Five early pregnancy signs you might not have heard of

If you are trying to conceive you are likely to be feeling and watching everything that happens to your body with even more intensity that normal. We have all heard of the usual early pregnancy signs, like sore boobs, but what about some of the more unusual ones? From personal experience, it was actual some of these that helped me to realise I was pregnant with my second child, even though it was rather a surprise that it all happened as fast as it did from the time we were trying. So if you are trying to conceive and you are looking to keep a close eye on what is happening with your body, and you would like a little more advice, alongside the usual resources, like the very first pregnancy symptoms at Emma’s Diary, then why not take a look at these experiences and see whether they apply to you? That way you will know whether you are wasting money and time when it comes to buying the pregnancy test, and pee-ing on that stick.

The WORST pregnancy symptom for me might come as a bit of a surprise to some of you…

1. Heightened sense of smell and taste

Pregnancy cravings are well documented, but did you also know that a sign of pregnancy that can appear early on is a heightened sense of smell, coupled with a stronger tastes or a change in taste tolerances? It was actually this that made me think that I was pregnant. I found it extremely hard to clean my teeth in the early stages of my first pregnancy, and weirdly this returned in my second pregnancy. For some weird reason, being pregnant heightened my taste and smell senses, so I really did not like the taste and smell of toothpaste…. Weird, but true.

2. Extreme tiredness

We all get tired, but the tiredness associated with pregnancy is really like nothing you can imagine for some. It is the kind of tiredness that has you nodding off in the middle of conversations during the day, and not just late at night when you are on the sofa watching the news. It is caused by your body changing in readiness for the baby, from the hormones it produces, to the increase in blood circulating around your body to make sure you are in a place to provide your the foetus. Blood sugar and blood pressure also drop, which are a contributory factor too.

3. Motion Sickness

Feeling sick while you are in a car, or moving fast on a roundabout is something that many of us have to deal with regularly, but increased susceptibility of motion sickness can also be a sign of pregnancy. It can be aggravated by the pregnancy hormones, which of cause make us more susceptible to nausea, and motion can exacerbate this – triggering that morning sickness feeling. Morning sickness is a well documented sign of pregnancy, but motion sickness is perhaps less well know; and the link between the two, even less so.

If you do want to help motion sickness there are a number of precautions that you can take when travelling, so why not take a look at the NHS guidelines?

4. Temperature changes

If you are trying to conceive and you are looking at your basal body temperature (BBT) for measuring ovulation, you may notice changes in your temperature too when you call pregnant.

After ovulation, BBT rises my about 0.5 degrees and stays this way for a number of days. You can therefore track this using a temperature chart.

If you are continuing to track your temperature, you might notice that your temperature rises too. This is because there is extra blood flow, which can boost the body’s metabolic rate by 20% – which generates more heat internally. This can raise a women’s body core body temperature (BBT) from 37 degrees to 37.8 degrees. If you are tracking this closely enough, you may very well spot this change, particularly if you have been trying to conceive for a while.

5. Implantation bleeding

Implantation bleeding occurred in both of my pregnancies and it was very different from the usual period. Symptoms of my implantation bleeding included:

• Blood / discharge darker (brown, but different to usual period spotting),
• Cramping was accompanied by nausea, which didn’t usually happen,
• Headaches at the same time, and
• Earlier than when expected for a typical period (around 7-10 days into conception/fertilisation) and much shorter and lighter than a period too.

It can be hard to tell the difference between a period and an implantation bleed, but if you are monitoring things because you are trying to conceive, you are likely more aware of your period cycles anyway.

Here is a great infographic with more information on pregnancy early symptoms, just to help you out a little more.

We hope that this has been helpful to you. If you need any other resources around pregnancy, do check out some of the articles on the site too.

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