Having children means giving up a lot of your freedoms – your heart will no longer be under your own control for one thing. Nor, really, will your time. But that’s okay. You knowingly and willingly give up a lot for the joy your child will bring.
So start as you mean to go on. Before you even try to conceive, you should stop smoking. I offer a stop smoking hypnotherapy Chancery Lane service and sometimes clients come to see me because they’re trying to start a family and want to give the pregnancy the best chance by stopping smoking.
Why?
Keep smoking and you are a lot less likely to conceive at all. If you’ve been trying for a year and there’s no baby, that’s defined as infertility. Perhaps you’d rather not know which one of you is infertile. But chances are that it’s the smoker.
Smoking’s effect on sperm
Smoking does harm sperm. Of all the many chemicals that cigarettes contain, two heavy metals in smoke, cadmium and lead, are believed to do the most damage. These two can affect the shape of sperm: of course sperm are designed to swim far and swim fast and any shapeshifting can significantly limit both of these functions. In addition, simply fewer sperm are produced by male smokers: about 25 per cent less. And finally, the DNA of sperm can be disrupted by smoke, so the likelihood of, for instance, a miscarriage, is much higher.
What about female smokers?
Once again, cigarettes significantly reduce fertility. They decrease the chance of conceiving successfully by making the lining of the womb a more hostile place for a fertilised egg. It is the womb lining which supports an embryo at the beginning of its journey to birth by offering a nurturing bed: in smokers, it is less likely to nourish the embryo and so the chances of miscarriage are higher.
Remember that inhaling a partner’s cigarette smoke is almost as bad for fertility as smoking yourself. In fact, secondary smoke can raise both infertility and the risks of pregnancy just as high as primary smoking. And something you probably don’t want to know is that, if a parent is a smoker, the chances of their child growing up to have fertility problems later in life are much higher.
Are you thinking of becoming a parent? Stop smoking now – not just to maximise your chances of conceiving but for your partner’s health and that of your future baby. Book a discovery call with me to find out more about how I could help you stop smoking with hypnotherapy to find out if we would be a good fit to work together.
