Are you asking yourself ‘am I pregnant?!’ The only way to know for sure is by taking a pregnancy test. But before you miss a period, you might be suspecting that you’re pregnant. Here, we share the first signs of pregnancy and why they happen.
5 common pregnancy symptoms
The 5 most typical early signs of pregnancy include:
- A missed period. If a week or more has passed without the start of your period, you might be pregnant. But if you already have an irregular menstrual cycle, this symptom isn’t a reliable one.
- Sore breasts. Early on in pregnancy, changes in a woman’s hormones make her breasts sensitive and sore. As your body adjusts to these changing hormones, your discomfort will probably decrease after a few weeks.
- Nausea and/or vomiting. Morning sickness can affect pregnant women at any time of the day or night, and typically starts a month after you get pregnant. But, some pregnant women feel nauseous earlier, and a few lucky ones never experience it.
- Needing to pee all the time. You might find that you need to pee more often than usual. Blood flow increases during pregnancy, which makes your kidneys process all that extra fluid that ends up in your bladder.
- Exhaustion. Fatigue is another common early pregnancy symptom. Early on in pregnancy, your levels of the hormone progesterone rise, which may make you feel sleepy.
Other pregnancy signs
Some lesser-known symptoms of pregnancy that you might experience are:
- Moodiness. Mood swings, weepiness, and being really emotional in early pregnancy is caused by the surge of hormones in your body.
- Light spotting. For some women, a bit of light spotting is one of the first signs they’re pregnant. This is called “implantation bleeding,” and it happens about 10-14 days after conception when the fertilized egg adheres to the lining of the uterus. This bleeding happens about the time of a period.
- Cramps. Some pregnant women feel mild uterine cramping early on.
- Constipation. A pregnant woman’s digestive system can slow down, once again due to hormonal changes.
- Food sensitivities. If you’re pregnant, you might get grossed out by certain foods, and your sense of taste might change.
- Stuffy nose. Rising levels of hormones and blood production may cause your nose to swell, dry out and bleed easily, causing you to get a stuffy or runny nose.
Am I pregnant?
Unfortunately, lots of these symptoms aren’t unique to pregnancy. Some of the signs may mean you’re getting sick or that you’re about to start your period. And, some pregnant women don’t experience any of these symptoms.
If you’ve experienced a missed period and have some of the above symptoms, take a home pregnancy test. If you get a positive pregnancy test, make an appointment with your doctor right away. The earlier your pregnancy is confirmed, the earlier you can start prenatal care.
It was a hard lesson to learn, but I learned it. He was 17 and I was 15. He was on the football team and I was a cheerleader. It seemed like a relationship straight out of one of those teenager romance books. The whole relationship seemed almost too good to be true….and, it was. The best part of the whole thing was that it wasn’t just a story, it was my life and things were great until it happened. In my wildest dreams, I never thought that I would be in a situation where we only did it once, but got pregnant.