How Does Hypnotherapy Help To Have Painless Deliveries?

Pregnancy is a period of joy and expectation, anticipating a celebration at the end while having your bundle of joy in your arms. While the joy of motherhood outweighs every kind of uneasiness you bumped into during your gestation period and labor, it doesn't take away the pain and trepidation associated with childbirth. The fear of labor pain makes the mothers opt for an unnecessary C section and epidural delivery, which has its own cons in different aspects.

So more and more mommies are opting for hypnotherapy to deliver their baby minus the labour pain. Scroll down to read more…

What Is Hypnosis?

Hypnosis, we can say, is one of the most misinterpreted and conflict-ridden processes of psychological treatment. The act of hypnotism performed by the magicians gives a totally wrong conception of hypnosis among the people. In fact, hypnosis is a genuine psychological phenomenon that has several significant applications in clinical practice.

We can define hypnosis as a state of highly focused attention or concentration. Tranquility, and keen suggestibility are usually associated with hypnosis.

How Does Hypnosis Help To Relieve Labor Pain?

The theory behind the hypnotherapy promoting painless labor is that the hypnosis helps to calm the mind of an expecting mom and doesn’t let her get into the ‘fight or flight' reaction.

What Is Fight Or Flight Response?

The fight or flight response is referred to our body's primeval, automatic, and natural response that prepares the body to "fight" or "run away" from an apparent attack that brings about peril to our endurance. Once the fight or flight response is activated, a series of nerve cell firing occurs and a flood of changes happens to your hormones, chemicals like adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol are released into our bloodstream, and body to prepare you to immediately run away or fight the situation.

How does fight-or-fly response affect the labor?

The response works in the following way-

1. When the expecting mother realize the time of delivering the child is just around the corner she will start to panic. This will bring about releasing stress hormones into their body
2. The stress hormone in the blood results in muscle to get tightened
3. The tightened muscles hinder the procedure of easy labor and childbirth

How Does Hypnotherapy Work In Having A Painless Delivery?

The subconscious mind has a significant hold on many of our bodily functions. When a woman in labor are put under hypnosis, she is swayed to think that she is going to have a trouble-free and comfortable childbirth experience.

Through self-hypnosis or hypnotherapy, the mother's mind will be filled with positive images associated with childbirth. Therefore, instead of panic attacks, which give rise to series of hormonal changes that resulting in difficult labor, the expecting mother recalls these positive thoughts and images and thereby, initializing the smooth labour by making her muscles more relaxed thus paving the way to less painful labor.

Relaxation through hypnotherapy brings down the maternal levels of circulating stress hormones. The lower levels of stress hormones can help with uterine contractions.

How Does A Woman Undergo Self-Hypnosis During Labor?

Mostly, an expecting mommy during self-hypnosis in labor concentrate on the sound of her breath and visualize the baby descending further with each breath (Deep breathing Affirmations Visualization). She will also keep assuring herself that she has faith that her body can confidently birth her baby.