(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 bod, 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. I want to chat with you ladies today about one of the most common and most consequential mistakes that women make when planning an unmedicated hospital birth, and that is going to the hospital too early.
And you might be thinking like, how can going to the hospital too early be a problem? Like, isn't that the safest thing to do? Isn't that what everyone kind of tells you to do? Yeah, it is. And also, it's one of the fastest ways to derail an unmedicated birth, and I'm going to tell you exactly why. We're also going to chat about the 5-1-1 rule today.
It's what you typically learn about in your hospital birth class, because if someone has told you to follow the 5-1-1 rule and go to the hospital when your contractions are five minutes apart, one minute long for one hour, I need you to hear this episode before your birthday, because that advice is not built for the unmedicated hospital birth mama. And we're going to chat about that too. So let's get into this.
I actually have a personal story to share with you about that. That might just blow your mind. It blew mine.
So let's talk about what actually happens when you arrive too early, and I'll just paint you a little picture to start. You've been having contractions for a few hours. You've been timing them at home.
It's getting real. They're getting more uncomfortable. You're excited.
You're nervous. Everything in you wants to go to the hospital to just see like, okay, where am I at? Let me get a cervical check, see how many centimeters you are, feel a little safer with the medical team there. That's where the professionals are, right? So you go, okay? You arrive, you get checked in, you get into a gown.
A nurse checks your cervix and tells you, oh, you're three centimeters dilated. And then one of a few things happens. Maybe they send you home, which can feel humiliating and defeating.
And now you're back at home, but you've lost that calm, focused headspace that had before. Or maybe they do admit you and now you're in a hospital room in a gown with monitors strapped to your belly under the fluorescent lights with strangers coming in and out of your room. And you've got potentially hours of active labor still ahead of you in an environment that is working against every single hormone your body actually needs to do this.
And you're on their clock now. So here's the thing. The hospital is not designed for early labor.
It's designed for active labor, delivery, and immediate postpartum care. That's truly what they offer. When you arrive in early labor, you don't just wait comfortably.
You get plugged into a system that has a clock, a timeline, and a set of expectations for how fast your labor should progress. And if your labor doesn't cooperate with their timeline, and early labors often don't, that's when the interventions start. Your labor is slowed down.
Let's talk about the tocin. You've been here for several hours. You're still at a four.
We're a little concerned. We'd like to break your water to get things moving. But babe, none of these conversations would be happening if you were still at your house.
This is not just like a vibe thing. There's a real physiological reason behind why laboring at home in early labor produces better outcomes for unmedicated births. Remember our friend oxytocin from last episode? Yeah, we love her.
That's your primary labor hormone, the one that drives your contractions and keeps your labor progressing. Remember? Oxytocin is produced in an environment of safety, privacy, warmth, calm. It's the love hormone.
It thrives when you feel comfortable, when you feel undisturbed, when you feel supported by familiar people in a familiar space. Are we going to go here? We're going to go here. Just stick with me here for a second.
I'm going to compare your birth experience to a sexual experience with your husband for a second. Okay? Okay. That is a very deeply intimate and personal experience, and so is birth.
It has the exact same hormones involved as birth. Okay? Oxytocin and endorphins. Beautiful.
We love that. Having a great time. Everyone's feeling so loved and safe and connected and all the things.
We feel so cozy and comfy in our space. We love it here. It's amazing.
Wonderful. That's a great way for things to start flowing, for things to start moving in the right direction, right? Okay, but imagine you were going to the hospital for your foreplay experience, and strangers are coming in and out, and there's bright lights, and there's beeping, and there's monitors attached to you, and all the things, and they're like, yeah, go ahead. Get turned on.
Go for it. We're waiting. Hurry up.
You're running out of time. You need to get to it. Okay? Just think about that for a second.
No thank you. Obviously, we're not doing that, but it's the same experience for birth. It's like when you're going in that early labor experience, and things really aren't there yet, and you went at the 5-1-1 rule, you could still very much be in your early labor.
