Your brain is playing a well-documented trick on you called the frequency illusion. Pregnancy hasn’t actually become more common around you. Instead, something has shifted your focus, whether it’s a desire to get pregnant, a fear of pregnancy, a recent loss, or even a casual conversation, and now your mind is scanning the world for matches. The result: pregnant bellies, baby announcements, and diaper ads seem to be absolutely everywhere.
There’s also a good chance your phone is in on it. Between ad-tracking algorithms and data-sharing apps, your digital life may genuinely be serving you more pregnancy content than it used to. Here’s what’s happening on both fronts.
The Frequency Illusion Explained
The frequency illusion, sometimes called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, is a cognitive bias that kicks in whenever something becomes newly important to you. It works in two steps. First, your brain starts directing selective attention toward the thing you’ve been thinking about, actively scanning your surroundings for anything related. Second, every time you spot it, confirmation bias locks in the pattern. Each sighting feels like proof that it really is everywhere, which makes you look even harder.
This is the same reason you suddenly notice your car model on every highway after buying it, or hear a new word three times in a day after learning it. The world didn’t change. Your filter did. Whatever you focus on, you find more of. Your mind actively seeks out stimuli related to whatever concept it’s been primed to notice.
With pregnancy, the effect can be especially strong because the trigger is rarely neutral. Whether you’re excited, anxious, grieving, or uncertain, there’s emotional weight behind the attention. That emotion keeps the filter locked in place longer and makes each sighting feel more significant than a repeated car model ever would.
Why Emotional Stakes Make It Worse
Your brain is wired to prioritize things that matter to your survival and well-being. From an evolutionary standpoint, stimuli related to reproduction, families, and babies belong to a category of “preservative” cues that the human attention system is already biased to detect. Research on visual attention has shown that these biologically relevant images capture focus even in peripheral vision, before you consciously decide to look. The attentional system shows domain-specific biases rooted in evolutionary pressures to enhance reproductive success.
Layer personal emotion on top of that biological baseline and the effect intensifies. If you’re trying to conceive, worried about infertility, processing a miscarriage, or even just wondering whether you want kids, pregnancy becomes one of the most emotionally charged categories your brain can encounter. Emotional stimuli get processed with high priority because they’re connected to fundamental needs: pain and pleasure, reward and loss. Your brain treats them as urgent, which means they cut through the noise of everything else you see in a day.
There’s also a compounding loop at work. When someone is already in a pattern of repetitive negative thinking, like worrying about fertility or dreading another pregnancy announcement, the brain tends to interpret ambiguous information through that negative lens. A coworker mentioning she feels “sick” gets filed under pregnancy. A friend posting a photo with a loose-fitting top triggers a second look. Each interpretation feeds back into the worry cycle, generating more scanning, more sightings, and more distress.
Your Phone Is Doing It Too
Not all of this is in your head. If you’ve searched for ovulation timing, browsed a fertility clinic’s website, downloaded a period tracker, or even lingered on a friend’s baby announcement on social media, algorithms have likely tagged you as someone interested in pregnancy content. From that point on, the ads and recommendations follow.
Retailers have been refining this for over a decade. Target famously developed a “pregnancy prediction score” that analyzed shopping habits, including purchases like unscented lotion and supplements, to estimate whether a customer was pregnant and how far along she might be. In one widely reported case, the algorithm sent maternity coupons to a teenager’s home before her own family knew she was expecting. These models are designed to reach you at the exact moment you’re most likely to buy.
Pregnancy and fertility apps make this even more targeted. An analysis by the Mozilla Foundation found that popular pregnancy apps collect extensive personal data and share it with third-party advertisers, external media channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, and various business partners for marketing purposes. Some apps combine your account data, device information, location details, browsing behavior, and interaction history to build a detailed profile. That profile follows you across platforms. You search for “early pregnancy symptoms” on one site, and within hours you’re seeing ads for prenatal vitamins on a completely different app.
Google’s ad-serving systems can combine information collected through apps with data gathered independently from other services and products. So even if you never explicitly told any platform you’re thinking about pregnancy, your behavior across dozens of small interactions may have been enough for the system to draw that conclusion and start serving you related content.
How to Tell Which One It Is
In most cases, both forces are working at once. Your brain is filtering for pregnancy cues in the physical world while your devices are amplifying pregnancy content in the digital one. But you can get a rough sense of the balance.
If you’re noticing pregnant people at the grocery store, hearing about pregnancies from acquaintances, and feeling like every TV show has a pregnancy storyline, that’s primarily the frequency illusion. Those things were always there. Your attention has simply reorganized around them.
If your Instagram feed, YouTube sidebar, and email inbox are suddenly filled with baby-related content, the algorithmic explanation is doing most of the work. You can test this by clearing your ad preferences in your phone settings, resetting your advertising ID, and reviewing which apps have permission to track your activity across other apps and websites. On most social platforms, you can also tell the algorithm you’re “not interested” in specific ad categories.
When It Feels Overwhelming
For people navigating infertility, pregnancy loss, or ambivalence about parenthood, the constant reminders can go from mildly annoying to genuinely painful. Research on couples undergoing fertility treatment consistently shows elevated levels of stress and anxiety, and being unable to escape pregnancy reminders in daily life adds to that burden.
Cognitive behavioral therapy and mind-body interventions like meditation, yoga, and structured relaxation techniques have strong evidence for reducing fertility-related distress. These approaches help not just with the emotional weight of treatment itself but also with the broader pattern of scanning and interpreting the world through a lens of loss or longing. They can help you reevaluate goals, build coping strategies for difficult moments like yet another baby shower invitation, and make plans that feel meaningful regardless of outcome.
On the practical side, curating your digital environment makes a real difference. Mute or unfollow accounts that trigger distress. Use the “not interested” and “hide ad” options aggressively. Check the privacy settings on any health or period-tracking apps and revoke permissions for data sharing you didn’t realize you’d agreed to. You can’t stop your brain from noticing a pregnant stranger on the sidewalk, but you can stop your phone from reinforcing the pattern every time you pick it up.