(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 bum 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'm Taylor, if you're new here.
If you're not, welcome back. Always happy to have you. Today, we're going to be talking about one of the biggest myths in the unmedicated birth world.
I'm quite frankly, honestly tired of seeing it. It's the idea that pain management and labor is something that happens to you, like something you get from a provider, from a device, from a medication, from a needle, whatever, and that choosing to go unmedicated means you're just choosing to feel everything with absolutely no plan. That's not how this works, okay? We're just going to put that out right up front.
That's not how this works, and if that's the story you've been told, either explicitly or just by the way birth is talked about in our culture, you're not alone. First off, I totally believe the same thing, but today, we are going to be rewriting that story because it's not true, okay? Here's the truth. Preparation is literally your pain management plan.
It is the most effective, most accessible, and most overlooked pain management tool available to any woman planning an unmedicated birth, and by the end of this episode, you're going to understand exactly why and exactly what that preparation looks like. Let's get into it. Before we get into the solution, I want to talk about the problem for a second because I think the way that our world frames pain and labor is doing enormous damage to women before they ever even have a single contraction.
Here's how most women are taught to think about labor pain. It is something that is happening to you. It's unbearable.
It's something to be managed or eliminated, and if you choose not to eliminate it, you're either very brave or very naive. The amount of people that think I'm a raving idiot for going unmedicated, I'll tell you a quick story. When I was having my first baby, I'm not going to name names, but a family member, not on my side of the family, we'll just say that, literally offered to pay for my epidural because they truly thought it was a money issue because there's no other reason why I would not have chosen one.
That was the view. I'm like, why would you choose that? I can't even tell you how many people have said that to me since then, but it's like because first of all, I'm terrified of the epidural. No thank you.
I've read the risks. I don't want anything to do with that. Like truly, I don't have any desire for that, and on no planet was I going to get that thing.
I had already made that up in my mind before I ever walked in there, and I was incredibly undereducated when I had my first baby, but that was one thing that was a non-negotiable for me, and that truly, honestly, is the only reason I walked out of that building without one because that was the roughest day of my entire life. Anyways, that's why we do the prep work, okay? But truly, I don't know if you've watched TV or movies lately. I'm not really a big TV show movie kind of girl, definitely not movies.
I can't sit for that long for a movie, but anyways, I don't know if you've seen that, but it's like literally the second the first contraction hits or the second their water breaks, it's like, oh my gosh, keeling over in pain, call 911. This is the biggest emergency ever. This is the worst experience of their entire life, and it's like, no, that's not how it is, and then it's like then we have the well-meaning relatives and strangers who are like, well, how would you do that to yourself? The messaging is consistent that labor hurts, it's too much to handle, and the epidural exists so you don't have to deal with it, but here's what that messaging does.
Before you are ever even in labor, before you have felt a single contraction, it primes your brain to interpret labor sensations as a threat, as something wrong, something to be afraid of. I'm like, that's doing a lot of damage for your mindset, okay? That fear, we've talked about this in the fear, tension, pain episode. If you haven't listened to that one, please check it out.
It's so important to know that, but fear creates the tension that we feel, and tension creates the pain, and pain creates more fear, and it goes around and around and around until you literally are begging for that epidural that you swore you'd never get, and this is the very messaging designed to prepare you for labor. It's actually amplifying your experience of pain before labor even starts. Isn't that dumb? Like, truly, if you think about that, like, if we were teaching women the opposite of, like, this is something that your body is doing, this is sensations, not pain, it's progress, it's, if we reframed some things, we'd be having an entirely different experience because labor is not pain happening to you.
It's your body working. Like, it's truly, powerfully, purposefully, and intelligently working to bring your baby into this world. The sensations of labor are not a sign that something's wrong.
They're a physical experience of something extraordinary happening exactly as it should, and that reframe is not, like, toxic positivity. I have so many people get mad at me on the internet for that. I'm like, guys, it's not, it's not toxic.
It's literally important to give your brain the actual truth. It's not pretending that labor doesn't hurt. It is understanding that how you interpret a sensation changes how you experience it, and preparation is what gives you the knowledge and the tools to interpret labor accurately, which truly changes everything.
But let me get specific about this because I don't want you to just, like, hear that preparation helps. I want you to understand the mechanisms. I want you to understand why it works.
Preparation removes the unknown, and the unknown is where most of the pain lives, and I know that sounds strange, okay? Stick with me. Pain is pain, right? But research on pain perception consistently shows that context matters enormously. The same physical sensation interpreted as threatening produces significantly more suffering than the same physical sensation interpreted as meaningful or purposeful, and this is why athletes can push through physical pain that would stop a non-athlete cold in their tracks, not because their bodies feel less, but because their brain is interpreting the sensation differently.