Yeah, things are starting to get there. Stuff's been initiated, and that's fantastic, but we still have quite a ways to go before we get to the finish line, if you will. Let's think about a different scenario.
Things are pretty hot and heavy now. We've passed the foreplay. We're into the main event.
We're all excited for the finish line. Everything's great. We're in it, right? No turning back.
This is a great time, and oh, an interruption comes. Probably a kid knocking at your door if you have 1,200 kids like me, and you're like, oh, okay. Well, we got to pause for a second.
It's a lot easier to pick up where you started versus if you weren't really there yet. It's a lot easier to pick things up where you left off when you are deeper into the experience, and that's the same thing with your birth experience. Once you are in that flow of things and things are really getting close to the end, it's a lot easier to get back into that flow state when there's an interruption, aka going to the hospital.
Just thinking about that, and then you're less concerned about when you're deep into it, you're less concerned about the random noises going on, the yard people working outside, or the TV that's on in the other room. That stuff kind of drowns out. So the deeper you are into your labor experience, the easier it is to stay there just based off your body's physiology.
That might have been a very weird parallel to share with you today, but I think it's a very important one, and I think it's one we can all truly understand. It's, again, the same hormonal processes that are happening in our body. The more love we feel, the more pleasure we feel, the more connected and safe and seen and all the things, all of that is going to make the experience better and better and better.
Once those things are already flowing because you've cultivated an environment for that in your home with your partner, doing the things that you normally love to do. When I just had my last baby, the entire day that I was laboring, which I just kind of ignore it until I can't ignore it anymore. I ignored it until four o'clock in the morning, and then my baby was in my arms shortly, I don't know, an hour later.
But all day I ignored it, but it was happening. My body was having those sensations, and I just continued my life as normal. I played Play-Doh with my kids.
We watched number blocks. I was quizzed on 473 different multiplication questions. My four-year-old just really loves his times tables right now, and he's obsessed.
So we were building our little number block characters out of Play-Doh. We were having a great time. I think we even played Lego.
It was a good time. I just continued having my happy little life and just going about my day. And the more and more I did that, the more and more my labor progressed, just enjoying the environment that I was in, just relaxing, just really just ignoring that labor was even happening and just trying to be present and not stress out, not be fearful, not be like, oh my gosh, we got to do this, this, and this.
It's just like, nope, we're just doing what we're here to do, just existing, letting the process unfold the way it was designed to do. And if I were going to the hospital, that was not my plan, but if I were going to the hospital, when I woke up at four o'clock in the morning, and I couldn't ignore it another second, and it was getting really, really rough, that is when I would have headed to the hospital. And I probably would have gotten there right in time to start the pushing, to be really honest with you.
The car ride probably would have interrupted it a little bit. It probably would have been longer than it was at home. Probably would have been maybe two hours total by the time you get to the hospital, you get checked in, all the things, and then into a room, and then your labor can continue how it's going.
Obviously, it's continuing the whole time. It's not just going to pause for you. My labor has paused for me when I needed to rest or whatever.
But that is not guaranteed, obviously. But that is when I would have gone to the hospital. And it's hard to know if you don't know.
We're going to talk about that. Don't worry. But when you enter that hospital environment, and there are all of those things that are kind of working against your body, that can activate your stress hormone or your stress response, and that's when adrenaline enters the chat.
And that starts going up, so your oxytocin goes down. That naturally suppresses oxytocin. That's its job.
And your labor, which was progressing, it's not its job. It's a consequence of it. It's a side effect, I guess.
Your labor that was progressing beautifully at home, it slows down. This is so well documented that there's actually a name for it in the birth world. It's sometimes called the hospital effect.
Women arrive at the hospital contracting literally regularly and in such a pattern and all the things. And they had been on that same pattern for quite a while. And then they get there, and it slows down.
Or it even stops altogether, like within an hour of arrival. And then they get told their labor isn't progressing, and they're offered interventions. The intervention wasn't needed.
