Do you know that anticipating something to be painful actually makes it more painful? This is because when we anticipate something unpleasant happening to us our body tenses up and we feel the event more intensely than if our body was more relaxed.

Studies show that these expectations had a significant effect on influencing how our brain processes pain.

If you look at this cycle is shows how our anticipation of pain can actually lead to higher levels of pain and so finding ways to relax our mind and body will have an overall positive effect on how our body experiences certain events like birth. If we calm our fears, our body relaxes as it no longer feels threatened and it is better able to perform as it is meant to.

Birth takes a certain amount of surrender, although preparation and knowledge of how your body will perform throughout labour is helpful the actual act of birth is not a thinking process but an instinctual one.

Fear can get in the way of this as it can actually stop the production of birthing hormones that are necessary in keeping labour progressing. We are mammals; much like any mammal in the animal kingdom if we feel like we are in danger at any point during our labour it can stop and thus gets labelled as ‘failure to progress’ leading to all sort of interventions.

In order to get those hormones flowing we need to trust the process of birth and trust ourselves to do it. Getting educated on how our body works is vital and then confronting any fears we have surrounding birth by using hypnosis and relaxation are helpful steps in surrendering to the process. The more knowledge we have will lead to more confidence and a greater trust in our intuition.