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The pregnancy brain, also known as mommy’s brain, has been a phenomenon for ages. It’s basically in which a pregnant women experience brain fog and have completely uncontrollable difficulty in focusing and remembering.
Forgetting water bottles or necessary stuff such as car keys, documents, and dates, are just common occurrences. Even though being pregnant is one of the most beautiful phases for a woman, many body changes and life changes happen.
With hormonal changes and imbalances, the cognitive function of a pregnant woman goes through complex and different changes in brain function.
The causes and changes in human brain structure are surprising and quite amazing to learn about, so let’s dig into this mystery of the pregnancy brain1.
What exactly is a pregnancy brain?
Many people believe in it, and some add excuses as not to admit it, but this phenomenon is quite real as many examples prove that pregnancy brain is real and how pregnant women have to deal with it.
Pregnancy brain means pregnant women have the sense of having a feeling of forgetting things and being unable to multitask. In other words, this is completely normal, and sometimes it just means that the brain functions differently than a nonpregnant woman. Pregnancy changes a women’s brain.
Causes of pregnancy brain
Sleep deprivation causes pregnancy brain – pregnant women might go through this sleep deprivation phase due to brain changes. Meanwhile, sleep is very important for not just a pregnant woman but even for a normal human to function properly.
Lack of sleep can be more problematic during the pregnancy period. Baby brain is often associated with not getting enough sleep, even though it is a fact that getting good sleep during pregnancy is hard, especially in the starting trimester.
Try to get as much sleep as possible not to be troubled by the pregnant brain, as sleep is good for you and your baby.
When does pregnancy brain start?
Research shows that pregnant women often go through the pregnancy brain phase during their first trimester when their body also goes through physical changes.
They often have considered pregnancy brain real and have faced memory problems and brain fog. The first trimester is considered from the pregnancy week 1 to week 12.
Mood swings, mental fog, and memory loss are very challenging to deal with as the brain function is solely getting disrupted by the hormone levels.
Why does the pregnancy brain exist?
New moms’ brains go through a new phase as their working memory gets affected, and their brains during pregnancy tend to be so lost in taking care of their little ones, even during their pregnancy. It can also be the lifestyle factors the pregnant woman adapts to.
Other research suggests that the pregnancy brain only exists because the new mom-to-be often faces a problem with having a good night’s sleep.
Though, more research shows that it might just be that in the excitement of welcoming a new life, the pregnant woman might shift her focus to the changes in her daily life and be more attentive toward taking care of herself and her new baby.
Brain changes are common and should be considered a beautiful journey to embrace during pregnancy.
How to withstand pregnancy brain?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLhIZOWLe2A
Pregnant women should consider themselves the strongest because, through all these, too, they are still cool and beautiful.
Hormonal changes can affect you, but being grateful and cheerful during this time is expected, so don’t get too carried away. As expectant parents, it is deeply suggested to the other partner to be more caring and take this situation positively.
Firstly you can be more active and alert by just reconstructing some of your habits and situations, and secondly, try to adapt new changes and habits to deal with pregnancy.
Ideas of new habits and changes
Listed below are some of our beloved suggestions to you and your baby to make pregnancy brain not the most frustrating stuff and make it easy for you. It will help you with memory lapses.
1. Physical Activity
Move your body and step up to the workout session or a yoga session as there are many youtube videos on how to exercise while pregnant. They are great for you as they may also help you while giving birth.
There are many benefits and different exercises according to your trimester. There are various physical activities in your first, second, or third trimester according to o the trimesters2.
2. Cold Water Consuming
Hydration is the key. Drink water as much as you can. Always carry a water bottle with you. We suggest cold water, as the temperatures of the water or beverage you drink can help you with your brain fog, as cold water can keep you alert.
Pregnancy needs care and lots of water.
Drink as much water and always keep it cool.
3. Meditation
Meditating is a great way to exercise your mental state. It can help your brain’s executive functioning.
It might make some cognitive changes as meditation reduces stress 3and anxiety and help your pregnant brain, and may bring more you being mentally sharp.
4. Setting a to-do list.
Being up to date with your day-to-day activity and listing them down can be helpful to remember things in detail and be in check with your daily activities that are needed to be done or completed. Try to set calendar reminders too to be more up to date with any upcoming dates.
5. Resting
Pregnancy is tiring. There will be most days that you will feel tired and take naps between every 4-5 hours, and that’s normal, so do take naps and rest as much as you can because maybe after giving birth, this time might be the most precious and rare and you might miss this naps.
6. New experiences
Start exploring and go to new places, as this might be a beautiful womb experience for the baby, too. Also, you will get a new spatial recognition memory and social cognition, which can help your neuropsychological functioning.
7. Listening to new music
In pregnancy, it is said that listening to new music can help develop the baby’s brain, and new dimensions of different music can adapt the baby’s brain and make them have a really good taste in music due to the exposure to the new sounds in the womb.
8. Reading storybooks
During pregnancy, you can read story books or, in general, read books to be focused, and also it will help the baby develop spatial memory.
How Pregnancy Affects the Brain
There are so many changes that go through the woman’s brain and also her body; even the physical changes are visible, and quite astonishing to witness that situation, but during that time, the changes in her brain are not visible, and that is quite hard to the baby mamma’s. The neural networks will be a little bit off.
The nature of neuroscience peer-reviewed studies talked about this cognitive impairment.
