What is Hypnobirth?
Hypnosis is a state of consciousness that you naturally go into at least twice a day, both on coming into wakefulness at the start of the day and as you fall asleep at night. This is when your brain waves are moving from Beta to Alpha to Theta and eventually Delta. You can also go into hypnosis when you are driving a route you know well.
In hypnosis the suggestions are talking directly to your subconscious which is the part of your mind that is the seat of imagination, impulse, suggestibility and creative thinking.
Once in a state of hypnosis, we can suggest new thoughts, beliefs and expectations which become embedded in your memory.
However, do understand that suggestibility would never override your sense of safety or morality so you can never be made to do something that you regret later (those decisions we make in states of full alertness!). Your subconscious also regulates sensations and emotions.
On the MindBody Birthing course you will have access to 6 hypnobirthing tracks, 2 mindfulness tracks and 1 deep muscle relaxation. They are released week by week so you have a chance to get to know each one in turn, however you can always skip forwards to the next one if you choose.
They each offer different visualisations and work on different birthing tools. Some will resonate more with you than others so don’t feel you have to listen to all of them all of the time.
You might find one or two that resonate, in which case just stick with those ones.
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.’
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. Discomfort is totally subjective.
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 help with your experience.
At BodyMind Birthing, we have your back! Hypnobirth is just one of the tools you will learn.
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.
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.
