I had anxiety pre-pregnancy anyway but actually it hasn’t been too bad throughout pregnancy with the exception of a few wobbles here and there; now I’m 39 weeks though, I feel like my anxiety is really ramping up.
I think the issue for me at the moment is that I know that if she were to arrive now she would be a full term and likely completely healthy baby, so in my irrational anxiety brain, that translates as ‘she’s not safe inside you and something will go wrong before you get to meet her if she doesn’t come now’. I guess before this week, it was always technically best for her to be inside, but now there’s the very real possibility of her arriving and us having a healthy baby, I’m panicking about her being inside.
Because of this I’m overthinking every tiny thing, I panic about her movements daily (she has never had a pattern, and isn’t a particularly active baby, my placenta is posterior but I have just barely felt her through pregnancy as it is) and work myself up about when labour will start, how long I have left, constantly googling symptoms of early labour even though I know all of them already. With all the adrenaline this anxiety must be producing, I know it’s going to lessen the likelihood of my body going into spontaneous labour anyway, but I’m just a bit at my wits end with how to cope mentally in these last couple of weeks.
For what it’s worth I’ve had a totally healthy pregnancy so far, this is my first child, my first pregnancy, I’ve had no scares at all and I’m low risk (aside from being under mixed midwife and consultant care because of my mental health history), no GD or high blood pressure, babies growth completely normal, so this worry really is completely irrational (if only that was enough to stop it…)
Does anybody else feel this/ has anybody else felt this way? What do you do to try and rationalise waiting for baby to arrive spontaneously and trusting that it will happen rather than constantly being anxious about it? I’m almost at the point of asking for an induction because of the stress, but ultimately I don’t want to have an induction and was hoping for a spontaneous labour if I could.