Inside: Pregnancy insomnia is the WORST. These natural remedies for pregnancy insomnia can help you get back at least some of that ever elusive sleep you need.
I will never forget the torture that was pregnancy insomnia.
You survive the first trimester with the never ending morning sickness and what feels like permanent exhaustion.
You think the second trimester is going to be SO much better. And it starts off well…until the pregnancy insomnia kicks in.
You expect to feel super uncomfortable as your body stretches in all kinds of ways to accommodate baby. You assume it will affect your sleep a bit – right?
But you are in no way expecting not to be able to sleep AT ALL! Especially after literally falling asleep while eating dinner during my first trimester.
Having never struggled with insomnia before, pregnancy insomnia was absolute hell. Especially since you can’t take most over-the-counter sleep aids.
In a time when I needed sleep more than ever, I desperately searched for natural ways to find relief.
What Causes Pregnancy Insomnia?
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For some unlucky ladies pregnancy insomnia can begin almost at the start of pregnancy. If that’s you, it’s probably in response to the hormonal changes that occur as soon as you become pregnant.
The nausea and frequent urination that these hormonal changes cause can make it feel impossible to stay asleep.
However, for most women, pregnancy insomnia kicks in right around the middle of pregnancy, during the second trimester.
The main cause of pregnancy insomnia is physical discomfort.
At this point in your pregnancy, your back, hips, feet, and more may be aching. All of your organs have begun shifting around in your abdomen to make room for the baby and there’s a lot of pressure on everything in there.
With all that going on, it’s tough to sleep!
Hormones are another cause. They are more settled than they were in the first trimester but they are STILL all over the place, fluctuating constantly to accommodate the needs of your pregnancy.
You might be overly emotional, anxious about your baby’s arrival, or have a lot of vivid dreams. All of these can cause insomnia.
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13 Natural Pregnancy Insomnia Tips & Tricks
The upside to pregnancy insomnia is that it prepares you for the endless sleepless nights you’re about to have while caring for a newborn who needs almost constant attention throughout the night at first.
But hearing that glimmer of positivity doesn’t make it any easier to deal with in the moment.
Here are the remedies that helped me…most of the time.
1. Read before bed – OR when you wake up in the middle of the night.
The good old standby of reading before bed is so much more effective at preparing your body to rest than what we all do now, scroll endlessly until we can’t keep our eyes open.
If you are struggling to fall asleep while pregnant, try reading a physical book to help tire out your eyes.
Personally, my insomnia often followed the same pattern: I’d fall asleep for a few hours, then wake up and be unable to fall asleep.
While you’re reading, you’ll avoid blue light and be able to fall asleep in the first place OR fall back to sleep.
2. No blue light two hours before bedtime.
Blue light is similar to daylight and tricks your body into staying awake longer.
It limits your natural production of melatonin, which your body should produce on its own in the evening, giving you that drowsy feeling.
There are blue light blocking glasses, but those are only partially effective. Your best bet to avoid blue light is to turn off all blue light emitting devices two hours before bedtime.
You could read, shower, listen to a podcast or music, do a crossword puzzle, clean the kitchen, color. So many options!
Light bulbs also produce a lot of blue light (especially LEDs), but there are light bulbs available that produce minimal amounts.
Switch a bulb in each room, such as your bedside lamp or a living room floor lamp, to a no-blue light lightbulb to use in the late evenings.
This will help you produce more melatonin naturally since it’s not recommended to take melatonin supplements while pregnant.
3. Try some chamomile tea.
A completely safe herb to use while pregnant as much as you want is chamomile tea.
Sipping on a warm drink in the evening can relax you anyways, but chamomile has a flavanoid in it that helps to calm you even more.
Chamomile tea can help to relax your nervous system so that anxiety eases and sleep comes more easily.
Others claim that warm milk helps them sleep, so you could try that if the chamomile doesn’t help.
4. Exercise during the day.
Exercising during pregnancy is now known to be highly beneficial to both the mom and baby.
Regular prenatal exercise has been shown to genetically predispose the baby to have less of a chance of suffering from many diseases, metabolic disorders, or obesity throughout their entire lives.
Amazing right?
Exercising during pregnancy can also help keep your body strong so that you suffer less from pregnancy aches and pains, which in turn helps you sleep better too.
It can help to prepare your body for an easier labor and delivery.
On top of those, exercising each day can drastically help you sleep better because it improves your circadian rhythm, helps to increase the amount of deep sleep you get, and reduces stress!
So try out a specialized prenatal exercise program for better rest and all those other benefits too.
5. Cut the caffeine.
People used to say that when you are pregnant you can’t drink coffee, that it harms the fetus, but that has been proven to be untrue.
Now it’s recommended that you cut your caffeine consumption overall to 200mg of caffeine a day. That’s approximately one giant cup of coffee.
Although this level of caffeine has been shown to be safe for your growing baby, that doesn’t mean that it can’t negatively affect your sleep!
Try to keep all caffeine before noon or try cutting it out altogether if your pregnancy insomnia is severe.
6. Sleep on your left side.
Sleeping on your left side is recommended during pregnancy, beginning in the second and especially in the third trimester.
