Is It Normal to Be This Tired During Pregnancy?

Currently I am eight weeks along in my first pregnancy, and while I know fatigue is a first-trimester symptom, I feel so much more tired than anything I’ve read or heard about. Is it normal to be this tired constantly? Is there anything (short of caffeine) that can help?

–Forever sleepy

First things first: I will confirm that fatigue in early pregnancy is very common. This happens, at least in part, because you’re working hard on growing the placenta to support your baby. It’s an entire organ, and it will end up controlling a lot of your physiology. The placenta is extremely cool! But also, growing it makes you tired.

This fatigue is well known based on anecdotes, but you can also see it in data. For example: a 2023 study used symptom tracker data from a pregnancy app to observe the evolution of pregnancy symptoms over the course of pregnancy. The authors find that fatigue peaks at six weeks of gestation, when 60% of pregnant women report it. It may be encouraging to see that at week seven, you’re just about at the peak and it may start getting better.

This type of data doesn’t say how much fatigue, but we see in older, smaller-scale data that it is enough to get in the way of normal activities. Having said that, if your fatigue is very extreme, ask your doctor about it. If you are anemic, which does happen to many pregnant women, that could produce more fatigue than “normal” and it would be treatable with iron supplementation. There are other vitamin deficiencies that might also contribute, and it’s worth checking.

If this is just standard fatigue, the only advice is: more rest, some caffeine, and waiting another few weeks for it to get better.