The pain means something to them. It has context. It's expected, and it's understood.
When you know what a contraction is doing, and when you understand that the tightening and the pressure, the intensity that you feel is your uterine muscle working to open up your cervix and to move your baby down, to literally bring you closer to holding them, oh my gosh, the best thing ever, right? That sensation doesn't disappear, but your experience of it changes fundamentally, like, truly. It stops being something that's happening to you and starts being something that you are doing. I've had three medicated births and three unmedicated births, and my medicated births were more painful than my unmedicated births.
Preparation builds the skills that physically interrupt the pain response, and what a beautiful thing. What a beautiful opportunity to be able to do this work and literally change the way that you're birthing your baby. What a blessing.
So that's the mindset side of things, but I also want to talk about the practical side of things because that's just as important. Breathing techniques are not just coping strategies. They are neurological interventions.
Slow, controlled breathing activates your parasympathetic nervous system, which directly suppresses the stress hormones that amplify pain. It keeps your adrenaline down, thank you. Oxytocin up, thank you.
It tells your body at a chemical level that you are not in danger, and that changes your physical experience of pain in real, measurable ways, like, truly. Movement, like changing positions, swaying, walking, getting on your hands and knees, these all physically aid your labor by helping your baby rotate and descend. It also releases endorphins.
It's your body's natural pain relief system. Every time I hear the word endorphins, I think about that scene from, what is it called? Legally Blonde. Do you know the one? She's like, exercise gives you endorphins, and endorphins make you happy, and happy people just don't shoot their husbands, and I love it.
But it's true. That movement, your exercise, not that we're going to be full-blown exercising and labor, we're already doing enough work, but a little movement gets the endorphins moving, and endorphins are genuinely powerful. They are not a consolation prize compared to an epidural.
They are a real response that your body produces when you move, when you vocalize, when you stay active and labor. There's also water therapy, laboring in a ... Oh, my dryer's done. Sorry about that.
Back to our regularly scheduled programming. Water therapy, laboring in a tub or a shower, it can be really effective at reducing the sensation of contractions, and it's sometimes called the midwife's epidural. The warm water relaxes your muscles.
It reduces the pressure of gravity, and it creates a sensory environment that calms your nervous system, and it's available to most women in most hospital births if they to ask for it. There's almost always at least a shower available. I know not all of them have tubs.
My hospital didn't have tubs. I was bummed about that. Not with my first.
I didn't even know there was an option with my first. I will say the one caveat about water therapy is that it can slow down your labor a little bit. Not always, but it basically disrupts your body talking to you.
I chose not to have a water birth this last time. With my fourth and fifth babies, I had water births where I actually delivered them in the water. With my fourth baby, I was in the water for quite a while as a pain relief.
With my fifth baby, I didn't need it. I was like, get me in the tub. I'm about to birth this baby, and I didn't put any plastic down on my rug.
That was the vibe. With our sixth, I very intentionally did not ... We didn't even fill the tub. We set it up in case I wanted it for laboring or even just before.
I should have gotten in it before, put it set up like a pool, because that would have been so nice, but whatever. I didn't. I paid for it.
We rented it. It's literally still on my back porch, actually. We need to get it back to the lady.
She hasn't really ... We messaged her about it. Okay, it's not from lack of communication. It's just she hasn't come and gotten it.
My baby's three and a half months old, for some context. Anywho, gosh, where was I? I need to go back to my notes. Water, that's what I was talking about.
Oh, I was just ... Side note of it can disrupt what your body's trying to communicate to you. That's why we chose not to do it with our sixth baby, because we were doing a free birth. Very different than a hospital birth with staff and medical professionals and all the things.
It's like that is totally available to you, and you're going to have the same reasons as I did for choosing not to. But as with everything, please look into the risks and the benefits and weigh those, imply them to your specific situation and your wants and desires for your birth experience, and then make the decision you feel best about. If you're praying girly, pray about it.
The Holy Spirit will lead you. Anyways, back to the pain management options. Counter pressure on your lower back, that can be really helpful.
Hip squeezes, my personal favorites. If you're having back labor, please do not sleep on those. Those are literally the best chef's kiss.
You can use heat or cold. You can ... What's the word I'm looking for? Alternate those. Vocalization.
We talk a lot about how the same hormones that make a baby help you birth a baby, and the same positions that help you make a baby help you birth a baby. Same thing. The same noises that help you make a baby help you birth a baby.
