Pregnancy transforms us completely. Not only does our body undergo different changes over those nine months, but we also experience changes at a psychological, neuronal and emotional level. One of them is that protective instinct that starts from pregnancy.
According to a recent study, that same protective instinct makes us need more space around us during the last trimester of pregnancy. We explain why this happens.
Published on the BioRxiv website, the study conducted by researchers from Cambridge, United Kingdom, analyzed the relationship between accelerated changes in the body with the speed with which the brain adapts to these new changes. That is, the ability to maintain a consistent perception of our body during the changes experienced during pregnancy.
In Babies and more When you're pregnant and don't stop touching your belly, like Meghan MarkleThis was achieved by analyzing the peripersonal space, which is considered the zone or distance that establishes the safety margin we feel between our body and the rest of the world.
Through different sound and touch tests, measured the limits of interpersonal space in each trimester of pregnancy, finding that during the third trimester they were older, unlike the previous two trimesters, in those that were similar to those that exist when there is no pregnancy.
And why does this need to have more peripersonal space occur in the last quarter? The researchers concluded that it is the way in which the brain adapts to the sudden changes that the body goes through during pregnancy: expanding the representation of the space around us, as a protective mechanism for our baby.
Therefore, it is possible that during the third quarter some activities or movements that we did so naturally and safely, now worry us or cause some anxiety, due to that feeling of needing more space to protect our belly from possible threats.
So if during the third trimester you feel that you need to take more distance from the people or objects that surround you or even bother you that they touch your belly, it is something completely normal and part of adapting your brain to the physical changes of pregnancy.
