Can anyone help me cure my health anxiety whilst pregnant?

Your blood pressure is completely normal. Stop it. You are obsessing over nothing. Literally nothing.

I think if you realize that your anxiety and emotional stress is FELT by your unborn child this might help. The vast majority of pregnancies and births are uncomplicated and I think you should keep your focus on the positives and not dwell on potential problems.
It is very true that fetuses absorb the vibrational frequencies of their mothers and while being upset once or twice is not going to have a long term effect, being in a chronic state of anxiety can very well effect your unborn childs temperment after birth, including a hard to soothe infant with an over stimulated nervous system.

BREATHE and RELAX, and know that emotional toxicity is every bit as bad for a fetus as smoking, drinking, taking drugs and eating crap foods.

Sorry if this sounds harsh, but…infants DO experience in utero stress and while we cannot protect ourselves from certain unfortunete emotional situations, in your case, you CAN choose to stop obsessing and rest in a place of low anxiety.

Best wishes!

No @Coloma it doesn’t sound harsh at all, I’m driving myself insane to be honest and I don’t know how to stop it – it’s only just started as well with the high blood pressure as the doctor said ‘oh that’s higher than normal’ which had me freaking out and because I suffer anxiety I figured my blood pressure was probably high anyway – so now I’m self inflicting and reading about how bad high blood pressure can be – which makes my heart start beating fast at the look of the machine. neurotic.
But you’re right, this baby is way more important that my silly neurosis.

@tan253 Good girl! You are aware, so, that’s half the battle.
I’m not a psychic, but I can tell you, the odds are in your favor!
Remember, gazillions of babies have been born and are born every day all around the world and even in some of the worst cases or poverty, no health care and poor nutrition, they come into the world healthy. It’s going to be just fine! :-)

@tan253 He probably meant higher than your normal, not high. Your blood pressure is well within normal limits the majority of the time. Blood pressure bounces around throughout the day. 140/90 is considered high blood pressure, now doctors consider slightly less than that something to keep an eye on, but yours is never close to that.

Here is a blood pressure chart. Educate yourself and you will stop worrying.

Like @JLeslie said, you’re totally in a normal range. You may, however, be experiencing the common phenomenon of white coat hypertension, wherein you get so freaked out about having your blood pressure high that you actually create higher blood pressure. So, deep breaths, and remember that high blood pressure is more dangerous when it’s sustained and over a long period of time, not when it’s for a few hours or days or even weeks every now and again.

Why don’t you ask your doctor while you and she are together?

The fact that she took your B/P a second time while you were lying down and got a lower result (although the first reading was certainly in the normal range) shows that she is paying attention.

And the fact that she didn’t tell you there was a problem means that THERE IS NOT A PROBLEM. Her primary job is TO DO NO HARM.’

Repeat; THERE IS NOT A PROBLEM.

Do you have a pregnancy support group in your neighborhood or affiliated with your hospital. You do seem to freak out much too often; we can continue to try to reassure you but we are an amorphous online group.

What about family or the baby’s daddy? What about buying some books that describe the parameters of a normal pregnancy?

How’s your cat and his third eyelid, by the way?

ah @galicalled reading your response really makes me have to laugh at how insane I sound.
My cat is great now – she had a small cold – I actually went out and spoilt her and bought her some new toys – better cat food etc and she’s back to her normal self of ignoring me again – no sneezing.
My doctor is great – she’s very tough and thorough which I totally appreciate – I just take the fear of the ‘what if it keeps raising!’ from the situation rather than the – ‘wow she’s a good doctor’ which is what i should have taken, and now I’m going to stop taking my BP at home as every time I go near it I feel my pulse get faster.

oh my partner is in London for another month – waiting on his visa…. so unfortunately I’m alone at the moment – probably making it worse – family lives overseas.

x

Laughter is good; laughter is much better than putting a B/P cuff around your arm every ten minutes.

The home monitor has instructions. They are usually to sit calmly for ten minutes in the morning while meditating or thinking about kittens and rainbows. Then take your B/P. Then stop and think about poopy diapers and babies who don’t nap (or kittens and rainbows again.)Then do not take your B/P again until tomorrow (unless it is 220/140 or something equally alarming.)

Here’s another really calming trick for pregnant women.

Go outside and find a tree branch that has fallen on the ground.
Bring it inside.
Tie a long piece of string, wool, strip ripped from an old t-shirt or shoe lace to the end of the stick.
Tease your cat with it by flicking it about under his nose.

You now no longer have to spend any more money on stupid cat toys, which bore them after five minutes any way.

I would not recommend focusing on the idea that stress could harm the baby. That will make you feel guilty, make you more stressed. No good comes from stressing about the fact that you’re stressed.

My recommendation for this particular instance would be to recognize the fact that blood pressure is not a static number, it changes slightly all the time, our bodies are very dynamic, and the change you are worrying about is slight. If it jumped up or down dozens of points, that’d be cause for concern, but this is not. Your blood pressure is very good.

Do you perhaps have an excess of free time? Nothing helps me get my mind off of worrying about minutia (which I also have a tendency to do) than having bigger things to think about.

They stopped telling me my blood pressure when I went to my check ups during pregnancy. My normal is so low my docs asks me if I’m still alive. Well, during pregnancy I was high normal. I’ve never been 138 over anything except during my pregnancy. I flipped out when one of the nurses mentioned my numbers out-loud…from that day on I was left un-informed.

Possibly, knowing you obsess over this you’ll inform them that you don’t want to know any of your numbers. Turn around when they weigh you, look away when they take your BP-etc.

If you weren’t healthy, they wouldn’t let you leave. Period. If you’re BP soars, they’ll be getting you a hospital bed.