Physical touch, especially from your partner, can be really helpful for oxytocin boost. Each of these is a real evidence-based comfort measure that physically changes how labor feels. But here is the critical part.
None of these work if you learn about them for the first time when you're in active labor. These are skills. They have to be practiced.
Your body has to know how to do them automatically so that when a contraction hits, you're not trying to remember what you read in a blog post. You're reaching for a tool that's already in your bag. Preparation also builds mental stamina, and that's the one that honestly not enough people are talking about.
Labor is long. Even if fast labor is long compared to anything else your body does in a single day. And mental stamina, the ability to stay present, stay focused, stay in your body instead of spinning out of your head, is something you build before your birthday.
I remember I used to have very terrible mental stamina. I used to get so overstimulated, even with my toddlers and stuff in the house. I just used to lose it.
I was like, oh my gosh, turn off the TV, turn off the noise. Everybody stopped talking to me, and I was just so bad at mental stamina. I had very little.
And the more work that I did in preparation for my birth actually translated right into my motherhood experience. It was such a skill that has served me well since then, since learning how to do that. And obviously, I'm not perfect, but it's like I'm way better than I used to be.
I have so much patience. I'm like, you have to with six children. But goodness, I'm so grateful.
And I see, we go to the playground, and we go to even a church and stuff. There are people that just get so broken up about little stuff. I'm like, gosh, I used to be like that.
I'm so grateful for how far I've come. And also, it's a skill. It's available to everybody.
I'm not special. And that's really something I want you guys to think about and say, okay, am I easily irritated? Am I able to be in discomfort and sit in it and be fine? Am I able to keep my nervous system okay in stressful situations? This is a real true skill that will not only serve you on your birthday, because it totally will, but it will serve you every area of your life. This is an exponentially wonderful skill to learn.
Practicing affirmations, making sure your why is so concrete in your soul. Your scriptures, memorize them. Faith is central to your prep.
That is for me. These are not decorative little add-ons to your birth plan. It's not like, oh, this is cute to do.
Or oh, let me screenshot this affirmation. No, these are mental tools. It's the mental infrastructure you draw from when things get hard.
When it's 3 a.m. and you're exhausted and someone is offering you relief and every part of you wants to say yes, that's when these tools matter. So what is in your head in that moment is what you put there in the weeks and months before. Preparation is the only way to put the right things there, truly, from someone who's done it all the ways.
It's the only way to get you there. I want to make a comparison that I think is really useful here. Nobody looks at a marathon runner crossing the finish line and says, wow, she must have really high pain tolerance.
She must have some really high endurance levels. They say, no, she trained for this. She put in the miles.
She prepared her body and her mind for exactly this level of effort. Like, she worked for that. We don't look at athletic achievement and attribute it to pain tolerance.
We attribute it to preparation, to training, to the work that's done before the event occurs. Birth is the most physical thing your body will ever do. And yet we have somehow decided that the outcome is about pain tolerance, some innate quality you either have or you don't, rather than about the preparation.
It's like, oh, if you weren't born as one of God's favorites, birth is just going to suck for you. I believed that for three of my births. I believed that birth was supposed to suck.
And if it didn't, like, that's great and wonderful. And like, you were literally God's favorite and you were born that way. And that wasn't available to many people at all.
And then I realized after my third baby, that actually the woman who were having these beautiful, wonderful, amazing births were just putting in the work and it was available for me too. I'm like, okay, it's not that I never wanted to do the work. I didn't know that it existed.
I didn't know that that experience was available to me after my first baby going in, believing birth was supposed to suck. And it absolutely sucked. It solidified that belief for me that day.
And I was like, oh, birth will always be this way for me. So I walked into my second birth and had the exact same result because that's what I believed. And what you believe about birth can really do a lot in that room.
Um, so let's make sure we're believing the truth about it because it's absolutely available to everybody. I'm not special. I had crappy sucky births, and then I prepared my butt off and then I created a, a totally different result.
And you can do it too. If you go in believing that it's based on pain tolerance, that really truly serves nobody. It lets you off the hook from doing the work.
And it sets you up to feel like a failure if things get hard, because if it is about pain tolerance and you struggle, the conclusion is that you just don't have enough of it, that you're broken, that you weren't one of God's favorites. And that is not what's happening. What's happening in every single case is a preparation gap and preparation gaps can be filled.
And I'll just take a moment to commend you for being here because so many women go in, never having even touched this work and you are here and you are putting in the work. You are literally miles ahead of most women. I'm talking like 90% you're doing something.
