(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
Welcome to the birth prep podcast. I'm Taylor, your birth bestie, who's here to support you as you plan and prepare for the unmedicated birth of your dreams. If you're ready to ditch the fear, conquer the hospital hustle, support that bump and bob, and walk into the delivery room like the HGIC you were born to be, then buckle up, babe, this is where it all goes down.
Hello, hello, and welcome back to the birth prep podcast. Today I wanna share with you something that honestly changed everything for me. This is something that I learned about while I was educating myself for a different experience.
We decided that we were going to have a home birth with our fourth baby. This is after I had my third baby. When I was crowning with her, that was kind of like my wake-up call, and I was like, oh my gosh, like, they are doing what they want.
Like, they don't care what I want. They don't care what I'm asking for. Like, they don't care.
And they hadn't cared the whole time. And it was like kind of like one of those moments in the movies where like you see all the flashbacks and like everything clicks into place. Like, it felt like that moment when I was having my third child.
And then after that moment of like sitting there and swearing like I will never do birth like this again, I didn't know what it was gonna look like, but I just knew that I could never do that again, that I would have to change things if we were to have another child, which we very much planned for and wanted. So that's what happened with my third baby. So between my third and fourth pregnancy, I started educating myself.
And I became pregnant with my fourth child around nine months postpartum. And the plan at that point was to aim for a home birth. So I started seeking out home birth providers.
And this is one of the things that I learned when I was preparing for that birth experience. And honestly, it made so much sense for me. It completely changed the way that I birthed my babies.
And I'm not saying like this is the one thing you need, but like it is such an essential piece to the puzzle. And I'm so pumped to talk about it today, give it its very own episode. I've definitely talked about it before.
You've probably heard me talk about it. It's the fear tension pain cycle or FTP cycle. And we're going to dive into it today.
So you are absolutely equipped to stop it before it starts. And also if it starts, because it might, and very well could, then we need to learn how to stop it once it's started, or at least pump the brakes on it. I want you to understand how it actually works in your body, why it is responsible for so much unnecessary suffering and labor.
And most importantly, how education and preparation, hello, what you're here for, are the most powerful tools you have to stop it before it starts. So let's do it. The fear tension pain cycle is a physiological cycle, meaning it's something that actually happens in your real life body, not just in your head.
It's not made up. It's not this thing that's like, oh, if I just get my mind right. No, it does have to do with that.
And we're going to talk about that in a minute. But it's a physiological cycle that quite literally connects fear and physical tension and the experience of pain in your body. And once you understand the mechanics of it, it's like, oh, that makes so much sense.
Let's do this so we don't have to go through that. So we're going to chat about that too, of what to do. But I want to talk about the actual cycle first so that you understand.
Step one is fear. Here comes fear. It enters the chat.
Labor starts, contraction hits. You arrive at the hospital. It suddenly feels really real.
And that's when your fear kicks in. Fear is a completely normal natural response. It's your brain's job every single day of your life to keep you safe and alive, if you didn't know that.
And your brain is going to offer you thoughts of like, hey, let's not do this. This is too much. This is scary.
And it's going to try to keep you from doing that thing. It doesn't want to put itself at risk. It wants to keep you alive and safe.
So it makes total sense that you're fearful of this experience, right? Because everyone knows there's so many risks that come with birth. Birth is unpredictable. Birth is predictable in a lot of ways.
And also, you never know what's going to happen that day. You can't guarantee a certain outcome or experience. So your brain knows that.
And your brain is going to be scared in some way, shape, or form. And the more information and knowledge you have, the more you are equipped to handle whatever comes that day, the less scared you're going to be. But I'm getting ahead of myself because we're going to talk about that in a little bit.
But what happens is your brain perceives something unfamiliar, something intense, something threatening, whatever the case may be. And it activates your stress response. Or that's when adrenaline starts to enter the hormonal experience, which we are trying to keep pretty clean, just being oxytocin and endorphins.
That's the goal. Oxytocin is what drives your contractions, and endorphins are your natural pain management system in your body. So we want those to keep flowing uninterrupted, and adrenaline interrupts that flow.
And then labor can stall, things get more painful, all kinds of things. We don't want that. So what happens is you basically go into fight or flight mode and that is not a good environment for those hormones that you need for your labor experience to flow freely and the way that they're supposed to.
And that's when interventions start getting recommended and all the things that you don't want for your unredicated hospital birth, your beautiful, amazing, peaceful birth experience, you don't want that stuff. So this is where it gets really important because what happens next is not your imagination. It's not this cute little thing I'm making up to be like, oh, you really need to prepare.
