Tag: birth

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.

15 Non-Pharmacological Pain Relief Options For You To Choose In Child Birth

For those that would prefer not to use medication, or want to try other options first, you might be wondering what on Earth is available to you. Well don’t worry, you have plenty of pain relief options!

Many of these are things that will naturally enable oxytocin and endorphins to work in your body, creating a hazy dazy birth bubble that protects you. All people respond differently to different things so it’s worth putting the work in to think about what might boost your oxytocin (the love hormone) and your endorphins (your pain relieving hormones).

The brilliant thing about these is that there are no negative side effects and you can layer them up like a little pain relieving onion, and take them away when they no longer serve you. In no particular order, I bring you 15 non-pharmacological methods of pain relief during childbirth:

Breaking the fear-tension-pain cycle: Fear leads to tension, tension leads to pain. By relieving the fear you can reduce the physical symptoms of tension, ie pain! So think about some of the things that help you reduce fear and anxiety – things like deep breathing and oxytocin boosters like aromatherapy can help, as can a big cuddle from your partner!

Concept of purposeful pain: Giving birth isn’t like breaking a bone. For a start, it usually comes on gradually and builds in intensity, unlike the sudden sharp shock of a break! It’s not a something’s wrong type of pain. Reframing the lens through which you look at labour pains and understanding that each contraction brings you one step closer to your baby can help transform the way you react to the pains. Instead of being something you fear (that fear-tension-pain cycle again!), they can become something you welcome.

Breathing: Deep breathing can help encourage your physical and emotional body into a relaxed state, promoting a healthy blood flow to the birthing muscles so they work effectively. A calm, relaxed body and mind reduces the pain you experience – yep, it’s that fear-tension-pain cycle again!

Visualisations: By creating images in your mind, especially when they’ve already been anchored in your brain to a time when you were relaxed and pain-free, can help reduce your experience of pain and give you a way to handle each contraction. Many people use the concept of a wave as your contraction during labour – the wave swells and with it so does the contraction in your body, and the wave washes away as the contraction releases; you can tie this in nicely with long deep breaths.

Hot water bottle: One of the oldest and cheapest methods of pain relief!

Laughter: Laughing produces endorphins, endorphins are your body’s pain killing hormones. Easy as that!

Bath/shower: Water promotes oxytocin and endorphins, helping that birth bubble be built around you. Being submerged in water can relieve stress hormones and muscle tension, while showers can be used to massage the sore bits.

TENS machine: These send tiny electrical impulses into your body, disrupting the pain signals that you’re experiencing from your contractions. You CANNOT use this with any pain relieving method that involves water.

Massage: Getting hands on can be a great way to reduce the pain your experiencing! Massage can relax painful muscles, relieve stress and promote oxytocin, especially if it’s someone you love doing it.

Music: Music isn’t just a good distraction in birth, it can actually disrupt your brain’s pain pathways meaning your pain is reduced! Also, when else can you listen to entirely your choice of music without someone moaning?!

Rebozo: Rebozo sifting is a really gentle way to move muscles and joints, bringing relief from any pain stored up in them. It’s not a very well known concept in the UK but one that people tend to love if they do use it.

Movement: Keeping mobile helps you move and sway into contractions, relieving your body of tension, stiffness and soreness as you go. Being able to choose which position you get into and move around helps reduce your experience of pain, as well as increasing the self-efficacy you have. Choosing upright positions can help wiggle your baby down into the cervix, helping trigger oxytocin to be released into your body and stimulating effective contractions. Win win!

Acupressure: Certain acupressure points can reduce pain intensity. One of the increasingly common ways of using acupressure is to hold a comb in your hand with the teeth pointing just below where your fingers meet your palm.

Aromatherapy: Olfactory stimulation can result in pain reduction. It can also be used to promote oxytocin and reduce stress. Some essential oils are contraindicated in pregnancy/birth so do check what you’re using with someone qualified.

Personalised oxytocin boosters: We’re all individuals and respond to different things in different ways. Have a think about what makes you feel loved up, joyful, ecstatic and on a natural high as they might be just the thing to help you in labour!

