Pregnancy can be a rollercoaster of intense emotions. You’ll experience a lot of joy and a lot of worries. You’ll feel stressed by planning, the body changes, and the endless list of things to do, and the fact that you’re growing a human life inside you. Being pregnant is a high-stakes thing to do, so it’s normal to feel worried about something going wrong. 

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Some of those fears might be warranted, but many of them are not. These are some of the most common fears that pregnant women have, and how much you should really worry about them. If your fears are taking over, it might help to talk to your midwife or a therapist to get better coping tools. If something does go wrong, you may be able to get help from skilled birth injury attorneys. 

What If I Accidentally Crush My Baby?

Many women feel scared that they will somehow roll onto their stomach while they’re sleeping and accidentally crush the baby. This fear might seem silly, but it’s a common one. 

The Reality

If you usually sleep on your stomach, it is understandable that you will worry about rolling back to that position in the middle of the night. However, the truth is, you can relax. Your body knows how to protect your growing baby. In the early stages of your pregnancy, it’s actually safe to sleep on your stomach. Once your baby, and your stomach, starts to grow, it won’t be comfortable or possible to lie for a long period on your stomach anyway so it’s likely that any changes in position that you make in your sleep won’t be anywhere near long enough to do any harm to your baby.

What If I Ate Something That Will Harm The Baby?

If you’re reading a lot of pregnancy books, you might also be obsessively reading labels to make sure you aren’t eating things like natural cheese or nitrates or too much caffeine. Many pregnant women worry a lot about what they’re consuming and end up over-researching.

The Reality

You will get a lot of advice about things that you should and shouldn’t eat during pregnancy, which makes it easy to obsess about everything on your plate. Obviously, it is important to follow the guidelines on what to eat and drink during your pregnancy, but also keep in mind that these lists are made out of caution. Women can get overly worried about making sure they’re doing everything single thing perfectly, when in fact, it’s very unlikely that one mistake will result in any harm to the baby. 

Most warnings are intended to ward off food poisoning, which can cause complications during pregnancy. One of the biggest concerns is listeriosis, a bacterial infection that you can get from eating contaminated cold cuts or hot dogs, but this infection is very rare today. For example, a pregnant woman would need to eat around five million servings of soft cheese before she could get a case of listeria. 

You should avoid problematic foods, such as alcohol, raw meat, raw seafood, and unpasteurized milk and cheese. But if you accidentally ate a piece of unpasteurized brie that you didn’t realize was on your salad, you probably won’t have anything to worry about. 

What If I Lose The Baby?

For most expectant mothers, their biggest fear is a miscarriage. This can be a horrible, constant fear because, at the end of the day, there is nothing much you can do beyond eating healthily and resting to keep your baby safe and healthy. Every moment that you’re still pregnant can make you feel incredibly grateful but doesn’t do anything to ease your fears. 

The Reality

It is very tough to handle the often all-too-real fear of experiencing a loss. Your worries are a natural part of being human and it’s normal and okay to feel worried about it, especially if you or someone you know has been through a miscarriage before. Unfortunately, a loss like this is something that you can’t control or prevent if it’s going to happen. If it does happen to you, remember that you are not alone.

It’s important to know the states. An estimated 1 in 10 clinically recognized pregnancies ends in early loss, with around 80 percent of those losses happening during the first 12 weeks. Bu the time you reach your second trimester, the risk drops to less than 1 percent. So if you have made it past the 14-week milestone, you can probably relax.

** This was a contributed post.

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