- Stress is the sort of unpleasant feeling you have when something feels threatening or difficult to handle. Not everyone feels stress about the same things.
- Pregnancy is a time when you may feel some stress. Your body changes. Your hormone levels change. You might be tired a lot of the time. You worry about the health of your baby. You may worry about how you will manage being a new mom or of having more children.
- Gestational diabetes may increase your worries about your baby’s health and your own.
It’s important to know that stress is not a mental illness. But when stress keeps mounting up and it starts to make you feel worse instead of motivating you, it can impact your mental and physical health.
What happens when you get stressed?
When we experience stress, we can have some physical signs.
- Higher blood pressure
- Faster heart rate
- Tense muscles
- Faster breathing
- Being strongly aware of everything around us
For our ancestors, these body changes were meant to help them run away from danger (flight) or fight it physically.
What is the impact of too much stress?
It is normal to feel some level of stress. In small amounts it can actually be good, helping you to get motivated and push you to reach your goals. However, when stress is more intense and doesn’t go away, it is more of a problem. It doesn’t feel good.
- For example when you are stressed you start worrying about bad things happening, find it hard to focus, feel frustrated and lose your temper more frequently.
- Over time unmanaged stress experienced chronically can affect your relationship with your partner, how you parent and how you function in your other roles (e.g. at work).
Can stress cause pregnancy problems?
Stress can increase the chances of:
- The baby being born too early (before 37 weeks of pregnancy)
- The baby not growing enough (less than 2500 grams or 5.5 pounds)
- Higher blood sugar and blood pressure
- A more challenging delivery
If we learn to cope better with stress, we may lower the chances of these problems. Removing all stress from our lives is not possible and life would probably be quite dull. However, we can learn ways to better cope when faced with stress.