Laying on your left helps provide more blood flow to the baby and reduces pressure on your vena cava.
This can be hard advice to follow though. It becomes really tough to find any comfortable position to sleep in at all eventually.
But TRY sleeping on your left because for some women the increase in blood flow can help ease their insomnia.
7. Invest in a good pregnancy pillow.
The biggest cause of not being able to sleep well during pregnancy is physical discomfort.
Eventually, your body becomes really uncomfortable and oftentimes painful because of all the extra weight and fluid inside you that’s supporting the growth of your baby.
Joints ache, pressure builds, and you swell.
Staying active by exercising during pregnancy (especially with the program I mentioned above) can help mitigate this issue, and these tips can really help ease the pregnancy back pain too, but honestly, it’s still going to happen to some degree.
At the end of pregnancy, your body is not your own and you will need help to get into a comfortable sleeping position.
I highly recommend investing in a pregnancy pillow! It’s a giant pillow made to fit alongside your entire body while you lay on your side.
If a pregnancy pillow is too pricey or you just don’t see yourself using it often enough, at least try to add lots of pillows to your bed. Place them around your body as needed until you take enough weight off the achy places.
8. Diffuse lavender essential oil.
Lavender essential oil is known for its calming effects. It is safe to use during pregnancy and even safe to use on your baby.
Lavender is a powerful essential oil that also smells amazing too. The easiest way to breathe this scent all night is to run a diffuser in your bedroom.
You can also sprinkle drops of the oil directly on your pillow or mix them with a carrier oil such as sweet almond oil and rub it directly onto your skin (the balls of your feet and your wrists are good options).
Make sure the essential oil you choose is 100% pure. There are a lot of fake essential oils on the market claiming to be real.
Trusted brands include expensive ones like Young Living and DoTerra but also affordable ones like Simply Earth and Even Now.
9. Keep it cool.
Another factor that makes it very difficult both to fall asleep and stay asleep while pregnant is that you get really hot.
The bigger you get, the more sensitive you are to the heat. Being pregnant in summer and trying to sleep can be miserable.
Run the AC if you have it, wear light and loose-fitting clothing, or keep a fan pointed straight at you.
You can even move the bed near a window you can open for a natural breeze while you sleep.
By maintaining a cooler temperature throughout the night, you will wake less often and probably fall asleep faster as well.
10. Relax with a warm bath or shower before bed.
A warm bath can be an excellent way to calm down and prepare yourself for a good night’s sleep. The more relaxing things that you can add into your nighttime routine the better.
Dim the lights, put away the electronics, sip some warm chamomile tea, and adding in a warm bath when you can will work wonders.
Add Epsom salts or magnesium flakes for an even more relaxing soak.
You can add a couple of drops of lavender essential oil directly into your bath as well.
11. Try meditation or progressive muscle relaxation.
Meditation can take on so many forms and can be irreplaceable for its calming effects.
Meditation is one form of mindfulness whose benefits have been scientifically proven again and again on many levels.
When used before bed, meditation can help you calm your body and quiet your mind and can make you ready to drift off to sleep. Begin with shorter meditations (you can find free ones on Youtube but there are lots of meditation apps too) and work up to longer ones.
If meditation isn’t your jam try progressive muscle relaxation. It’s a relaxation technique that has you tense and release certain muscle groups, relaxing your entire body by the end of the session.
You can find guided progressive muscle relaxation to follow on YouTube for free.
12. Control noise and light for optimal sleep conditions.
Sometimes pregnancy can tune you in to everything around you.
The littlest of noises like a ticking clock or a little bit of moonlight sneaking around the curtains can drive you crazy!
You can try wax ear plugs or a noise maker (we love THIS one), depending on your preference.
Personally, I don’t know how any parent of a newborn doesn’t have a noise maker – they are essential for keeping baby asleep so you might as well get used to them if you can.
Sleep masks can help with any light issues.
(Decluttering your bedroom can also been shown to help with sleep, anecdotally at least.)
13. Cat nap during the day to compensate.
If after trying all these tips you are still suffering from some restless nights try napping during the day.
Although many of these tricks are powerful and effective a lot is going on with your body during pregnancy. Sometimes things like anxiety or pain will keep you awake no matter what.
When nights like that happen, set time aside to nap during the day whenever you can, although you may want to experiment with nap lengths.
If you start napping over 1-2 hours every day, it might make your nighttime insomnia even worse. Cat naps of 15-20 minutes each might be a better option.
(If you’re getting next to no sleep at night, the longer naps might be a necessary evil.)
This will help to keep you from becoming excessively overtired and struggling to fall asleep even more the following evening.
Read Next: 7 Natural Ways to Prepare Your Body for Labor
Have any of these pregnancy insomnia tips worked for you? Did I miss any? Share in the comments!
Owner of Growing Serendipity, June could talk to you all day about homeschooling, parenting, and minimalism, which she does at This Simple Balance. When she’s not homeschooling, decluttering, or blogging, she loves to enjoy perfect silence while sipping a hot cup of coffee and thinking uninterrupted thoughts—which, of course, with five kids, doesn’t happen very often.