Can hypnobirthing help to reduce pain during childbirth?
This isn’t a blog that’s going to tell you that my hypnobirthing courses can guarantee you a pain-free birth, I’m not that sort of hypnobirthing teacher.
However, what hypnobirthing can do, is help people to feel more comfortable and manage the sensations of birth better when using hypnobirthing techniques.
Whilst it is totally possible to experience birth without any pain (some of my client’s birth stories support this), we have to remember that we are all different and we all experience pain on different levels. I’m going to be honest, I have a really low pain threshold, and I do not deal with pain well.
I once stubbed my toe and cried, yet I was able to give birth without needing any pain relief, how?
Let’s face it, most of us who are feeling worried about giving birth, are concerned that we won’t deal well with the pain during labour. Perhaps you have heard all the horror stories about how horrendous it is and we all know that labour is the benchmark for pain (it’s like being kicked in the balls, right?)
This is exactly the reason why more and more people are turning to hypnobirthing, they want to feel in control during labour, to have techniques to help them manage contractions, to have a positive experience and to bring their baby into the world with the best possible start.
Let’s take a look at the ways in which hypnobirthing can help you during labour to:
A/ Reduce the levels of pain you might experience
&
B/ Help you to manage any pain that you might feel.
When it comes to dealing with pain during labour, hypnobirthing is a two-fold process. Firstly we look at point A, is there anything that we can do to reduce the levels of pain that we might experience during labour, or perhaps a better term would be, is there anything that we can do to make sure that we aren’t making the pain any worse? We then move on to look at ways that we can manage any existing pain.
So let’s start with point A…
How can hypnobirthing help to reduce pain during labour?
What we do know is that we can actually make pain worse.
Let’s take an example of a migraine, we feel absolutely shocking and all we want to do is lay down in a dark room and sleep, but there are no curtains and the sun is blasting into the room, then we hear someone banging outside. You start to panic because now you aren’t sure if it is a migraine, you’ve lost feeling in your arms and you can’t see properly, what if it’s something more serious? There’s no one with you to help and suddenly you feel like you can’t breathe properly and it’s all spiralling out of control. Can you see how the pain has suddenly got much worse? If you were able to just lay down in a dark room and sleep, it wouldn't have got to this. There are certain things during labour that can heighten our experience of pain and make it harder to deal with.
We can unknowingly increase the levels of pain that we experience during labour.
A simple way to reduce the level of pain experienced during labour:
Once we understand how the uterus works, we see that in its simplest form, it is two sets of muscles that work together. If the body is tense during labour, the uterus muscles can’t do their job. Tense uterus muscles = working against the body = more pain.
The uterus needs these muscles to be relaxed in order for it to do what it needs to do to get your baby out. Hence, if we can learn how to relax our body during labour, this can help contractions to become more efficient and also helps us to feel more comfortable.
Relaxed uterus muscles = working with the body = more comfortable
So all you have to do during labour is relax then?
Sort of, but it’s not that easy to “just” relax. Remember the last time you had a smear test and the nurse said '“now just relax” and you thought “that’s easy for you to say, you don’t have a stranger prodding your vagina”.
When I speak about relaxing your body, it actually takes a lot of practice to do this, we refer to it as self-hypnosis in hypnobirthing. Relaxation is a skill and it takes a whole heap of techniques to be able to do it properly. It actually starts by working on your mindset, a relaxed mind = a relaxed body. This is what hypnobirthing helps you to do, it helps you to learn the skill of self hypnosis (a true state of relaxation) which can help you to work with your body during labour, in turn helping to potentially reduce the levels of pain you might experience during birth.
Once we develop this skill we can then head onto point B…
How can hypnobirthing help to manage pain during labour?
I hear you shouting “take the pain relief” at the screen. It is absolutely a valid option but for those who are wanting to lean more towards natural birth, there are so many other techniques that we can draw upon to help us manage the sensations of birth. Once we have worked on the skill of relaxation and we allow our body to do what it needs to do during labour, we can then use various hypnobirthing techniques to help manage any existing pain during labour.
In my courses, I teach 18 techniques to help you manage pain, ranging from those that produce pain-relieving hormones in your system (said to be 200 times stronger than morphine) to a simple, yet really effective breathing technique that floods your body with oxygen. We discuss how to minimise external factors that might increase our perception of pain (remember the curtains and drilling in the example above). I also provide your birth partner with plenty of ways to help support you during labour.
In a nutshell…
There are things that you can do to help yourself during labour and hypnobirthing is an amazing tool to support you during childbirth. We have to remember that birth is intense and it is powerful, the majority of people will experience pain but having techniques to help you manage these feelings is crucial. I am not claiming that my courses will totally eliminate pain but we can find ways to manage these sensations better.
Have a read of some of my clients positive birth stories below and see how they used their hypnobirthing techniques during labour to help them stay calm and feel in control.
I would love to support you during such a wonderful life event, please feel free to get in touch if you would like to know more about hypnobirthing.
Hannah xx
“Hannah’s course was absolutely amazing! I’d been fearful of birth for as long as I can remember. The hospital recommended I look into hypnobirthing to try help with my anxiety and worry around birth.
I didn’t think it would ever be possible for me to look forward to giving birth, but after the course and the weeks of practicing that’s exactly how I felt.”