What was needed was more time at home. Your home is your birth sanctuary in early labor. And even, I would say, into active labor a little bit.
It's where your body knows how to do this. And leaving it too early is one of the most common reasons that unmedicated births get off track. Because once you're off that track so quickly, it's so hard to get back on track.
Can you? Absolutely sure. And also, it can be so difficult, especially being in a system that pushes interventions and pushes timelines and all the things. It's like, if you get there, your water had broken.
And it's like, oh, immediately run to the hospital. And you haven't had a single contraction yet? Girl, you should have stayed at home for at least 10 hours and waited for some contractions. No, I'm not saying.
That's not advice. That's just theoretical. But anyhow, that is why this stuff is so important, because it's so hard to get it back on track when it's derailed that bad.
But I want to talk for a second about the 5-1-1 rule, because the 5-1-1 rule says to go to the hospital when your contractions are five minutes apart, one minute long for one hour. And this rule is not exactly wrong. It's just not built for you.
The 5-1-1 rule was designed as a general guideline, primarily for first-time moms who have, speaking of the yard men, hello, yard men. It's Tuesday. You're not supposed to be here until Thursday.
Whatever. The 5-1-1 rule was designed as a general guideline. It's primarily for first-time moms who have no idea what active labor feels like, and they need some kind of framework, right? It's a starting point.
It's a floor, not a ceiling. It is something that they can just share with everyone and be like, this is probably when it's going to be time. And this is probably when you should at least give us a call and be like, hey, this is what I'm experiencing.
But here's the problem. For a woman planning an unmedicated hospital birth, especially a first-time mama, 5-1-1 often means arriving at the hospital in early active labor, which sounds fine until you realize that early active labor can last quite a bit longer than just a few hours. You've just traded your comfortable oxytocin-friendly home environment for a hospital room when you could have literal hours left.
Now you've got a monitor and a gown and a nurse asking you every 20 minutes if you've reconsidered that epidural. And for a woman who has had babies before, 5-1-1 really isn't your rule. It's not something you can really go off of.
It's like second and third-time laborers typically often move faster, statistically move faster. I'm not saying that it's guaranteed, but sometimes it's significantly faster. If you wait for 5-1-1 with your second baby, you might be fine.
You might very also well deliver your baby in the car. So you've got to know your history. You've got to know your body.
5-1-1 rule is not just this one-size-fits-all instruction. Here's the deeper issue with following that rule at all, or a rule at all. It's rules keep your brain in your head.
They keep you focused on the clock. They keep you counting the minutes. They keep you timing the contractions.
They keep you checking the boxes instead of tuning into your body and actually feeling where you are. And if there's any overachieving honor roll girlies in the chat, like myself, we love this kind of stuff. We love to have a rule.
We love to know what to aim for. We love to know what we're working towards. We love to know once we've gotten there.
We love that. But the numbers really, truly don't matter. And I'll tell you a quick story.
With my fifth baby, I was 37 weeks in some change and started having contractions. And I labored literally all day. And I was in touch with my midwife.
And I was in touch with my mom in case she needed to come get the kids like the plan was. And I was cleaning the house like it was probably possibly labor because it was feeling like labor. And I reached that 5-1-1 rule.
And I just something in me was like, this isn't it. This is not it. This doesn't feel like it.
Even though on paper, I was already there. I was at the 5-1-1 rule with my fifth baby. And if I had followed the advice and the rules that I had always been given and told to do, I would have thought I wasn't, I was planning a home birth.
So I would not have gone to the hospital. And also if it was my first baby and that was happening for me, I absolutely would have gone to the hospital. Are you kidding me? It was my second or third baby.
I would have gone to the hospital. 5-1-1. I reached the rule.
I got to go in. And I was at the 5-1-1 for a couple hours. I was having consistent labor contractions.
