Breaking the Fear - Tension - Pain Cycle in Childbirth
Fear, tension and pain. How does this affect your birthing?
When teaching hypnobirthing I talk about the fear tension pain cycle and how that affects your mindset and ultimately your birthing experience.
When we fear something our sympathetic nervous system activates (our fight-flight-freeze-appease response), and this affects our body in several ways including direction oxygen to the muscles in defence system and accelerating heart rate. The sphincters at the neck of the uterus are linked to the parasympathetic nervous system, our rest and digest or sometimes called our relaxation system. When we experience fear in birthing our sphincters close in preparation for action.
The circular muscles at the neck of the uterus become tight and oxygen deprived.
Meanwhile the longitudinal muscles that push baby down continue to work, but they will be pushing baby against taut muscle. This is painful, and we then begin to fear that pain and dread the next surge, and it just keeps going around and around and around.
Put a different way, the body tenses when there is fear. When the body is tense the level of pain skyrockets. When this happens our fears that birth is painful and unbearable are confirmed, we become more fearful and the cycle continues.
It's a bit like having a needle. I always talk about my two older children when we reach this part of the training. It's not often that they need needles or blood tests but sometimes they do. My oldest child will fight it every step of the way. It's a multiple person job to hold him down while the doctor has several goes at getting the needle into taut muscles. This is painful and distressing and he's even been left with bruises from multiple needle jabs. My middle child, my daughter, sits in the chair, looks away and takes a few deep breaths. She might flinch but will not move her body. It's over quickly and painlessly and she goes on with her day.
Out of these children who has it better? My daughter knows that if she relaxes and does not hold tension in her muscles that the whole process will go quicker and overall be much more pleasant.
Muscles need oxygen to work effectively. Your uterus is a set of muscles, and during birth it is working bloody hard!
There is a fine line between control and surrender during birth. We need to surrender completely to the sensations that are happening within us, it is your body doing a fantastic job, but we also need that mental discipline to always come back to the mindset and tools that you learn during hypnobirthing.
One of those tools is a confident and knowledgeable support partner. This can be a great opportunity for birth partners to remind birthing mothers of what mums body is achieving, to go floppy, making sure that she is not holding any tension in her face, and overall treating her like the goddess that she is.