In 2016, a group of specialists from the Netherlands and Spain utilized magnetic reverberation imaging (MRI4) to concentrate on what occurs inside the cerebrum during pregnancy.
Contrasting MRI pictures taken before ladies became pregnant with pictures taken after the scans showed they had conceived an offspring, the specialists found during pregnancy, the mind’s gray matter shrinks, and the pinkish-dim tissue containing the cell bodies and neurotransmitters of nerve cells.
Also, the gray matter volume misfortune persevered for about two years after postpartum5.
While losing gray matter could appear negative, the impact might be an incredible inverse. “Everyone generally considers volume misfortune something negative, as a deficiency of capability,” says Elseline Hoekzema, a neuroscientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands and lead creator of the review.
However, volume misfortune can likewise address a “calibrating of associations.” She looks at the change in what occurs in the teen cerebrum when a surge of chemicals triggers far and wide pruning of neurotransmitters, the associations between nerve cells. This makes for more effective, smoothed-out cerebrum circuits.
Hoekzema notes that they couldn’t say without a doubt whether synaptic pruning or another system — like loss of neurons or glial cells — was behind the dark matter shrinkage in pregnant ladies.
The cerebrum region that contracted the most was those engaged with social comprehension, the capacity to sort out the thing another person is thinking and feeling. At the point when another mother was shown an image of her child, these regions of the cerebrum 6were illuminated with movement.
Improved social cognizance could assist a mother with dealing with her child, empowering her to unravel the youngster’s different coos and cries and sort out what she wants, Hoekzema says.
Upgrades in social cognizance could include some significant pitfalls. The social signals may get disrupted. While concentrating on taking a gander at mental changes during pregnancy and the post-pregnancy time frame have delivered blended results, numerous ladies report encountering memory issues, a peculiarity named “pregnancy cerebrum.”
Spatial memory, for instance, could experience late pregnancy since it’s not basic for posterity endurance during that time. All things being equal, the body diverts energy and assets to focus on the child, Galea says.
Chemicals like estrogen, progesterone, and others undoubtedly drive the progressions in mind construction and capability during pregnancy. Chemicals can apply a strong impact on synapses, and no time in an individual’s life creates more outrageous chemical variances than pregnancy.
However, specialists have to a great extent, ignored how pregnancy and its chemical floods shape the mind — somewhat recently, there have been a couple of dozen examinations investigating pregnancy’s effect on ladies’ cerebrums.
People Speak About Their Experiences:
I don’t know if I at any point had faith in the pregnancy cerebrum until encountering it for myself. I need to write daily agendas on my telephone to make sure to paint my nails! My significant other has seen it as well.
As of late, I got back home from work, lit a flame in my room, and went to put on a facial covering. I thought I had memory problems.
A short time later, I sat in bed and — not thinking — I went after the flame and took a beverage from it thinking I had presented myself with water, but rather figured out how to get hot wax all over. At this point, it’s obvious that I’m anticipating meeting my little man soon and recollecting the easily overlooked details once more!
Said Molly, 29.
The pregnancy cerebrum (fortunately) didn’t affect me at work. However, there was a distinct increase in absentmindedness at home. I’d forget where I put something just a short time previously, couldn’t recollect where things should have been taken care of, and fail to remember discussions with my significant other just after they occurred. We were both ready to dismiss it, yet here and there, it was baffling to realize that it was working out, and our companions without kids couldn’t comprehend why I was unexpectedly such a dingbat.” —
Said Kate, 31
“Before having my child, I had the option to tell you precisely what outfit I wore returning months! This was before web-based entertainment reported everything, as well. Then, at that point, I saw my memory change while I was pregnant. I would leave my keys in the entryway while entering my home. I would unload every one of some basic foods to leave the meat on the counter until my significant other got back home to find it hours after the fact. It hasn’t deteriorated as my child has developed. However, it most certainly hasn’t improved. If it isn’t recorded, there is no assurance it will get achieved.” —
Said Alessa, 31
It is quite beautiful and amazing to know how pregnancy progresses.
And how pregnancy leads pregnant and postpartum women through these memory problems. Well, not really; it’s just the changes in cognitive functions that can make their whole remembering content accurate or not.
Well, this is all that we have for you to know about pregnancy brain. If you have any experiences of your own, do feel free to share with us.
- Rosenfeld, Cheryl S. “Placental serotonin signaling, pregnancy outcomes, and regulation of fetal brain development.” Biology of reproduction 102.3 (2020): 532-538. ↩︎
- Chaemsaithong, Piya, Daljit Singh Sahota, and Liona C. Poon. “First trimester preeclampsia screening and prediction.” American journal of obstetrics and gynecology 226.2 (2022): S1071-S1097. ↩︎
- O’Connor, Daryl B., Julian F. Thayer, and Kavita Vedhara. “Stress and health: A review of psychobiological processes.” Annual review of psychology 72 (2021): 663-688. ↩︎
- Wald, Lawrence L., et al. “Low‐cost and portable MRI.” Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging 52.3 (2020): 686-696. ↩︎
- Wang, Ziyi, et al. “Mapping global prevalence of depression among postpartum women.” Translational psychiatry 11.1 (2021): 543. ↩︎
- Li, Yang Eric, et al. “An atlas of gene regulatory elements in adult mouse cerebrum.” Nature 598.7879 (2021): 129-136. ↩︎
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