No, this is a real measurable physiological response, and that's tension. When your brain signals fear, your body responds by tensing up. This is automatic.
Think about a time, I don't know, when maybe you don't have a lot of siblings like me, but my little brother, the one right below me, I'm the oldest, he was a little booger and he would scare me all the time. He would go out of his way to scare me, so much so that I probably checked behind the shower curtain every time I walked into the bathroom for a good 10, 20 years. I don't know.
It was a little too long. Maybe I stopped when I lived alone, to be really honest with you. But he would scare me all the time.
I'd go out to the garage for like a water bottle and I'd come back in and he'd be standing in the dark laundry room and scare the absolute socks off me. He was so mean to me. I love him.
And I would get so scared. And what would my body do? It would tense up. I would like, you can like feel it like, ah, like you can think of a time where you were scared and got tense.
It's your body's natural response. So that is what happens when the fear comes. It's automatic.
It's your body's way of preparing to fight or to flee. Tightening muscles, redirecting blood flow, bracing for impact. It's your body's normal function.
And that's great in a lot of experiences. That's wonderful. But for your labor experience, that's not gonna do what we want it to do, okay? The problem is that labor requires the exact opposite of tension.
It requires your body to open and to soften and to relax. Like your uterus is a muscle. Your cervix needs to soften and open.
Your pelvic floor needs to release. Your entire body needs to work with the labor process, which is a process of opening, surrendering, and letting go. Okay? We don't need any tension up in here.
Like I just touched on, when your body goes into that fight or flight mode, it releases adrenaline and even cortisol, which are your stress hormones. And those stress hormones directly suppress oxytocin. Oxytocin's the primary labor hormone.
It drives your contractions. It keeps your labor progressing. It's the reason your body can do this.
So when fear triggers your adrenaline, the adrenaline tanks your oxytocin, your labor slows down, your contractions become less effective, and everything gets harder. Next comes in the pain. Now your muscles are fighting against each other.
Your labor hormones are being suppressed. Your contractions are less efficient, which means your body has to work even harder to achieve the exact same progress. And all of that produces more pain, real physiological, measurable pain.
It's not made up. It's not imagined. It's not exaggerated.
It's not you thinking, oh my gosh, this is crazy. It's not, it's not fake. It's significantly greater than it would have been without the fear and tension driving it.
More pain produces more fear. This is why it's called a cycle, because more fear produces more tension, and more tension produces more pain, and more pain produces more fear, and around and around and around it goes until something breaks it. And this is why two women can go through, objectively, like similar labor experiences and have wildly different experiences of pain.
And it's not about pain tolerance. And I have told you guys this a million times, but I'm gonna tell you again. It's about what's happening in your nervous system.
You're not, like, predestined for easy or difficult labors when you're born. It's not like something that you're born with. It's not like, oh, she's, like, I used to literally think, well, like, the people that were having those beautiful, amazing, peaceful home births, or births in general, and, like, that they were God's favorites, that they were just born that way, that that's how they experienced birth, but that could never be for me because I had had traumatic experiences, and birth always sucked for me, and that's how it was always gonna be, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
That was literally my view of things up until after my third baby, like I talked about earlier, until I started seeing that it was actually a result that people were working for and achieving based off the effort that they put in during their pregnancy and, like, doing the work, and then I was like, oh my gosh, wait a second, because I just didn't know it was possible. It's not that I wasn't willing to do the work. I didn't know there was work to be done.
I thought I was doing all the work. I was doing all the work I was told to do, but this is stuff that they don't tell you. They don't teach you about the fear, tension, pain cycle at the hospital birth class.
Absolutely not, are you kidding me? But why not when it quite literally can change so much for you? So anyways, I'm gonna keep talking about it. You can count on that, that's for sure. But anyways, my point of all that, let me get back on my notes.
I'm not special. If I did it, you can do it too. I've had awful, terrible, traumatic, painful out of this world.
Couldn't even, like, breathe half the time. I was, like, hyperventilating. They were prepping me for surgery.
It was like I was looking through straws. I was in so much pain. I have absolutely wanted to die versus be in that room another second longer.
And I've also had beautiful, amazing, pain-free, like, wonderful experiences that were literally euphoric. And I'm not special. I just did the work, which means you can do it too.
I just, that's the point I wanna drive home right now, even though that's not the point of this episode. But I need you to know that. I need you to, like, write that on your little heart right now.
