Pregnancy anxiety looking for support

[HEIHEI23]

Hello
This is my first very much wanted pregnancy. We had a bit of a bumpy start which meant we had 3 early scans on the NHS and then a friend of mine unexpectedly lost her baby at 30 weeks.
I am really really struggling with anxiety at the moment. I’m not sleeping more than 4/5 hours at a time and feel that I am constantly worrying about feeling the baby’s movements. When I go to work, I feel so panicky incase I can’t feel them and can’t get to the hospital in time. I’ve had a bit of an upsetting week with a small car bump and being sent home from work due to an infection being at work that can affect pregnant women. I was checked after the bump at the hospital and they said everything seemed ok with the baby and booked me in for a follow up scan.
since then, I just feel even more anxiety I can’t stop worrying about the baby.

does any have any books/podcasts/advice they could give? I still have a while until I’m due and worry that the anxiety is affecting the baby. Any help would be hugely appreciated as it’s impacting how I feel everyday.

Have you talked to the midwife about your anxiety? They should fast track you for mental health support if you're pregnant and it sounds like you could really use having someone to talk all of this through with. Also, please don't worry about the anxiety affecting the baby - they are efficient little vampires who will hoover up everything they need from you! But it's still important to look after yourself for your own sake 🙂

I’m due to see her in two weeks but think I might give her a call next week to see if we can get the ball rolling thank you! That’s good to know about the baby. Hopefully they’re quite happy in there and have no idea what’s going on 😂

I am sure that's exactly it and they are bobbing around happy as anything!

Hi,
I'm sorry to hear you are going through this, I am feeling exactly the same way and it's awful. I'm 30 weeks currently and all of my check ups etc have been fine and my pregnancy has been fairly easy physically (so far) but my anxiety has been hell.

I'm totally obsessed with monitoring the baby's movements (having an anterior placenta doesn't help!) And have been in 3 times for reduced movements when I didn't feel anything for hours and none of the tricks to get them moving were working. Everything has always been fine but I still get worried when I go a while without feeling anything. With my placenta, some days I feel movements easily and others I feel barely anything so even now I don't really feel like I have a baseline for what's normal for my baby. Always go get checked if you are really worried, even if you've been in a million times. The midwives never mind and it's better than sitting at home and stressing yourself out.

I've had two sessions with the mental health nurse at my hospital and it is helpful to talk to someone about it but at the end of the day they can't take away the anxiety and fear. They have given me some tips to try and stop myself catastrophising all the time and it has helped a little but I've just had to accept that I'm going to be anxious about movements until baby is safely in my arms and that's ok.

Even though no one can guarantee any outcome with a pregnancy it does help to remind myself that there's a 90+% chance that everything will be ok and most of my anxiety is my brain trying to protect myself from something awful that has no guarantee of happening.

I still struggle to get excited about the baby being here because I'm so terrified of the alternative but I have started to buy some baby bits and bobs in the last week or so which I wasn't able to do beforehand.

Please know you're not alone, anxiety is so common in pregnancy and so many women go through it.

I've found some CBT techniques to be helpful in managing my anxiety a little, and I've heard others say hypno birthing videos on YouTube have helped them to be more in the present instead of spiralling about what ifs, but I haven't tried those yet.

Please don't worry about anxiety affecting the baby now, but it would really benefit you as a parent if you can reduce your anxiety once they're here. I don't know how many weeks you are, but patterns of movement aren't usually felt until 28 weeks. If you're in a position to do so, I would really recommend counselling which you'd likely have to go private for - I had awful anxiety after a miscarriage last year and counselling helped me so much. It really has continued to help me with my current pregnancy. It is statistically very unlikely anything will go wrong, especially once you're past 12 weeks.

Thank you for your lovely messages. I will definitely look into counselling. I’ve used one before and she was amazing so I’ll see if she has much experience with pregnancy. I’m almost 25 weeks, anterior placenta but have been feeling the baby for about 4 weeks now so do seem to have a pattern. It’s nice in a strange way to know I’m not alone though!