Most women never even think to do. Anyways, let's get practical about this preparation because I don't want you guys to hear like, okay, let's prep and think that like the hospital birth prep class is enough because it's not. I want you to know exactly what to do because it's usually framed in such vague terms and that doesn't help anybody.
So here is literally what real birth prep for pain management includes. First and foremost, stage by stage education, knowing what each stage of labor feels like, how long it typically lasts, what your body is doing, knowing that transition is the most intense and the shortest, praise the Lord. Knowing that your urge to push can feel overwhelming and that that's normal.
Removing the unknown removes the fear that amplifies pain. We already talked about that. Like this is important.
Know what's going to happen. Obviously everything's different. Everybody's different.
Every labor is different, blah, blah, blah. And also when we're educated on how it typically goes, we are so much more prepared for what we're going to encounter that day. And again, pain lives in the unknown.
So know as much as you can. I'm not saying go kill yourself to be a birth expert. Like could you? Sure.
Absolutely. But it's not necessary. Just know the basics, understand what you're going to be experiencing that day.
And if you have a jumping off point, you're going to be so much more prepared for that day. And the, what am I trying to say? It's going to be really hard for you to be caught off guard if you know what you're going to be experiencing. I don't know if those weren't the words I was going to use, but whatever.
I'm tired y'all. Next up is breathing practice before labor. Not just reading about it, actually practicing it during your normal day or when you're stressed, when you're uncomfortable, training your nervous system to go there automatically.
It's like when you start to feel that like uncomfort and that stress build up in your body, be like, Oh no, we're going to breathe through this. I tell my children in through your nose, out through your mouth, in through your nose, out through your mouth. And I point and then I do it with them.
Or we do, I hold my fingers up and wiggle them around and say, okay, blow out the candles. Or we do dragon breaths. I don't know.
Find something fun. Make it a fun time. Do it with your kiddos.
Practice it with your husband. I don't know. Do it.
That's all I got to say. Going hand in hand with that is relaxation practice. Again, before labor.
Okay. Body scans can be really helpful. And when like you start to get stressed out or something gets uncomfortable, it's like, okay, just check in with yourself, with your actual physical body and be like, where am I feeling this? For me, a lot of the times my chest gets tight.
Like, especially like when I'm anxious or whatever, I'm like, Oh my gosh, literally feels like my world is going to implode. It's my chest is tight and I just need to chill for a second. I like my shoulder, my shoulders go up to my literal ear lobes.
I'm like, Oh, okay. Taylor, just like relax. My jaw gets real tight.
Like I clench my teeth and stuff like, Nope. Let's, let's not do that. So like, like intentionally relaxing those muscles, like learning to release that tension in your jaw, your shoulders, your hands, your pelvic floor.
Definitely that one on command. It's a skill. Okay.
It takes repetition to build and you're capable of building it. 10 out of 10, highly recommend. Next is knowing your comfort measures.
And this is incredibly important. Honestly, this question is so helpful is what are you going to try first? When you start to get uncomfortable, when you start to feel like it's too much to bear, what are you going to try first? You don't have to have every single tool that's ever existed. You just have to have, I like say like three to five that you have like in like ingrained in you.
What does your partner know how to do? Have you practiced counter pressure, hip squeezes? I definitely recommend having that one. Cause that one truly, honestly, I don't know. That's changed my life.
I can never sing enough praises about the hip squeezes. Have you gotten in the shower or tub during pregnancy so that your body knows how that feels and not to take a shower? Like prayerfully, we're all doing that. But I'm just saying like not in there trying to get your legs shaved and you're running out of breath because shampooing your hair is hard because raising your arms is hard and everything is hard.
But I'm talking about just like being in there and relaxing. Your comfort measure tool kit needs to be stocked and practiced before labor day. Again, you only need about three to five decent tools in there.
You don't need to bring the whole giant 12 drawer toolbox. Okay. We're taking a little tool bag with us.
Our favorite, our favorite tools, the tools we always use, right? The tools we've been practicing, the tools we know the best, those are the ones we're going to take with us into that room. Next and last, but certainly not least is your, no, just kidding. I have another one.
It's not on my list. Okay. But this one is important.
Okay. Next is mindset work. This is your affirmations, your why, your birth vision, your spiritual prep.
So the prayer work that we've done, the scripture memorizing, the speaking life over our birth and our baby and our experience, um, that is just like everything that holds you up when it gets hard. Cause your brain is probably going to be like, we can't do this. And we're like, actually brain we're literally, we're literally doing it.