Five minutes long, not five minutes long. Holy, could you imagine? Five minutes apart, one minute long. For a couple hours, that's what I was experiencing.
Real labor contractions. 37 weeks and some change. They stopped later that night.
I went to bed. I was like, oh, okay, that's weird. But okay, no problem.
It's just my body preparing. And I went to sleep and kept on going. I went until 41 weeks and three days pregnant with her.
My waters broke at 11 o'clock that day. I didn't really have any contractions that day. Honestly, probably because my body did all the work a month ago.
But could you have imagined if I went to the hospital at the 5-1-1 rule and went to have my baby? And they're like, oh, yep, you're X centimeters dilated, which I probably was multiple centimeters dilated. I was showing all the signs of active labor. And if they had admitted me, it would have been intervention after intervention after intervention.
And my baby would have been a month earlier than she was supposed to be. But I would have never known. And I can't help but think how many times that's happened.
So the 5-1-1 rule is flawed in my opinion and in my experience. And it's really not built for the unmedicated birth experience. It's really, truly not.
And that's OK, which is it's good knowledge to have. But it's like your goal is not to hit a number. The goal is to read your labor accurately and leave at the right time for you.
And that requires a different kind of knowledge than a timer app. OK, but Taylor, how do I know when to leave? That's always the question. I know.
I know you want to know how to actually know when to leave. And here's the framework that I'm going to give you that goes way deeper than contraction timing, because contraction timing is literally one data point. It's not the whole picture.
First, I want you to know the difference between early labor and active labor. Early labor is when your contractions are irregular. They're manageable.
You can talk through them. They're uncomfortable, but you can still function. You might be excited.
You might be nervous, but you're largely like, OK, like you could go lay down and take a nap. You would go rest. You could go do the things with your kids like Play-Doh and Legos and all that.
You can walk around. You could be eating something. You can do all the things, taking a bath, a shower, whatever.
Let your body do its thing in its own environment. Enjoy the experience. Just ignore it, honestly, in my opinion.
Active labor is a little different. The contractions are longer. They're stronger.
They're closer together. They usually demand your full attention. When I get to active labor, I have to stop what I'm doing when a contraction hits.
I'll be walking around. I'll be folding laundry. No problem.
No worries. Then when one of those hits, I start going up the little contraction mountain, if you know. Because it comes to a peak.
That's how I call it a mountain. It starts out slow, and it ramps up, ramps up, ramps up, hits the peak, and then it starts climbing down the mountain. It gets easier, easier, easier until it plateaus and goes off into your resting point.
The contraction kind of demands you to stop, breathe through it, pay attention to me. Hey, this isn't fake. This is real.
This is happening. Active labor is that. You usually can't talk through them.
You have to stop, breathe, focus. The intensity has shifted in a way that's kind of unmistakable. That is when you start seriously thinking about leaving.
It's not that you have to leave yet. It's that given your situation, maybe you're two hours away from the hospital. Maybe consider it's time to go.
If you're 10 minutes away from the hospital and you're really intent on doing a lot of your early active labor at home, you stick around for a little bit. If it starts to really get close together, you start thinking like, oh, this might be transition. Things are getting really rough, and they're coming one after another.
It's time to go. Also, always have a plan. What if you have your baby at home? What if? That's always a thing.
Well, what if I have my baby at home? Girl, answer the question. We talked about this last episode. Answer the question.
What if you have your baby at home? What's the plan? Okay. My husband's going to catch it. We do it here.
We do it in the bathroom, so it's easy cleanup. We do it on the bed, blah, blah, blah. We have this for preparation for it.
We're going to call 911 just so they know, and they can be on the phone with us. Someone can chat with us while we're doing this, or this is our plan step-by-step. This is what we can do.
This is how to manage baby. Once baby is here, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Same thing for a car worth, right? What if I have my baby in the car? Okay.
What if you do? Answer the question. Whatever that looks like, right? There's so many different options. There's so many different things.
