every couple has quietly given something up — the wine, the coffee, the gym they liked, dinners, sex that wasn't scheduled. Some of it was worth giving up. Most of it wasn't, and the giving up cost more than the thing.
Who is your support?
Most people go quiet on this one. That's an answer too.
What is the stressor?
Not stress in general. The one. It's usually specific, and it's often not fertility.
Why are you not sleeping at night?
Notice I don't ask how you sleep. In fifteen years I haven't needed to.
I ask both of you. Separately, when that's better — people say things one-to-one they won't say across a kitchen table, and those are usually the ones that matter.
Two biologies, one window
His timeline
Sperm takes about seventy-four days to be produced, plus roughly two more weeks of maturation before it's used.
Her timeline
Eggs complete their final maturation over the months before retrieval.
Those windows overlap almost exactly. That's the whole reason this is a couples conversation and not two separate projects: same stretch of time, two different bodies, two different plans inside it.
Not her plan with his supplements attached.
The biology is the easy part of this page. Everyone explains the ninety days. Almost nobody asks what happened to your Friday nights.
What you actually get
A balance plan. Written, both of you, in one document.
What to keep — usually more than you expect. What to change, in the order that matters. And what you can stop policing, which is most of the forty small decisions you're currently making every day with a little guilt attached to each one.
You can stop spending your energy on the things that were never going to move, and put it where the biology actually responds.
What it costs
The written plan, both of you, is $400. If you want me alongside you for the whole window, that is $4,500 for fourteen weeks, with the $400 coming off it — and I don't sell that from a page. I offer it on the review call, only where it fits.
What I can't tell you
I can't tell you why a particular cycle failed. Nobody honest can.
I can't promise this cycle works. I don't know, and neither does anyone selling you something with more confidence than that.
I don't prescribe, order tests, interpret labs, or touch your protocol. This runs alongside your clinic, never instead of it, and anything you change during a treatment cycle should be something your team knows about.
What I can tell you is what's yours to do, what isn't, and how to hold it for one full window — which is the part almost nobody manages alone, and the reason the support runs fourteen weeks instead of ending at a document.
Fifteen minutes, no cost, no pitch — and not the assessment. There is no honest way to do that in fifteen minutes. It is to work out whether this is the right window for you, and whether there is anything here worth preventing.
Most people find this easier to say to someone who isn't in their life. Choose phone and I'll call you at the time you pick — no link, no camera.