Myth-Busting Hypnobirth
There seems to be quite a lot of understandable confusion about what happens on a hypnobirth workshop and what the benefits of hypnobirth are.
So, it’s easy to deduce by the name that you are somehow to be ‘hypnotised’ and that it will help you in some way have a positive birth experience. Which is true. But that’s actually only a small part of the content covered. More of that later.
In fact, 99% of the hypnosis doesn’t happen at the workshop. It happens after the session when you and your partner go home and practice in the intervening weeks before baby comes.
Another myth is that hypnobirth will give you a pain free birth.
One of the dads who recently attended my Couples Birth Refresher workshop said he felt that the hypnobirth part of their previous antenatal training had been oversold and he was surprised to see how much his partner struggled. Unfortunately, his partner had had a 3 day ‘back labour’ which means that the baby had turned back-to-back. Typically, a much more painful and long labour.
It’s likely that the hypnobirth did indeed play its part in helping mum to stay in a more manageable zone, just not the magic spell that perhaps had been promised. Expectations can be the cause of an awful lot of unhappiness when they aren’t realised, so we need to be careful with what expectations that we are lining up. And anyone who works in the birth arena knows better than to promise anything!
The study ‘A meta-analysis of hypnotically induced analgesia: how effective is hypnosis?’ by Montgomery, DuHamel & Redd concluded:
“Meta-analysis of 18 studies revealed a moderate to large hypnoanalgesic effect, supporting the efficacy of hypnotic techniques for pain management.
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Even though hypnosis does have a ‘moderate to large’ analgesic effect in this study, there are so many variables in the way that we interpret pain signals (personal history, beliefs, the behaviour of caregivers, if one has a predisposition of anxiety, if you are tense, tired, cold, hungry to name but a few) that you can’t be sure on the day who will feel what and when.
Yes, a proportion of women who have (or who have not) done hypnobirth will report their birth experience as intense but not painful and another group will report that it was actually pleasurable. But what pleasure is for one person may be unacceptable for another. Pain is totally subjective.
“ Pain + resistance = suffering.”
What we can say for sure is that hypnosis is one tool that may well help you to stay calm and reframe the experience. This works because one part of hypnobirth is learning to relax and when you can consciously relax this can reduce your experience of pain.
Another part of the mechanism is the affect that hypnosis has on a part of your brain called the anterior cingulate cortex. The ACC interprets pain sensations and decides whether it’s acceptable or not. If your ACC accepts the sensation then you will be ‘coping’ if it doesn’t, then you won’t. If you are in a state of anxiety, then your cingulate will more likely tell you that the sensations are not to be tolerated.
So that’s great if you are in the 90% of people who are medium to highly hypnotisable. But what if you are in the 10% who aren’t?
Don’t worry I have some good news! It has been proposed that the power of suggestion is almost as successful as hypnosis and that a big part of hypnosis could simply be the positive suggestion part of it, just in a hypnotic state. (https://hypnosisandsuggestion.org/types-of-suggestion.html)
Which is great, because that means if you are in either group (hypnotisable or not), there are other ways to help prepare your mind (which of course affects your body) for what is essentially the unknown and that if we use both hypnosis and positive suggestion (eg visualisation, affirmations, watching and listening to positive births) then all groups are being empowered and in the case of the 90%, it’s a belt and braces approach.
But that’s not all. And this is where my hypnobirth workshops differ from many.
There is also a lot of research that shows mindfulness and meditation can be helpful for childbirth preparation. The following study was conducted to find out what techniques would help women suffering with fear of childbirth.
It concluded;
“‘An increase in mindful awareness was the strongest mechanism of change for better adaptation to the challenges of childbirth.’”
The WHO recommendation backs this up:
“Relaxation techniques, including progressive muscle relaxation, breathing, music, mindfulness and other techniques, are recommended for healthy pregnant women requesting pain relief during labour.”
So, I strongly encourage couples to use Mindfulness as part of their preparation too.
As mentioned above, breathing is also an incredibly powerful tool for birth. In fact, its efficacy has been enthusiastically praised by hundreds of the women who have come to my pregnancy yoga classes over the last 20 years. I take the time in my hypnobirth workshops to describe the physiology of breathing and explain just how and why it’s so powerful. We also practice several different breath techniques for different birthing experiences.
As well as all the mindbody techniques above, it’s also important to understand the physiology of birth, your hormones, what you can do to optimise your environment, the impact of your emotions on your physiology, how your birth partner can support you with words, touch and massage, the importance of your relationship with your caregivers and how this too can impact on how things shape up. It’s also important to remind you that you are an individual who will have individual needs and desires that need to be heard.
If you choose to attend more traditional childbirth education as well as a hypnobirth course, then you may have covered the nuts and bolts of this already. So, you may hear some of the content twice, but its likely it won’t be in the same way. It’s been commented that my courses offer a more emotional and spiritual side to birthing than some of the more traditional ones.
I continue to call my workshops ‘hypnobirth’ as this is a term that is familiar to a lot of people. It is tried and tested and has proven to be a very useful birth preparation technique. But as a yoga teacher of 20 years, a mindfulness teacher with a further qualification as a Mindbody Practitioner, I now include other techniques, some mentioned above, that I believe will give more women and their partners a broader range of resources.
Brigid Godwin
www.unityyoga.co.uk
Couples Antenatal Holistic Hypnobirth workshops and Couples Birth Refresher workshops available in Uckfield, Tunbridge Wells and privately in West Kent and East Sussex. Pregnancy & Postnatal Yoga, ‘Mindful Mum, Buddha Baby’ mindfulness & baby massage courses also available.