Why Is Pregnancy So Sleepy?
When you are in your first months of pregnancy, you feel like you get tired of everything and nothing. This happens to all of us, to women who have proven to be energetic for most of the day and also to those who have always napped during their day. When we are pregnant we end up collapsed by fatigue and sleep and that has an explanation.
Among the most common symptoms during pregnancy is feeling intense and seemingly inexplicable tiredness, which is often accompanied by excessive sleepiness.
The first few weeks of pregnancy can be terrible. Well, in addition to feeling tired and sleepy, it is also very common for nausea and vomiting to wreak havoc with your body and your energy. But cheer up, these don’t last forever. At the end of the first trimester the symptoms disappear and you feel good again.
However, this relief is not eternal either because your body feels fatigued again in the third trimester, when the baby is already very large and consequently your belly too. At this stage, your body carries at least 10 kilos more than its usual weight. So as you will see, the reasons for being sleepy when you are pregnant are unnecessary and they are not fortuitous, they all have a reason.
What makes you so sleepy?
The tiredness and sleepiness that you experience when your baby is growing inside your womb is due in large part to the hormonal and physiological changes that your body begins to experience in the first weeks of pregnancy.
Among the hormones that revolutionize your body during pregnancy and progesterone is the one that stands out the most. Its levels suffer an increase of more than 500% and its action is essential for the maintenance of pregnancy and for the development of the baby. However, the rise in its levels causes many side effects, being the feeling of extreme fatigue and excessive sleep the main one.
In the first weeks of pregnancy, your body, in addition to offering the necessary nutrients for the baby to develop, needs to generate the placenta that will nourish your child during pregnancy. This process requires a lot of energy and makes your body prioritize the development of pregnancy to the detriment of your daily activities.
The growth of the placenta also consumes energy
The baby and the placenta also need blood and a good part of your blood flow is destined for that new being that is developing. In addition to the diversion of the blood, the pregnancy hormones also stimulate the decrease in blood pressure caused by vasodilation of the arteries.
So pregnant women have lower blood pressure. Well, a good part of the body’s blood is destined to irrigate an area of the tissue that is larger than usual, that area where the love of your life is brewing.
On the other hand, fluid retention thins the blood, causing pregnant women to have relative anemia. What contributes even more to the fatigue and intolerance that we feel at this stage of our life towards physical efforts.
At the end of the first trimester, hormonal levels stabilize and the placenta is already formed, so fatigue and sleep improve considerably. In this period, many women feel as energetic as ever. For this reason, the second trimester is known as the happy trimester, because all those unpleasant symptoms that appear in the first weeks of pregnancy go away.
As your baby grows, so does tiredness
But the story does not end there. Many times we feel tired again during the third trimester, when our body begins to feel that it is carrying excess weight.
The baby alone weighs around 3 kilos, meanwhile, body water and amniotic fluid are estimated at just over 6 to 8 kilos, and the placenta next to the uterus weighs almost 2 kilos. Therefore, at the end of pregnancy, each mother carries about 10 kilos more than she used to carry a few months ago.
Thus, during pregnancy your body assumes a significant weight gain in a very short interval and does not give it much time to adjust. In addition, progesterone also acts on the muscles, tendons, ligaments and joints of the body, altering their normal functioning. Which makes you more prone to pain and musculoskeletal injuries.
At the end of pregnancy you feel very sleepy again
The feeling of being very sleepy comes back to you in the third trimester of pregnancy. This happens not only because of the direct action of progesterone on the central nervous system but also because the large size of your belly prevents you from having a good night’s sleep.
In the final stage of pregnancy, sleeping on your back or on your stomach is impossible, and in fact it is not recommended that you sleep on your stomach. Ideally, you should spend the whole night on your side and in fact when you get comfortable it is very likely that you will stay that way for the rest of the night, because in that period you feel great difficulty changing position while you sleep.
To make matters worse, the action of progesterone and compression of the bladder by the uterus make you feel like urinating all the time. Sometimes you will need to get up more than once during the night to go to the bathroom, which further disrupts your sleep.
Therefore, in addition to all the fatigue accumulated throughout the day due to excess weight, pain, frequent urge to go to the bathroom and shortness of breath (due to a giant uterus compressing the diaphragm), Every pregnant woman continues to struggle to replenish her energies during nighttime sleep.
But experiencing all these annoyances will be worth it, because after 9 months you will have your little newborn in your arms.