(And to finish off, if you do choose pharmacological pain relief then that’s perfectly ok! You can choose to do your birth any way you want! <3 )

Where Can You Give Birth: Your Birth Place Options

Women and birthing people are supposed to be informed of their choices about where they can give birth and, crucially, are supposed to be supported in their choice. But we know this doesn’t always happen – according to the CQC Maternity Survey Results published in January 2023 a fifth of women said they were not offered any choices about where they can have their baby. Even if they are, the choices are often presented as a list rather than a proper discussion about them. How can you pick something as important as where to birth your baby if you don’t know what each option means?!

Read on for an overview of your choices of where you can give birth.

Home Birth

A home birth is exactly what it says – you give birth at home. Midwives come to you when you’re in labour and stay until you’ve given birth. They examine you post birth, help you with a shower, feeding, and tuck you into bed and go on their merry way. There is NOTHING like getting in to your own bed after giving birth and not sharing a postnatal ward with several other mums, partners and babies.  

You’re supposed to be told that home birth is a good choice for ‘low-risk’ women as there’s a lower intervention rate and the outcomes for mums and babies is no different to in a hospital setting – there’s lots of evidence for this. You’re also supposed to be supported in a home birth if you’re ‘high risk’. You can choose to birth at home whether you’re low or high risk.

To hear more about what I’ve got to say about home birth, click here or here.

Birth Centre / Midwife Led Unit

Midwife Led Units (MLUs) are generally called Birth Centres. They come in two variations:

Alongside Midwifery Unit (AMU) – these are alongside the obstetric unit, ie on the same hospital site. Because they’re on the same site if you need extra support such as certain types of pain relief or necessary interventions, it’s a short trip usually taking a matter of minutes in order to receive it (and doctors do also have legs and can come to you if it’s really necessary!).

Freestanding Midwifery Unit (FMU) – these are on a separate site to the obstetric unit. Because they’re not in the same place it will take more time to receive extra help. If you needed that support you would need to be transferred to the local obstetric unit.

Midwifery Led Units are, as the name suggests, led by midwives rather than care being shared between midwives and doctors. They tend to be a little bit more ‘home from home’ like than labour wards and often have birth pools, twinkly lights and pretty murals on the wall. If it’s a particularly well-equipped one you might even find birth ropes, birth stools and other exciting birth equipment.

You have the right to choose to give birth at a Birth Centre if you wish, however sometimes this may involve a negotiation as your trust literally hold the keys and may encourage you to believe that it’s ‘not allowed’.

Labour Ward / Delivery Suite / Obstetric Unit

On Labour Wards care is shared between doctors and midwives. This is generally where those who are expected to have a complicated birth are recommended to give birth, however sometimes your definition of “expected to” may differ from your caregiver’s definition! It’s also where caesarean births take place.

The environment tends to be more clinical looking and less oxytocin-promoting than at home or in Birth Centres, which is a bit silly because people having complicated births are arguably more in need of oxytocin promotion! There is access to more significant pharmacological pain relief such as opiates and epidurals if you want them. By definition, more interventions happen here – because they can’t take place at home or on the Birth Centre.

You have the right to choose to give birth in a Labour Ward either vaginally or by planned caesarean section if you want to. However, you should be advised that unnecessary intervention is more likely to happen on a Labour Ward than either at home or Birth Centres.

So there’s your whistle stop tour of where you can give birth. Where you choose to give birth to your baby is a really important decision because even planning to give birth in one place but actually giving birth in another can change your birth outcomes. So make sure you really consider it and don’t dismiss any of the places until you’ve thought about them properly. And remember, you can change your mind at any point before your baby arrives!

Positive Birth After Birth Trauma

Here we are, in the middle of birth trauma awareness week 2019 and I realised that as important as the subject is for people to recognise and talk about, it’s also pretty important for people to know that it can get better and it doesn’t have to affect you forever.

Now, I’ll preface all of this with I was a bit of a dick and went for the head in the sand approach to birth trauma management. Personally and professionally I recommend that you go for a slightly more structured approach that has better success rates! Although having written that I guess I need to be as compassionate to myself as I would to someone else telling me this story. I did try and get help after my first was born; I waved bright red flags at the Health Visitors but one ignored my sobbing and left the house, and others didn’t have the depth of understanding of me to know that I wasn’t fine (and I don’t blame them for that, I blame the system which doesn’t have the continuity of health care that means you’re not just a name on a list of visits or appointments that day). I specifically made an appointment to try and get support from a GP before getting pregnant again and was basically laughed at saying I need to get pregnant first and then I can be referred to the mental health midwife. I spoke about this in my birth trauma video at the beginning of the week but that’s not helpful. For some it would be the difference between having more children and not. The ignoring of people when they stick their hand up and say they’re struggling has to stop. During pregnancy number 3 I told my booking in midwife I was experiencing high levels of anxiety and she said “don’t worry, I won’t write it in your notes just in case”. Just in case what? Just in case I get help?!

