Hormones 101

It’s all about those hormones baby! When we’re talking about birth and Hypnobirthing, there are two main hormones that it’s essential you know about.

The first is our friend, and that’s awesome Oxytocin. This is the feel good hormone, you know, the one that’s making us feel all gooey when we fall in love. It just so happens that this is the hormone that the muscles of your uterus need to be able to contract, and birth your baby. Who’d have known?! Together with prostaglandins (the one that helps your cervix to dilate) these two hormones work in a sort of positive feedback loop, one helping the creation of the other.

Then there’s the hormone that’s definitely not on the Christmas card list – Oxytocin’s enemy, Adrenaline. We want to keep our adrenaline levels super low in labour, otherwise it starts to interrupt the production of oxytocin (you know, the one we need for things to work), our breathing starts to quicken and become more
shallow, preventing us from keeping our muscles nice and oxygenated. Oh and it also makes us tense up and clamp our muscles – not so conducive to getting a baby out.

Try to think of it like this. When we go into birth feeling afraid, we’ll naturally become tense when it begins to happen, and when we feel tense we experience more pain. The same way that you brace yourself before an impact. We focus all of our attention on that area, tense up our muscles, and therefore increase the levels
of pain we feel. Which makes us feel more afraid = more tense = more pain. You get the picture. This is what we call the fear, tension, pain cycle, and ideally we want to do everything we can to interrupt it.

During your Hypnobirthing class (online or in person in Glasgow), we’ll work on removing your fear and interrupting that cycle before it ever gets a chance to get going.

See? Pregnancy hormones aren’t just sent to drive us crazy, they have a job to do too!