All the changes your body is experiencing can affect your sleep. In the first few months, you may perhaps feel sleepless due to hormones, or because you have to get up frequently to urinate in the middle of the night. Later on in pregnancy, the size of your belly may make it uncomfortable to find the right position to sleep in.  Also, many women have vivid dreams during pregnancy.

Sleeping in the first few months

Some women, despite the intense fatigue characteristic of the first few months of pregnancy, find it difficult to fall asleep at night. The effect of pregnancy hormones could interfere with a good night’s sleep and besides, all emotions or concerns that arise when expecting could prevent you from sleeping soundly. This is compounded by the fact that in the first months you usually urinate a lot more, reason for which you may have to get up from bed more than once at night.

If you can’t fall asleep on schedule, you can take some measures before going to bed, in order to help you sleep more soundly. Following are a few tips:  

• Don’t drink liquids in the hours before bedtime. Drink your daily amount of water in the morning, in order to avoid waking up to go to the bathroom and not being able to fall asleep again.

• Have a light dinner, a few hours before going to bed. Heavy digestions are not conducive to a good night’s sleep.

• Take a warm bath before going to bed, with relaxing soaps or salts.  

• Drink some warm milk or chamomile tea before going to bed.

Your sleep as pregnancy progresses

Even if you slept well during the second trimester, you may start to have problems sleeping after the third trimester.  The main problem in these months is finding a comfortable position and then changing positions without having to wake up every time.  

The recommended position for sleeping as pregnancy advances is lying on your left side. This facilitates blood circulation of the vena cava and both you and your baby are oxygenated. Don’t worry if, even though you lie on your left side, you wake up lying face up. Nature is wise and if something were not going well by sleeping on your back, your body would know to shift positions.  

In order to eliminate the pressure that the back may feel in this posture, place a big pillow between your legs. In fact, if you want to achieve ultimate comfort, get yourself a pregnancy pillow. It is a large pillow that enables you to accommodate your belly and rest your right leg and your head on the pillow.  You may find them in the Internet or maternity stores.

Avoid drinking liquids late at night so you don’t have to get up. When the pregnancy is quite advanced, it will be more difficult to get up but you will wake up more often to have to urinate.  

Dreams during pregnancy

Another factor that can be making you wake up is the vivid dreaming that many women experience during pregnancy. Being a mom is such a big change in a woman’s life that it is normal that all those concerns, hopes and emotions are expressed through dreams.

Many women dream with small babies with which they don’t know what to do, or that they have sex with someone other than their partner. Possibly, these dreams are expressing, on the one hand, their concern about being a good mother and on the other, what will happen with her feminity now that she is going to be a mom.  In any case, don’t be alarmed. This is something normal that happens to many women and it doesn’t mean that they won’t be good moms or are about to cheat on their significant other.