How to manage with first trimester anxiety with yoga

First trimester anxiety in pregnancy can be intense.  It doesn’t matter whether you’ve lost a baby, or had trouble conceiving or perhaps just experience general anxiety that flares up during times of stress – anxiety during the first trimester is not something you just want to ‘put up with’ as normal.

After losing Orion, my next two pregnancies (which both ended in miscarriage at around 10 weeks) I was out of my head with anxiety.

In HINDSIGHT.

To be honest, at the time I didn’t really even recognise what I was experiencing as anxiety. I thought I was coping pretty well given what I’d been through and that it was normal to feel how I was feeling after losing a baby, and then more two babies.

It wasn’t until after we lost our third in a row and I was working with my counsellor and naturopath (who helped me come down from my anxiety with supplements) that I realised just how anxious I had been.

I personally believe (and of course I have no proof of this, it is just my experience) that my high level of stress and anxiety contributed to why I miscarried. I don’t think it is the only reason, but I do believe that it played a part. I hadn’t dealt with the grief of losing Orion, I wasn’t looking after myself well with food and rest, I hadn’t yet discovered that I had the MTHFR gene mutation and I spent all day everyday running over scenarios in my head of how I might lose these babies too.

And then I did.

It wasn’t until we took a big break from trying to conceive and I worked through all this that I could come back to pregnancy with some perspective (and some tools and practices) to deal with the anxiety of the first trimester.

Of course, when I fell pregnant with Luca after three losses I still felt anxious and nervous and unsure of how it would all turn out.  But I also knew that I absolutely had to control the physical effects that anxiety had on my body to make sure that it didn’t affect my pregnancy.

So I used lots of deep belly breathing (whenever I felt those anxious thoughts rise), positive mantras and I spent a lot of time visualising the best case scenario – growing and birthing a healthy baby.

If you’d like to try some of these techniques to manage anxiety in the first trimester check out this yoga flow below.

How do you manage first trimester anxiety during your pregnancy?