It's available for you, and I'm proud of you for being here and for wanting to do the work and for doing it, because you can quite literally change your whole experience. Let's talk about how to break this cycle, how to stop it on its little tracks, because no thank you. Fear feeds on the unknown.
The primary source of fear and labor is not actually the pain itself. It's not knowing what is happening. It's not knowing what a contraction is supposed to feel like.
It's not knowing whether or not what you're experiencing is normal. It's not knowing how long this stage lasts or what comes next or whether something is wrong or if that intervention you just agreed to is actually helpful or not, or if your medical team is actually on your side or they're just here for their policy and their paycheck. You have so many things that can pop up, right? I have, this is the biggest thing I see moms ask when they, hi baby, when they come and chat with me and they have questions and all the things, it's like, then they get on their little, like I answer their question and it's like, well, what if this happens? Well, what if I have to have a C-section? Well, what if my provider isn't there? Well, what if I, my baby isn't like ready to come down in my water broker? What if I get to the hospital too early? Or what if, well, literally all the what ifs in the world.
Baby girl, answer that, answer that, answer it. That is the best thing you can do is answer the question. What if you have to have a C-section? What does that look like? What's your plan? Why does that have to be some big scary thing that you refuse to answer? Just answer it and then you can stop being scared of it.
If I have to have a C-section, here is exactly what I'm going to do. This is what it's gonna look like. This is how my recovery is gonna change.
This is what I'm going to need in terms of support. These are the questions I'm gonna ask if that time comes. This is how I'm going to make an informed decision on that if the question arises.
Like, answer the question. It's not that hard, I promise. It's scary and letting your, I, okay, we're gonna do this.
Wow, this episode's getting real long, real quick. When I was a newer mom, when my oldest was like two years old, she was new in her toddler bed and newly in her toddler bed. And it's my first toddler, right? Like, she was, I don't know, she was maybe two, maybe not.
But anyways, we were redoing her room to accommodate her new twin-size bed instead of the crib. So we were shifting things around. I was going through all her clothes and her enormous stuffy collection and all the things.
And her room was just out of sorts. And one night we had put her down in bed and I had gone downstairs. Her brother was sleeping in the next room, tiny little baby.
And I was sitting on the couch downstairs and we had a tiny little townhouse at the time. And so I didn't, you know, I didn't normally bring the monitors down. I just kept the monitors next to our bed so we could hear them while we were sleeping and stuff.
And you can hear them if they were crying even with the TV on. So I was chilling downstairs and out of nowhere here, her start screaming like bloody murder, like screaming at the top of her lungs. I'd never heard her scream like that in my life.
And I booked it up the stairs, all these thoughts flying through my head. Oh my gosh, she's, you know, someone has scaled the side of our house and has broken into her room and is trying to take her and is, or is hurting her or whatever. Like my mind was going to worst case scenario.
She fell off her new bed and broke a bone. She like, right? Like my brain is like going a mile a minute giving me all these worst case scenarios. Well, what if this happened? What if this happened? What if this is what's happening? All the things, right? And so I get to the top of the stairs, I bust open her door, I flick on her light and she's sitting there pointing at this pile of, I don't remember what it was, stuffies, clothes, whatever.
I don't know, it was like eight years ago almost. And she like realizes what she's pointing at. And immediately I watch the fear leave her body, the tension leave her body.
And she realized, oh, that's not whatever she thought it was, right? The monster, scary thing, insert whatever here. And she literally got so relieved. I literally watched it flush over her face, the relief, that it wasn't something scary.
It was just her stuff. And I felt the immediate like relief for me when I saw that she was just scared of something. It was like, oh my gosh, she's fine, she's safe, she's unharmed, there's no one else in the room.
And immediate relief came over my body and that tension left my body. And that's the best example that I can have because I got more information and my brain immediately calmed down. She got more information and her brain immediately calmed down.
The circumstances never changed, but the information we had was the only thing that changed. And that is how powerful information can be. I'm like, I do not mess around with birth education because education is quite literally power in the birthing space.
And that's how much it can do for you. And like, she was thinking worst case scenario, I was thinking worst case scenario. And when your brain has all that running around room, sometimes you just need to reach over and flick on the lights.
And that's what you're gonna do when you're starting your Google searches and looking into different resources and having conversations with your provider and gathering more information and looking into evidence-based care opportunities and options, whatever, you know what I mean. My brain is like mush right now. It's been a long week.
Anyhow, that is going to change so much for you. That's gonna do so much for your fear is just answering those questions that keep coming up, especially the ones that like literally keep you awake at night. You know the ones.
