Ditch Fear and Build Confidence - Transforming Your Subconscious Mind For Birth
As you go through pregnancy, it’s natural to have a mix of excitement, apprehension, and worries about giving birth. Understanding how your mind works can be powerful in preparing for a positive and empowering birth. Just as we know the importance of nurturing our bodies, nurturing our minds is equally important.
In this blog post, I share an analogy I like to use to explain the different parts of our mind and why they matter, how your subconscious beliefs could limit your birth experience, and how hypnobirthing techniques can help you to re-shape those beliefs, lose the fear, and build a positive, calm mindset for pregnancy and birth.
Understanding Your Mind: Subconscious and Conscious
A hypnobirthing course prepares you for birth by targeting both your conscious and subconscious minds. An analogy I like to use to explain the difference between the two is to think about your mind as a computer.
Your conscious brain is your thinking, planning brain - you can think about it as the keyboard to the computer. With a keyboard, you can write down any of your dreams, thoughts, and plans for the future.
The subconscious part of your brain is like the hard drive. There are specific programmes that have already been downloaded and stored in the hard drive, based on the experiences and stories you’ve heard, and those are like your subconscious beliefs. If you try to use the keyboard in a way that isn’t supported by the programmes downloaded, it just cannot work.
How Negative Subconscious Beliefs Can Affect Your Birth
When preparing for your baby’s birth, you might use your keyboard (your conscious mind) after an antenatal course to ‘type’ the things you’ve learnt and want to put into place, for example:
‘These are the things I plan to use for pain relief’
‘These are the things I’ll rely on my birth partner for support with’
‘I choose to give birth at x because of these reasons’, and
‘I know that my body does x, y and z to make labour and birth easier for me’,
But if the programme you downloaded years ago screams that birth is painful, scary, and even dangerous, the keyboard will not be able to work. The programme (your subconscious belief) doesn’t support it. Your emotions and behaviour will always fall back to match your subconscious beliefs.
We don’t really know what’s been downloaded in our subconscious brains, it’s likely been there for years and formed based on the most emotional and unfortunately, the negative stories and experiences you've had and heard. The reason for this is negativity bias. It’s a survival technique - our brain’s biggest motivation is to keep us safe; it remembers potential threats to alarm us so that we can avoid them and stay safe.
We are said to use the subconscious part of our brains 95% of the day, and even more so when we’re in labour. The engrained beliefs we hold in our subconscious have such an impact on our lives.
How To Re-Programme Your Subconscious Beliefs
So how do we change what’s in our subconscious?
As a child, it’s very easy and even automatic to form ‘programmes’ within our subconscious brain. As an adult, it’s not so easy to change what’s in there or to learn new skills, but here are two things that are really effective:
Repetition - repeating messages over and over is one way. As a Hypnobirthing teacher, I give my clients a number of Hypnobirthing audio’s to relax and listen to, ideally every day. This is one way of continually reinforcing positive messages about birth, alongside the birth education and knowledge from the course itself. Seeking out positive birth stories, affirmations, and visualisations are other things you can repeatedly do to start building that mindset. Over time, your subconscious emotions shift into ones of calm and positivity.
Theta - it’s much easier to change what’s in your subconscious when your brain is in theta state. Theta is a brainwave state we use when we’re deeply relaxed and we’ve switched off our thinking brain, perhaps as we’re drifting off to sleep, or in a deep meditative state. Here, we can more easily absorb messages directly to our subconscious. Many of my clients find it beneficial to listen to their audio’s as they are in bed ready to fall asleep.
The table below briefly explains the four brainwave states we go through each day.
Empowering You For a Calm Birth With Hypnobirthing
Tuning into these subconscious beliefs is what separates a Hypnobirthing course from other antenatal programmes. Not only do you learn valuable information and knowledge about labour and birth, but Hypnobirthing values the role of the subconscious too, and the impact this has on your birth experience.
If you’re feeling worried and unsure about your upcoming birth, you’re not alone. I remember feeling scared too; worried about how I would cope with the pain and would the experience spiral out of my control. Gaining knowledge and building new beliefs completely transformed my mindset and put me in a place of trust, calm and confidence.
Feeling calm throughout your labour has many physical benefits for you and your baby; it lowers your levels of stress hormones, increases your production of oxytocin, allows your muscles to work more efficiently leading to a faster labour, increases the amount of oxygen to both you and your baby, helps you find the sensations less painful, and can lead to a better postpartum recovery.
Not just that, but whether you deem your birth experience to be a positive one is not usually about what actually happened, but rather how you felt during the experience - feeling calm and empowered helps you feel more of a sense of control, heard and listened to, able to be an integral part of the decision-making. These are the types of things that significantly contribute to a positive birth experience.
There are many studies demonstrating the benefits of Hypnobirthing. A systematic review of studies published in the Cochrane Library found that women who used Hypnobirthing reported lower levels of pain and anxiety during labour, with many opting for fewer pain-relief medications and fewer interventions.
If you’re curious about how Hypnobirthing could help you prepare for birth, send me a message at any time. I offer an introductory call free of charge where I can answer any questions, see how I can best support you in your pregnancy, and you can test if I’m a good fit for your growing family.
Megan x
