Like Mary Poppins, you’re “practically perfect in every way.” And like the Victorian ueber-au pair, you’ve got everything nicely under control. You’re always immaculately groomed, your home is like something out of a decor mag, and you’re on a stellar career path, universally admired for your ruthless efficiency and utter reliability. You appear to be in full control of your destiny. But there’s a price to be paid for this world of polished surfaces; underneath it all, you’re teetering on the brink of collapse. You’re enslaved by the clock, you are crushed by any perceived flaws or failures in your life and, far more alarmingly, you’re battling – really battling – to fall pregnant.

If this thumbnail sketch rings true for you, it could be that you’re a “time-urgent perfectionist”(C) (TUP), a unique personality type who heaps enough pressure on herself to disable her immunity and compromise her fertility. We all have a little bit of a perfectionist in us, and we all tend to be harried by the clock, but certain individuals are enslaved by the demands of time and their own exacting standards of perfection.

While most of us seem to manage with our stress load, the TUP(C) personality type tends to reinforce and amplify her stress the point of self-sabotage.

But help is at hand. Self-confessed TUP(C) Mandy Rodrigues, a clinical psychologist in Johannesburg, has spent the last 12 years tracking this syndrome, along with her husband, fertility specialist Dr Antonio Rodrigues, and their colleague, clinical psychologist Dr Edward Wolff. They published their findings in a book, Faster, Better, Sicker (self published) and, in the face of her own infertility, Mandy and her co-authors put together a 10-week online course that seems to have yielded startling results.

The first step on the road to improved fertility is to determine your personality type and degree of stress. According to Mandy Rodrigues, “all the people we identify have behavioural traits involving time urgency and perfectionism. However, they express it in different ways. They may be either personalising or scarcity personalities. This refers to the way the individual interprets her stress and reacts to that stress.”

Briefly put, the personalising type will heap blame on herself for the stress, internalise it, and bottle up her feelings. She’s a people pleaser, hates to offend, and tends to be a more passive person. The scarcity person, au contraire, will externalise her stress. She angers easily, and is more confrontational.

She’ll heap blame on others and/or circumstances in a stressful situation, rather than herself. Sound familiara Mandy says you only have to think about your reaction when your credit card is rejected in the check-out queue. “The personalising person agonises over the queue behind her, gets embarrassed, and worries that others may think she has no money in her account. The scarcity person gets angry and blames the bank, the magnetic strip, etc.” Both, however, experience stress in a heightened way.

So what happens to our bodies when we’re ranting or agonising in the checkout queue? Here, we’d have to look at the pathways of stress in our bodies. And we’d have to distinguish between two types of stress – real, mediocre or functional stress, which we all live with, and “chronic” or learnt stress, which becomes debilitating and disabling.

A more balanced person will use their stress in a positive way; it will motivate them to act, initiate change, or disengage from a stressful situation. Under such conditions, the body releases adrenaline (not a bad thing) and we react or act.

This is good. Learnt stress or self-induced “chronic stress”, however, is often an undue, disproportionate response to real stress, and is usually generated within, ie. it’s self-induced. The TUP(C) personality type will typically heap on more stress than there really is (through negative-speak, panicked or rushed behaviour, etc) and this generates an unhealthy response in the body: the production of cortisol and noradrenalin, which will, amongst other things, impair fertility.

For most TUP(C) types, “infertility is possibly the first obstacle they have faced where they have little control over the outcome… Despite having attained and achieved well in other areas of their lives, they are suddenly thrown into the possibility of their plans not working out as they were meant to,” says Mandy in Faster, Better, Sicker. So what do they do when faced with this realityT

Thirty-year-old Marguerite Potgieter, a housewife, says, “my fertility started to consume my whole life. We’d plan our holidays, parties, etc around my cycle. I started to feel like a complete failure in life, because I just couldn’t do a simple thing like fall pregnant, and everyone else around me seemed to be falling pregnant at the drop of a hat!” Marguerite heaped on additional stress through a typical TUP(C) response, through negative self-talk, through recrimination and blame. Mandy’s course identifies 10 typical, knee-jerk, conditioned responses to stressful situations.

Things changed for Marguerite when she moved to a new specialist, Dr Antonio Rodrigues. “The course helped me to get through the stress of the IVF cycle by doing self talk, and being able to determine whether I was facing real stress or it was just my personality at work. The course also helped me to communicate better with my husband about my feelings. Most of all, the course put me in touch with 11 other women struggling with infertility. We communicate daily, getting updates on each other’s lives. The support of the group has been great – knowing that you’re not alone in this world. And now I’m 22 weeks pregnant with twins!”

Frith Thomas, 39, a magazine editor, shares a similar story. “I used to be the typical time-urgent perfectionist living on a stress high, and I’d been struggling to fall pregnant. Dr Rodrigues suggested I go on Mandy’s course as he felt it would benefit my personality type. I was initially fairly sceptical as I thought I was programmed to be the way I was, and that stress habits are too deeply ingrained to do much about. But, as the course progressed, I found myself changing, and my colleagues and husband started commenting on how differently I was handling things.” Frith learnt, through the course, how to interrupt patterned behaviour responses.

When faced with a stressful situation, the TUP(C) personality has to talk her way through several steps. Known as “Planned Thinking Management”, she has to de-programme her response and really interrogate it. “Mandy’s course taught me the questions I need to ask myself when faced with a stressful situation. I now ask myself: is this real stress or is it just me making a big deal out of it Would my teenage son, the most laid-back person I know, get stressed about it

If not, chances are pretty good I can let it go. I ask myself whether I have any valid facts to back up whether it’s truly a stressful situation or not. I do this automatically now. It’s become ingrained in me, and although none of the stresses that were there previously have gone away – I still face daily traffic, taxis and deadlines – my reactions to those situations are a lot less extreme than they were before,” says Frith.

Many self-help courses involve an almost impossible degree of journey work. You’re expected to travel so far from who you are, to effect such a transformation in yourself, that the course itself becomes yet another site of stress, yet another potential place for self-sabotage. The TUPS(C) course is qualitatively different – small steps, daily measures and monitoring, daily work and self-analysis, and there is no requirement for a personality change. You simply learn how to manage your own worst habits, to block patterned behaviour and breeze your way through it all.

Sylvia Plath, the gifted, fractured poet once wrote: “Perfection is horrible; it cannot have children.” Plath was speaking about poetic creativity – how you need flaws in order to write – but she chillingly identified a central motif of our age. Now, thanks to courses such as the TUPS(C) course, the poet’s fatal words no longer hold true.

Contact: Mandy Rodrigues on 011-4632244 or go to www.timeurgency.com The TUP(C) Stress management course includes a nutritional evaluation, and should be supported by a visit to your gynae/fertility specialist.