Anyways, back to my notes. Oh my gosh, I need to stay on track. Taylor, come on.
I just love chatting with you guys so much. I get excited, okay? I go off on my little side tangents. But this is why I want you guys to educate yourselves because I know you guys are gonna be like, because when you study the stages of labor, when you understand what transition feels like, what it means, when you know that the urge to push can feel overwhelming and uncontrollable and that this is your body doing exactly what it was literally designed to do, then the unknown disappears.
You really can't be afraid of something you understand. It's like when we're afraid, that's like it's because we don't understand something. And let me bring it to the word real quick because I don't know about you, but I've read my Bible a time or two and there are a lot of things that say, do not be afraid, fear not.
You were not given a spirit of fear, et cetera, et cetera. There's so many, so many areas in the Bible that we are instructed not to fear because fear is not of the Lord. And it is, it's so wild to me that that's how our bodies are designed, but also it's not.
It makes total, complete sense when I bring it to the word of God and when I understand the assignment of the enemy and when I understand how women are transformed during their birth experiences. It makes total and complete sense to me. And it's also wild because God's design is like literally insane.
It's beautiful and it's amazing and it's insane. And I love it. And I love learning more about it.
And I love watching it in real time and experiencing it in such a different way now that I understand it. And there are things that we're not supposed to understand. We're not supposed to know the exact order of those events that day.
And those are the types of things that we can't be fearful of, that we have to surrender to the Lord and trust that we have used the wisdom he's given us and the resources he's given us in order to prepare for whatever that day brings and in order to have the experience that he is planning for us. Because yeah, we can sit here and make a plan for our birth all day long, but whatever the Lord has planned is what is best. And I dealt with this when I was preparing for my sixth baby.
There's a woman that I follow on Instagram and I love her content. And she honestly was one of the reasons why I even started entertaining a free birth. She free births her babies.
And she's not like the reason why, right? I felt very much called to do that from the Lord. And I think that he used her account to help get me there. But anyways, she had had a baby, I think her seventh baby, very shortly before I was due with Hailey.
And she had a birth experience that didn't really go how she thought it was gonna go. But she, and to most people, it would have been, oh, the complications and oh, that could have gone really bad. And there could have been so much said about it, right? And she said something that stuck with me that I had to, well, one, it created fear for me.
Like, I don't think I'm equipped to manage that or handle that. She seems so much more educated than me. And like the imposter stuff came up and it created fear for me.
And I had to bring it to the Lord. And the Lord just kept reminding me exactly of her exact words, because she said about her birth, she said, I had the exact birth that my baby and I needed. And I just loved that.
And she praised the Lord for it. And I just was so encouraging to me. And I loved that she said that.
And also, I still was fearful based on hearing her story and saying, well, what if that happens to me? And the Lord so gently and so beautifully reminded me that I was going to have the exact birth and that me and my baby needed. And he said, I'm teaching you a different lesson. And I loved that confirmation and that reminder from him.
And also it was like, wow, like I really need to stay on this fear because I'm trying to do something I've never done before. I'm trying to do something that like honestly was very scary to me because I did feel ill-equipped. I had a lot of people that didn't believe that I could do it.
Not that they didn't believe that I could do it. They were fearful. They were very fearful for me and were sharing those fears with me as well, fears that I had already worked through.
So it was like, it was a lot to handle and to navigate in real time. And it was also such a gift to be able to work through that. I learned a lot of lessons doing the things that I did in preparation for my sixth birth and experiencing the birth that I had.
And the Lord also reminded me, he said, hey, I made you promises and you can hold on to those. And I didn't have to know how it was gonna go. I didn't have to know all of the events that were gonna unfold.
I didn't have to know every single little thing about birth and how to manage every single little emergency. I didn't have to know all of that. I got to rest in the fact that I had promises made to me and the Lord's promises are yes and amen.
And what he says will come to pass and I believe that wholeheartedly. And I had the promise that I was going to get the exact birth that me and my baby needed, whatever that was. And that could have honestly looked terrible and awful.
And I'm grateful for the experience that I had. And even if it was terrible and awful and it ended in such a tragic experience, whatever that could have looked like, the Lord's still good and he was giving me exactly what I needed, even if it wasn't what I wanted or thought I needed. And I have to believe that, I have to operate out of that.
So again, we're choosing to use wisdom and the resources that he's given us and educate ourselves, but also we're not trying to make the education an idol at the same time. Like I could have gone insane trying to prepare and learn all the things because that was what my fear was calling me to do, was to obsess over all the different emergencies that could happen and what to do in those things and gathering supplies for those situations and making a whole giant emergency plan and for all these different potential outcomes. Like I could have done that and I had the urge to do that.