That's literally what we're doing right now. Um, and I, one of my favorite affirmations, especially like when I finally learned how to do the mindset work, my favorite affirmation that was for my fourth birth, it was, I can do anything for a minute, especially for my baby. Like I could do anything for a minute.
I'm, I'm honestly like I can lift up a car for a minute. No, I'm just kidding. Um, but like, I would probably do it for my baby.
I would try my very best. I'd figure it out. I'd ask for help.
I'd do something that's like, you need to figure it out. And it's like, I can do anything for my baby for one minute. I can absolutely do that.
I don't know if that really helps me. And hopefully it helps you too. Um, and then last one, truly the last one is your birth environment.
What goes in the room with you, what music, what smells, who is there, who isn't, who isn't is just as important. Who is, by the way, um, your environment directly impacts your hormones, which obviously we've talked a lot about. They're so important.
It directly impacts your pain experience. So this is preparation to really just looking into what that is going to look like. I did a whole episode on your birth environment.
What was it called? Home birth vibes in the hospital. I think it's episode nine. I do know that much.
It's episode nine. I just did an Instagram post about it. Um, literally right before I recorded this podcast, I think it's called home birth vibes in your hospital.
Listen to that and I'll link it in the show notes for you. But if you want to look up, if you want to get more about, if you want to, gosh, I can't even talk tonight. If you want to learn more about setting up your birth environment to support the work that your body is doing, listen to that.
All the things that I just mentioned, all the things that we're preparing, the actual physical prep of things, that's all the work that we do inside the birth prep course. We walk through all of it bit by bit. It's all comprehensive.
It's in the right order. It's with the support to actually follow through. I've designed the birth prep course to build upon itself.
So there's three different modules inside the birth prep course. It is the groundwork, the nitty gritty and the big day. And the groundwork is like the foundation.
We learn about what labor actually is. Like we just talked about the stage by stage, like education. And we talk about the different decisions that need to be made and kind of just what birth looks like.
Um, and the cascade of interventions we learn about a little bit about the hospital. It's all like introduction to like learning about what birth actually is and what we want for our birth. And then we get into the nitty gritty and that's where we do the mindset work and we prepare our team and we have conversations with our provider and we take charge of our birth experience.
We become the head girl in charge. And then we get to the big day. And that's the practical stuff like your birth bubble.
What does your birth environment look like? Um, pain management that, um, that lesson is called all aboard the pain train. It's the practical things that you'll need for that big day. So it all builds upon itself and it's literally everything that you need in order to walk in truly prepared.
It's in essence, everything that I wish that I could go back and give to myself as a first time mom, I can't do that. I wish as much as I wish I could. I am truly grateful now for the experiences that I had.
Cause I get to sit here and talk with you guys about this stuff all every day. I get to do this every day. I get to help you do things differently.
And that is such a blessing to me. It's such an honor to be able to do that. Did it suck to go through those experiences? Yeah, absolutely.
Honestly, I was talking to somebody the other day and I was like, gosh, it really was that bad. Cause sometimes I get like so far detached from it. Cause it was years ago, but it's like, it really was that bad.
Like somebody really literally gave me a husband stitch and then told my husband from like over talked over my body and said, Hey buddy, I added an extra stitch for you. Like that's how disgusting it was. That's how gross that I was treated like a literal object on a table.
Anyways, we're not going to go there, but it is truly everything that I wish I could go back and get myself. Um, so if you're serious about going into your birth with a real pain management plan, one that's built on preparation, not hope the birth prep course is where that plan gets built. The link is in the show notes as always, or you can comment prep on any of my Instagram posts and I'll send it right to you.
Um, but to wrap things up for the day, pain management in an unmedicated birth is not the absence of a plan. It is the plan. And it's built on three things, knowledge, understanding what is happening to your body so that fear has nothing to feed on.
And your brain can interpret labor accurately skills, breathing, relaxation, movement, water therapy, all your comfort measures practice before labor. So they're available to you in real time. And then mental strength, the mindset work, the affirmations, the why the spiritual preparation, that is all built before your birthday.
So it is there when you need it most. And none of these are passive. None of them just happen.
They are built intentionally in the weeks and months before your birth by a woman who decided that preparation was her pain management plan. That's you by the way, but no, seriously, that woman can be you. And I'm so here to help you become her.
And I'm glad that you're here literally trying to become her. That's amazing and beautiful and wonderful. And you literally are becoming her.
How awesome is that? I'm proud of you. If you have any questions, please reach out on Instagram. I'm always happy to chat.
Uh, you might get a three minute audio note, but like that's fun, right? A little mini podcast just for you. Yes, please. I will see you in the next episode until then as always happy prepping.
(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
