What is HYPNOBIRTHING?!
I want you to think of Hypnobirthing as a toolkit for birth - it’s a combination of different relaxation techniques & breathwork alongside knowledge of the physiology of birth so you can understand how your body works and how you can support it.
Hypnobirthing also considers the role of the nervous system on birth - exploring our body’s instinctive stress responses and recognising the impact that those can have on birth.
Increasingly, hypnobirthing courses will also discuss your options for different medical interventions, the process of induction & your rights in birth, which is something I’m hugely passionate about. In my opinion, a course which does not discuss these elements is doing you a huge disservice by ignoring the existence, and often the need for, interventions.
And this leads me to the first myth about hypnobirthing - that it’s ‘just breathing’. Hopefully that very brief introduction has opened your eyes to how much more a hypnobirthing course really is. Breathing is albeit a really important part - but in my course we don’t even begin to look at it until half way through our 3rd session.
Breathing is fundamental to our existence; our breathing patterns tell us a lot about how we are feeling in a moment. And amazingly, by altering our breathing in moments of stress we can often regain control of our bodies influence their physical reaction.
Our breathing affects our mental state. It improves our cardiovascular system. How we breathe can energise us, or it can calm us. We can also use our breathing to release tension in our muscles. All of those individual things can affect both the physical & emotional experience of birth.
There are two very distinct stages of labour - stage 1 where your cervix dilates, and stage 2 where your muscles are working to push baby out. We teach 2 very different breathing techniques to manage these 2 very different stages, with their very different sensations.
And yes these techniques which hypnobirthing is renowned for are undoubtedly important, but they are only one piece of the puzzle. Understanding how your body works, how you can support yourself & knowing your options are just as crucial in preparing for an experience that you can enjoy & feel positive about.
Another infuriating myth about hypnobirthing is that it is only for ‘natural’ birth or ‘home’ birth.
Wrong! Hypnobirthing can be beneficial for all births. My goal in teaching hypnobirthing is to support you to have a birth that you look back on with a smile on your face; that you feel positively about; a story that you enjoy sharing & reliving with friends family & strangers on the bus. There is no one way to have a positive birth. It does not need to be a home birth. It does not need to be drug free. It doesn’t need to be a vaginal birth.
There is no Hypnobirthing prescription that says you need to birth a specific way, and it’s also very important to remember that hypnobirthing cannot guarantee you a specific birth. As much as birth is safe for the vast vast majority of people, it is also unpredictable, and this is why I think it is so important to have an understanding of birth that is broader than just focussing on your ideal experience.
What I aim to do is provide you with the tools to be able to make the right decisions for you and your baby and your unique situation; to make decisions that you feel confident with; to be able to support yourself to stay calm & relaxed as much as possible.
Why is it important to be relaxed?
There is a lot of focus on being relaxed & calm in Hypnobirthing; the importance of fending off stress as much as possible, regardless of the situation. The reason that this is important is because of the physical impact that the emotional feeling of ‘stress’ has on our body. We talk about this as ‘the mind body connection’.
When the body is experiencing stress it has is a physical reaction. You have probably all heard of the fight / flight / freeze response. I’ll be diving in to the science of the nervous system in detail in another episode so I’ll just give you a brief run down here…
When our brain feels unsafe it flicks an internal switch and our body goes from running optimally and our sympathetic nervous sytem is activated. My friend Sophie once described this as our inner scaredy cat, which is just the perfect analogy for this.
So the scaredy cat floods our system with stress hormones which tells our body to do certain things, like increase our breathing, up our heart rate; slow down non-essential operations (like digestion & the reproductive system) and they divert blood to your major muscles, ie your arms & legs so that you can either fight off danger or run away from it.
It also stops the production of a super important hormone for birth - oxytocin. Oxytocin is the hormone responsible for telling the muscles of the uterus to contract. And I’m sure you can see why this would massively impact your birth.
And these responses are all amazing and life saving - they are the reason we have been able to evolve and are the humans we are today. Back in the cave days, if you were in labour, and saw a predator in the distance, would you have wanted your labour to continue? Absolutely not! That adrenaline spike which shuts down the process is incredibly useful and gives you an opportunity to get to somewhere safe.