Anyway, there I was. Other avenues could have been explored but I went full-blown ostrich instead. Got pregnant, tried to block out the fact I needed to actually give birth. In writing this blog post I’ve tried to remember being pregnant and I can’t. I can remember being pregnant with the first, remember the third but there’s not one single memory I have of me actually being pregnant with my middle child. I experienced panic attacks in the hospital during appointments because the NHS still hadn’t caught up to person-centred care, so I decided to have a home birth with a doula in attendance (for which I’ll forever be grateful to the friends who paid for it for me) and during my “if there aren’t enough midwives to come to you” talk I made it clear I flat out refused to go to that hospital if midwives couldn’t come to me or I needed to be transferred. And it was around that point that I’d got it clear in my head that I wouldn’t have to go to the source of my traumatic event no matter what – which I firmly believed, even if the midwifery staff didn’t – that my attitude to my pregnancy began to change. I could relax into it.

All of that is a fairly long contextual prelude to what came next. Knowing I had the safety blanket of someone to step in and advocate for what I wanted I was able to let go for labour. I was at peace that she’d arrive when she was ready to arrive and, although I’d known what I’d wanted and hadn’t wanted out of my birth the first time, I didn’t have an understanding of how I could help myself achieve that. I was told or read what interventions existed but never how to help avoid them, or even how they’d impact on my ability to give birth. I never knew how crucially important being calm was. We’re sold the idea that ‘what will be will be, accept what happens’ in labour and it couldn’t be further from the truth – things might happen that we hadn’t anticipated but arming yourself with the tools to decision-make through the unexpected puts control back into your hands.

And that’s the crux of it, for me. I felt in control this time. My house, my rules. I hadn’t devolved responsibility or authority to anyone else because I wasn’t on their turf. I hadn’t handed over my labour to people wearing an ‘hello my name is’ badge simply because they were the trained professionals. I was responsible for my decisions and my actions, in a way that never felt true for my first birth. I owned the house and they were my visitors and that had to be respected, and I was treated in a much more respectful way from those who attended me, unlike in the hospital where doctors felt that it was appropriate to walk into a labouring woman’s room without knocking, without introducing themselves, while she was trying to use a bedpan kneeling on a bed after taking opiates. Whether this was the beginnings of change away from paternalistic healthcare over the intervening years, striking lucky with who was on duty or a different dynamic from being at home I don’t know, but it definitely helped. I mean, I guess not owning a bedpan also helped!

As well as this shift in the dynamics of who was present, one of the other things that helped me was going in labour knowing I’d considered what would happen in different scenarios, something I’d not done for the first birth. I think this was likely the beginning of my birth flow chart theory! Instead of a black and white view of what I didn’t want with, crucially, no real understanding of what my alternatives were or how to find out, I knew what alternatives were available for different things that might crop up and I was reassured that I, my husband, and my doula were able to get that information if we got into a situation that needed it. Knowing that there were people positively primed to be the labour breakwater and stop a situation escalating was priceless.

Home birth isn’t for everyone, but for me staying at home and the extra support coming to me instead of me going to it meant that I didn’t have the huge break in oxytocin during the travel time which is where the fear was really allowed to set in during my first birth experience. It almost goes without saying that a calmer, less fearful labour is going to help not replicate the events of the first time round.

After a 7 hour labour during which I was described as “zen”, my daughter was calmly and quietly born in the water in a darkened room arriving en caul. A far cry from the screaming purple baby born under the strip lights of a huge labour ward suite observed by dozens. I immediately described her birth as healing. I still do. It made me realise that birth really is magical, that our bodies do know what to do and that we really, really need to listen to women. My emotional scars took 3 years to heal, but they healed the moment she came into this world (2nd degree tear and all!). So much so I opted to do it again 4 years later and, although this time it wasn’t a healing experience, it was even more beautiful and joyous than I’d experienced before.

Image adapted by Natalie Dean