From 
Del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUponSleeping for Two
Thirty-four-year-old Becky Hanf Nezin experiences pregnancy the way every woman wishes she could. She sleeps like a log at night, wakes up refreshed in the morning, and stays in shape by running after her five kids and walking along country roads near her home in Lincoln, Vermont.
“All of my pregnancies were uneventful,” says Becky, long blond hair swinging over her shoulder as she lifts Adeline, her three-month-old daughter, for a cuddle.
“But I was exhausted every day at about 2:30,” she adds ruefully. “Right when the kids came home from school.”
Less Sleep = More Labor
Except for that one little glitch, Becky was fortunate. Some 80 percent of women in their first trimester report that they have trouble sleeping, and a whopping 97 percent are tossing and turning by their third.
That’s serious stuff. Aside from the fact that a lot of cellular growth and system repair takes place at night and that without a good night’s sleep most of us are pretty miserable people, a study at the University of California, San Francisco, found that women who averaged less than 6 hours of sleep a night had 10 hours more labor than women who got 7 or more hours of sleep. And women who slept under 6 hours a night were more than four times more likely to require a cesarean delivery.
So what’s going on?
“Sleep changes in a couple of different ways during pregnancy,” explains Grace Pien, M.D., a sleep researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Sleep and Respiratory Neurobiology. “Women often say that they get a lot sleepier just a few weeks after they become pregnant. But they also find that even if they’re sleeping seven or eight hours a night, they’re still tired during the day.”
The sleepiness seems to be caused by the first-trimester rise in hormones, says Dr. Pien. Practically from the moment of conception, progesterone floods your body to support the pregnancy, bringing with it the sometimes overwhelming need to sleep at any time and any place. It also tends to make you nauseous, increase your body temperature, and tweak your urinary tract muscles so you’re heading off to the bathroom every 10 minutes. So even though the progesterone encourages you to spend time in bed, the sleep you get is often fragmented and less than restorative.
The second trimester is better, says Dr. Pien. Women have more energy, and they feel more alert. The fetus moves higher in the abdomen, which reduces pressure on the bladder and the need to stay close to a bathroom. But sleep is beginning to get lighter, there’s less restorative deep sleep, and the physical discomfort is growing.
By the third trimester women are frequently experiencing heartburn, backaches, and breathlessness as the growing fetus displaces their stomach and diaphragm and reaches maximum weight. What’s more, some 75 percent of women experience leg cramps, 20 percent experience restless legs syndrome outright, and absolutely nobody can find a comfortable position in which to sleep.
Not that anyone’s sleeping. Those frequent visits to the bathroom are back.
Advertisement 
Your Comments
See all
...
Post your commentCancel