But let’s think about modern birth - that predator in the distance may well be your drive to the hospital - it’s so common for labour to stall between home & arriving at hospital. The reason for this is that the change in environment can set off a stress response. Your subconscious doesn’t realise that the move to hospital is good, that you’re moving to where you’re going to have your baby. It just thinks ‘WOW WHATS HAPPENING WHERE ARE WE GOING?’.
What I’m trying to highlight for you here is how responsible our thoughts, past & present, are for how our body reacts to situations. Feeling confident & informed ahead of birth goes such a long way to helping you counteract these responses and try to ensure that your physiology has the opportunity to work as it should
If you haven’t considered how the mind influences the body before it can be tricky to get your head around. A good way to think about it is to think about nightmares - experiences that happen entirely in your mind but can have a physical response; pounding heart, sweaty. Your brain tells your body that the threat is real.
So what can we do about this - well, not being afraid of birth is a good place to start. The aim of hypnobirthing is to transform your mindset from negative to positive - or if you already feel positively about birth, it’s to reinforce that belief in yourself & your body and in birth.
A quote that I love, from a coach called Gabrielle Treanor - “Beliefs are not set in stone or finite. They can be acquired, recognised & released. They can be planted, nurtured & strengthened, and by doing so empower us to thrive & flourish.”
That there is the core value my hypnobirthing - to break the cycle of negativity; to let go of the belief that birth is inherently dangerous; to believe that birth can be a safe and positive experience. That it can be a powerful & exciting event, whether that’s a vaginal birth or a caesarean birth. When we believe that we are safe, we are far more likely to enter birth feeling calm & in control as well as being far more likely to feel positively about the experience afterwards.
Why does a negative mindset affect our birth experience?
We all have subconscious thoughts about birth. Even if we have no first hand experience of birth, our subconscious has already formed a belief about what birth is, and sadly for the majority of people, this is that birth is dangerous and something to be feared.
Think about it like this: our brains have an idea about bears, or lets say dinosaurs incase you have in fact met a bear. No one’s met a dinosaur! So you have no first hand experience with dinosaurs but your brain already that an idea about what kind of experience meeting a dinosaur would be. I’m going to give it a good guess here and say that that’s probably not a great experience. Based on what we’ve seen in books & films and learned at school our brains think meeting a dinosaur will be scary & dangerous. When we encounter something that our subconscious doesn’t like it sets off a stress response in the body.
So let’s bring all this back to birth - replace that dinosaur with childbirth. You’ve no first hand experience of it but your whole life people have talked about it like it’s a terrible experience. You see birth on TV shown as a medical event, coordinated by doctors & midwives. You’ve heard family members compare the number of hours they were labouring. You’ve seen blue lights & emergencies. It’s no wonder people aren’t singing & dancing thinking about birth.
My No.1 tool for telling the brain that birth is safe is stories. Stories are a really powerful tool on so many levels, and, with the power of google, they’re also really easy to access.
When we hear a story, it tells our brain that that scenario is a possibility, this is magnified when we know the person. The closer our connection to the person, the more our brain thinks that is a possibility for us.
So if you have friends with positive birth stories, have them talk to you about their births over & over again - and also try to limit your exposure to people’s negative experiences. This isn’t to invalidate their experience - it’s to try and protect yourself; to safeguard your mindset. A good way to approach this is if someone wants to share their story with you suggest that you wait until you have your own story to share and you can share your experiences together over a bottle of wine or a coffee & cake.
Birth stories are particularly powerful because they give you an insight in to the emotional experience of the person giving birth as well as the physical experience. They may also talk you through their decision making processes.
Reading positive stories which highlight a variety of different experiences, such as inductions, homebirth transfer to hospital, planned or unplanned caesarean will help you realise that there are so many routes to a positive birth - it’s all about how you feel about the experience and not really much to do with the actual course that your birth takes.
I want you to approach your birth feeling powerful, regardless of whether you are birthing in the bath at home, squatting in the labour ward or having a belly birth in theatre.
