Category: breastfeeding

15 Ways To Boost Oxytocin In Labour

Oxytocin is produced naturally in your body during birth where it helps to stimulate and strengthen contractions. These contractions help to push your baby down the birth canal and into the world. Although it’s produced naturally and in increasing quantities in labour, are things that you can go to help promote the production of the hormone in your body.

15 Ways To Boost Oxytocin in Labour

  1. Gentle touch and massage can help to stimulate the release of oxytocin, reducing stress and promoting a sense of wellbeing. Massage can also relieve sore muscles of tension. There’s also research that shows that oxytocin rises in the person giving the massage, which is a great way to promote calmness in your birth partner.
  2. A warm bath or shower can reduce stress hormones and enhance oxytocin production.
  3. Deep breathing can turn off the sympathetic nervous system’s stress response, allowing oxytocin to relax your muscles and calm you down.
  4. Having an emotional support person who’s there solely to focus on you rather than anything medical, such as a partner, doula, or close friend, can help to enhance oxytocin production and reduce stress during birth.
  5. Cuddles! Research shows that oxytocin starts to be produced 20 seconds after a cuddle starts, so some lovely long hugs are bound to help your oxytocin levels.
  6. And on the subject of intimacy…orgasms produce oxytocin too. Just make sure you’re somewhere private first!
  7. Nipple stimulation triggers the release of oxytocin, whether this is from your own hands or your partner’s.
  8. Laughter – it really is the best medicine!
  9. Essential oils and other smells that trigger feelings of love and happiness can boost your body’s production of oxytocin.
  10. Music has been found to boost oxytocin levels, so crank your labour playlist up! Some people like to have a calm playlist and a more upbeat one – as long as it’s music that you enjoy do whatever suits you best.
  11. Start eating dates; it seems that the fruit influences oxytocin receptors and stimulates the muscles to respond to your body’s oxytocin.
  12. Creating a peaceful, supportive, and nurturing environment can help to enhance oxytocin production and promote a positive birth experience.
  13. When you’re stressed you produce stress hormones, inhibiting oxytocin. So if you’re feeling stressy during labour figure out the cause and get rid of it, allowing the oxytocin levels to rise.  
  14. Showing love and affection towards your support partner can boost your oxytocin levels; meaningful connection while bringing new life to the world, can there by anything more worthy of the love hormone?
  15. Avoiding unnecessary disturbances can help promote an oxytocin-fuelled environment. If someone’s constantly bringing you out of your hazy dazy birth bubble the oxytocin production will be disrupted – yuck.

Oxytocin is a crucial hormone for the birthing process. It has many benefits including reducing the amount of time your labour lasts, increasing your tolerance to pain, promoting bonding and attachment. By enhancing oxytocin production during labour, you can promote a positive and empowering birth experience, and create a strong foundation for the future.

For more information about oxytocin in birth, head over to Sara Wickham’s page where she looks at some of the evidence.

If You Only Read Some Breastfeeding Articles, Make Them These

I know that statistically most of you reading this while pregnant will want to breastfeed. And I know that most of you won’t reach your goals. That’s what the evidence says. Bizarrely, the research also tells us that antenatal breastfeeding education doesn’t help women fulfil their goals. But I see and hear women every day say “Why did nobody tell me…” about some aspect of breastfeeding or another, which is why the new Stockport Birth Services antenatal course programme includes a breastfeeding session. And even then I won’t have been able to say everything I want to.

I can’t overstate that for some women breastfeeding is hard. I don’t want to put you off, but there’s this idea out there that because breastfeeding is ‘natural’ it’s easy. Nothing could be further than the truth! Remember when you learned to walk? (Well, no, not unless you have hyperthymesia). But trust me – you fell down, got up, fell down, got up, fell down, got up then eventually cracked it and didn’t fall over again until you became a student and cracked open the White Lightening. So if you feel like you’re struggling and ‘failing’ then take heart – many of us have been there and there’s help available. If you can’t get to a group, or you’re not local this is a rather fab Facebook group who I see give excellent information (generally I’d say be careful of where you get your info from online as you don’t know their creds, but on this occasion you can trust the source)

First we need to unpick some of the misinformation out there. Yes your baby needs feeding again. Yes you are making enough milk. Yes it is normal. No your baby doesn’t need to wait 4 hours between feeds. No you don’t need to time a feed from one side for 20 minutes. This is one of the most important blogs you’ll read about breastfeeding and the obsession over the infant feeding intervals. Followed by this one about how long to feed for. I’ll also direct you here to here we question the idea of a ‘good baby‘ and how the idea of it is complicit in damaging the breastfeeding relationship. 

However you feed your baby, responsive feeding is the key and all parents should be helped to understand what that means. 