There's easy, quick plans that you can put together without making yourself crazy about all the little tiny details. It's like you can figure this out. Like, gosh, I'm going to be fine.
People have their babies at home and in the car all the time. I have had several women over the last, what? I don't even know how long I've been doing this, five or six years. So many women message me and be like, oh my gosh, you'd never believe it.
I had my baby in the car. I've had my baby in the truck. I had my baby in the hospital parking lot.
I never even made it. We were in the waiting room. I had my baby at home.
We didn't even know she was coming. It went so fast, so quick. It was so easy, way easier than I thought it was going to be.
I have women say these kinds of things to me all the time. It happens all the time. It's not as scary and life-ending as you think it is.
Sometimes you just got to get a little more information and your brain will stop freaking out about it. But if you need more information on that, just go listen to the last episode. But anyways, you're going to notice when you're in active labor and that's when you can start taking that decision seriously and be like, okay, let's really think about when it's time to go.
And again, listening to your body you know best and praying about it, asking the Holy Spirit, hey, is it time to go? Like, tell me now, is this time or am I waiting? What's the best course of action? Second, I want you to pay attention to your emotional signposts. Let me explain what that means. This is one of the most underused labor assessment tools and it is incredibly reliable.
There's a shift that happens in active labor. It's an emotional signpost where the energy changes. Early labor often has like a kind of excitement, even nervousness.
Active labor has a seriousness to it. It's a focus and inward quality and you stop wanting to talk. You stop really caring about what's on TV.
You go inside yourself. This is like, like I just talked about a little earlier at my, my gosh, what is it? My, whatever you want to call it. Oh my gosh, I can't even think of a word.
My analogy, my comparison. It's like you get to the point where you kind of just drown all that stuff out and kind of in the moment you're just like in a, in a different state of mind. And that is like a really important shift to notice.
When labor stops being something happening to you and starts being something that you have to be fully present for, that's a very strong signal that things are moving closer to the finish line. And then third, I want you to know your personal factors. Like how fast did your last labor go? How far is the hospital? What does your gut say? These are really very helpful variables that belong in your decision.
And a mama who lives 45 minutes away from the hospital with a history of fast labor seems a different plan than a first time mama who lives 10 minutes away. Okay. So you can always talk to your provider about this.
Talk to your doula if you have one. Make a plan that accounts for your situation, not just a generic rule. Like have a game plan, think about what it looks like, what, what you might want to see before you make that decision, et cetera.
This is something that I truly think you should think about and plan for before it gets there, instead of like making these decisions in the moment. We don't like to make decisions in heightened emotional states, okay? And it can be hard and you can very easily make a fear-based decision in moments, and we don't want to do that. Okay.
And a little bonus one. I think this is the fourth one. I don't know.
I wasn't really counting, but this sounds super simple and it's one of the hardest things to actually do, but it's to trust yourself. You know your body, you know when something has shifted, you know the difference between I'm uncomfortable and scared and wow, this has changed and it's time. The more you educate yourself on what actually is supposed to be felt during your labor experience and what that looks like at each and every stage, the more you'll be able to trust your own read of the situation.
Which brings me to my last point, is why preparation is the whole answer. Everything I just told you, reading early versus active labor, knowing your emotional side posts, trusting your body's signals, none of it is accessible to you if you haven't done the work to understand it first. This is exactly why birth education is not optional for the unmedicated hospital birth mama.
The 5-1-1 rule exists because most women don't have enough education to make a more nuanced decision. It gives them something to hold on to when they don't have real knowledge to draw from. But you, you don't have to be that woman.
You can actually understand your labor. You can actually know the stages. You can actually read your own body and make a confident informed decision about when to leave.
One that protects your oxytocin, protects your progress, and sets you up for the birth that you've been preparing for. I had a mama reach out to me literally this week and shared her whole birth story with me. I loved it.
It was amazing. But she literally got to the hospital at 10 centimeters because she was intent on staying at home for as long as possible and still she couldn't handle it anymore. She got to the hospital, got checked in.