And that's not how I was going to go about it. That's not how I was called to go about it. So I don't know, that's a whole another side tangent.
Oh my gosh, Taylor, you needed to know it. You needed to hear it. But anyways, my point was that education is the single most effective fear prevention tool that exists for birth.
It's not positive thinking. It's not more affirmations. It's not just trusting your body or just breathing, just hoping for the best, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's not any of those things. It's about knowing what's actually happening in your body at every stage in real and specific detail. That's what removes the fear that starts the cycle.
Education removes the fear before labor, but preparation gives you the tools for when labor is actually happening. Because even the most educated mama can feel fear in the moment. Because labor is intense, things can happen fast.
You might have an experience that you definitely weren't planned for expecting, maybe a nurse that you weren't planning to encounter. And having studied something is different from having practiced what to do when it hits, okay? I compare it to reading a ton of books about swimming versus getting in the pool. It's like, yeah, it's great to have the information.
It's great to have the education. And also, you don't really know how to swim just because you read some books about swimming. But you gotta get in the pool in order to swim.
So that's where, that's why I think preparation is. Because preparation, like your preparation toolkit becomes literally everything. This is like your breathing, your relaxation, your environment, your mindset work, like all the things that we prep, right? Your team, et cetera, et cetera, the whole nine yards.
Like those are the things that are going to actually change the experience when fear enters the room. Because it probably honestly might. Even if it's not a conscious like, oh my gosh, I'm so scared of this.
And it's just your body getting tense because you're in an environment that's working against your hormones. You're in conversations that are working against your hormones, like things like that. It's like you are going to need tools in order to maintain a state of relaxation and opening and releasing and all the things.
So that's what preparation does. The fear, tension, pain cycle is literally not required of you. It's not something you're just gonna have to survive because birth is hard and that's just how it goes.
It's a physiological process that is significantly influenced by your level of preparation. The more that you know, the more that you practice, the more tools that you have in the room that day, the less power that cycle has over your birth experience. And I'm not saying you have to get it perfect.
I'm not saying if you didn't have a pain-free birth, you did it wrong. I'm not saying any of that. I'm saying the more that you do, the less painful your birth experience will be.
If you wanna build all of that, the education, the skills, the mindset work, the environment planning, the provider conversations, the team building, all of that, that's exactly what the birth prep course is designed to do. Inside the course, we go deep on every single piece of what I just talked about today, the stages of labor so that nothing catches you off guard, the breathing and relaxation techniques that interrupt the cycle in real time, the mindset work that keeps fear from getting a foothold in the first place, the comfort measures, how to plan for those, the birth environment, again, the building your team, all of it. It's all organized, it's comprehensive, and it's built specifically for the woman planning an unmedicated hospital birth, aka you.
Because you deserve to walk into your birth with more than just hope and a prayer. You know, you deserve to walk in prepared. You deserve to walk in knowing how your body's going to operate that day and how to best support it.
Like, this is the kind of game-changing information that changes the way women birth. I did it. Again, I'm not special.
You can do it too. I teach you literally all the things that I did and then some. It's like, I believe in this work so much.
It's why I don't shut up about it. But I am trying to land this plane, so if you want more information, there's the link in the show notes for you. You can enroll there as well.
And if you have any questions at all, just shoot me a DM over on Instagram. We'll chat about it. Before I go, let's just do a quick recap, right? That works.
The fear-attention-pain cycle works like this. Fear activates your stress response. Your stress response creates physical tension and floods your body with adrenaline.
Adrenaline suppresses oxytocin, your primary labor hormone. Tension causes your muscles to work against each other, making contractions less efficient and more painful. More pain creates more fear, and the cycle goes around and around and around until, honestly, you don't even know what the heck you're doing, and you're probably screaming for the epidural you swore you'd never get.
The most powerful way to break it before it starts is education, knowing what is happening in your body so that fear has nothing to feed on. The most powerful way to interrupt it once it starts is preparation, having practice skills that calm your nervous system and release the tension before it starts to compound. Both of those things are available to you.
You have time to build them, and I'm here to help you do exactly that. Thanks for listening. I will see you next week, same time, same place.
Until then, you've got this. I'm so proud of you for doing this work. Kick your feet up, girl.
Have a nice, tasty snack, and as always, happy pregnant. βͺ Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey βͺ
(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