As a final note here, sometimes feeding worries continue through to the time to wean your baby onto solid food, and sometimes this comes from the mistaken belief that it will help you get some much-needed extra sleep. Here’s a look into it.

There’s literally thousands of blogs I could point you towards on this subject, but these are my favourites.

Breastfeeding, And Why Smugness Came Before A Fall

This was originally written for Professor Amy Brown who was compiling one of her books. I don’t think it’s been used in print and I’ve re-discovered it on my hard drive so I thought I’d share here.

When I got pregnant with my first child I went into research-mode and looked for THE best way to do every single aspect of pregnancy and baby-care. (Unfortunately, I was also a smug first-time mom to be and didn’t hold back in telling everyone why my way was going to be THE best way and questioning why on earth wasn’t everyone doing the same as me. God I cringe so hard. Sorry, everybody I came into contact with then!)

A huge part of this was, of course, how I was going to feed my baby. Breast is best hun, so despite having no clue whatsoever of what breastfeeding entailed I decided that was that and I was going to breastfeed my son. I wasn’t breastfed myself – a fact I knew only because my mom took great delight in telling everybody that I never cried as a baby and just stood in my cot waiting for a bottle. We’ll just skip past that little attachment issue in waiting there…In fact, to the best of my knowledge I only ever saw one person breastfeeding during my childhood; a friend of my mom’s giving her newborn twins milk. Now I look back and know how much hard work that would have been and I’m slightly in awe!

Of course, smugness goes before a fall. Literally, in my case. I fell down the stairs on my due date and damaged my coccyx which set the scene for a really traumatic-feeling end to my pregnancy, and my labour couldn’t have deviated further from my birth plan if it had tried. It traumatised me so much it nearly stopped any future children from being considered, and it definitely impacted on my ability to bond with my son in those early days. Frankly, I wanted nothing more than to hide in bed until all the pain went away. So having a baby who didn’t immediately latch on and do something “natural” was more than I had the ability to cope with at that point. I just didn’t have the stamina or desire to add fighting to feed my baby into the mix – and it really did feel like a fight. He wouldn’t latch, every position hurt, my nipples hurt, my coccyx hurt, my stitches hurt, I was too anaemic to sit upright. In my drug, hormone and tiredness addled state I thought expressing would be the best option in the short-term. So that’s what I started to do. My very first time at the pump produced about 10mls of colostrum which would have been great except it was red, so of course I thought I was poisoning my baby with infected milk. It really wasn’t easy this parenting lark.

I carried on pumping, putting baby to the breast as often as I felt I could which in hindsight is nowhere nearly enough to have done anything particularly useful. And I carried on pumping. And I carried on thinking that we’d crack breastfeeding soon. And I carried on pumping. And I started to think that perhaps one of us just couldn’t do it. And I carried on pumping. And I stopped putting him to the breast. And I carried on pumping. And I carried on pumping.

Thankfully I responded well to the pump. I could nearly always keep up with his demand, despite him taking so much milk each day. He was diagnosed with reflux and drank milk to soothe the pain, invariably vomiting it across the room in an exorcist-style propulsion of milk and mucous. When your hard-pumped milk was so rapidly discarded there really was a point in crying over spilt milk.

I don’t know how I kept up the regime of expressing for 5 months. One of the overriding memories I have of those early months with him is frantically rocking his bouncer to stop him crying while I urged my boobs to be faster at filling those bloody bottles. It was intense. Having gone through the newborn period with two subsequent children I’m filled with regret at how much I missed with the pump-feed-wash-sterilise routine. Even more regret that I was never told things that would have eased the intensity of exclusive pumping – like the fact you don’t need to sterilise breast pump paraphernalia! (note: current NHS guidelines have been revised to say that now it is recommended to sterilise breastmilk equipment).

My husband was as supportive as he could have possibly been and made it as easy as he could possibly have made it (apart from that one fatal misunderstanding where he binned an entire freezer drawer full of milk stash – that one still smarts!) but he didn’t ‘get’ it. It would have been really nice to be able to talk to people who had been there. People who had breastfed, people who had expressed, people who I didn’t mind being vulnerable in front of. But there was nobody. None of my friends had yet had children and my family weren’t breastfeeders. Even the most well-intentioned support doesn’t quite hit the spot when it’s from somebody with no experience of the issue.

Years have passed and more babies have happened. After success feeding my second-born I trained as a breastfeeding peer supporter and have been volunteering at community support groups for several years. She was breastfed until the hallowed WHO guidance of 2 years, self-weaning shortly after her birthday. My third-born is showing no signs of stopping, we’ll address weaning if and when it becomes a problem. A small, irrational part of me probably thinks longer-term breastfeeding makes amends for the fiasco that was my son’s first months. The bigger, more rational part of me knows that’s bobbins and I did the best I could have done, which is all any of us can do, really, isn’t it?