She was 10 centimeters dilated and almost ready to push. She waited for the urge to push. She had a beautiful, natural, unmedicated birth experience in the hospital like she wanted.
She is now recovering postpartum with her sweet little boy and having the best experience she's ever had postpartum because of how uninterrupted and how natural her birth was. Isn't that amazing? I love that. That's available.
You guys can do that same work. She put in the work. She told me all the things that she did that she'd listened to the podcast every time she'd go to work.
She got all the freebies and she filled out every single workbook that she could get her hands on from me and she quite literally prepared her butt off. She did the work. She completely did it and created that result for herself and for her baby and for her family too.
An easier postpartum experience for mama is an easier postpartum experience for your family. I'm not saying you don't deserve to be supported if you can just support yourself. I'm saying it's just better on everybody.
Everyone has a more quality, more beautiful experience with that new little life in your home when you are able to be more present and there's less to physically recover from and all of that. I love when you guys share your stories with me. It makes me so happy.
I'm truly so honored to be a part of your birth preparation journey, even just a small part. It literally brings me so much joy. Thank you, Jesus.
We love it. All that to say, where was I? Where are my notes? Oh, just that that's the whole point of the birth prep course. That's why I made it.
It teaches you all these things. We go deep on the stages of labor, what each one looks like and feels like, what your body's doing, what you should be doing in response. We talk about your birth environment, your hospital timeline, how to navigate the system confidently from the moment you walk in the door, whenever you decide that's going to be because the goal is not just to survive your hospital birth.
Could you imagine if you enjoyed it? The goal is to arrive at the right time in the right headspace with the right tools and walk out of that room saying, oh, I did exactly what I came here to do because you get to do that. If you want to learn more about that, the link is in the show notes. If you're ever over on Instagram, if you call it prep on any of my Instagram posts, I'll send it straight to you, the information and stuff.
I'm always open to a chat with you guys over there too. DM me, even if you just left this episode or whatever. I'd love to hear from you.
I'd love to hear what you're working on. I'd love to hear how far along you are, what you're doing in preparation, how your team is being prepped and all the things. I love hearing from you ladies and cheering you guys on along the way.
It's, again, such an honor to do this work with you. Before we go, I'll give you a quick little recap. Going to the hospital too early in labor is one of the most common reasons unmedicated births get derailed.
It's because your home is an oxytocin friendly environment. It's where you love to be. I'd hope the hospital, even a good one, activates your stress response.
It suppresses oxytocin and it plugs you into a system with a timeline. The 5-1-1 rule is a generic guideline. It's not a personalized plan.
It often sends women to the hospital way too early, especially for first time unmedicated mamas. Here is how to know when to actually leave. Know the difference between early and active labor.
Watch for that emotional signpost, the shift from excited to serious. Know your personal, not that you can't still be excited while you're serious, but there's a definite shift of like, ooh, this is real. Know your personal factors, your history, your distance, your gut, all the things.
Trust yourself. Build the knowledge base that makes that trust earned. If you're a Jesus girlie, I hope you are.
If you're not and you want to chat about it, my DMs are always open for that. Chat with the Lord about it. Ask for discernment.
Ask for the wisdom to know when to go. Ask for a direct like, hey, it's time. I don't know.
Ask and you shall receive. Praise the Lord. Thank you, Jesus.
All of this stuff starts with education though. The more you know, the better you can read your own labor and the better you read your labor, the more confident you are. The more confident you are, the more you protect your oxytocin and the more you protect your oxytocin, the better your birth goes.
It's all connected. That's why we prep. Okay.
Thanks for being here. I'll see you in the next episode. Until then, I hope you do something fun this weekend.
I need to get in some sunshine. That's my plan, but Florida is a little iffy on that, but I hope you guys are doing well. I hope you guys are feeling well and I'm praying for you and I'm so glad that you're here and doing this work.
Until next time, as always, happy prepping.
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