“The breath is the physical expression of the nervous system.”
These words were echoed by my teacher Barbara Benagh over and over. It is because of this connection that most yoga trainings and practices shy away from in depth teaching of pranayama- breath control in general population classes. You never know when someone is going to overly impact their nervous system, and thus without personalized instruction this side of yoga is often left untouched.
But enter the world of childbirth education and birth preparation and the ability to access the breath becomes critical. Depictions of childbirth have long displayed various breathing patterns designed to help in coping with labor, many of them popularized by childbirth educator Ferdinand Lamaze. Think back to Bill Cosby huffing and puffing in the 80’s of the comically depicted “hee, hee, hee” breathing shown in countless movies and sitcoms. This fast paced breathing, while often see, was in fact meant to be used as a sort of “rescue breathing”; a technique for grabbing an anxious nervous system and creating a sense of control and calm through paced, rhythmic breathing.
This isn’t magical thinking. As I wrote in an earlier blog post about the effect of the nervous system on labor, the Fear-Tension-Pain cycle can have a dramatic impact on how we experience the sensations of labor, and thus on our ability to work with those sensations. Simply put, when we are afraid, our bodies tense, and when we are holding excessive tension in muscles, we feel more discomfort, and an understandable emotional response to feeling increased discomfort and pain would be greater fear, and thus we create a downward spiral.
This is where the breath comes in. Rapid breathing increases the stimulation to our nervous system, while slow, abdominal breathing decreases it. Put more simply, imagine entering a yoga class and seeing someone on a yoga mat, panting and gasping. Our first impression would probably be that this person was experiencing some anxiety and probably needed help. Now contrast that with observing someone breathing slowly and deeply with a sense of focus and purpose. Rather than assuming a panic state, we would probably intuit this person was relaxing or working with something. The same is true for our bodies during labor. If we begin panting and gasping for air, we signal to our nervous system that things are not well, and trigger a sympathetic nervous system reaction (read fight or flight), but if we deliberately breathe fully and deeply, we not only signal to our nervous system that things are manageable, but we begin to create the conditions whereby we can work better with whatever sensations we are having. We down regulate the sympathetic and increase the parasympathetic nervous system (or the relaxation response).
Breathing deeply for labor isn’t just filling the lungs with air. (Breathing solely into the chest actually works against the relaxation response). The breath for during labor is full abdominal breathing which physically moves your belly forward and away from the spine. “Make yourself look 11 months pregnant,” I often tell my prenatal yoga students. The reason for this is twofold. If we breath into the belly, we do so by expanding the diaphragm downward, which creates more space for the lungs to fill-leading to a deeper breath. But the other and equally important part is that moving the abdominal muscles forward- as we do when we expand the belly- literally creates more space for the uterus to contract effectively during labor!
hypnobirthing.com
During labor contractions, the outer fibers of the uterus shorten and literally change the shape of the uterus causing it to press forwards into the abdominal wall. HypnoBirthing refers to this as the uterus surging forward in the body, and the ability of these muscles to work effectively is one of the conditions that allows labor to progress smoothly. If the muscles are moving forward into abdominal muscles which are also tightening (remember fear-tension-pain?), then the body is pushing back against muscles which are trying to work and we get increased sensation and more pain. Breathing that moves the abdominal wall away from the surging uterus literally gets out of the uterine muscle’s way, so they can work more effectively and strongly.
So how do we do this? It might seem as simple as just practicing breathing deeply while expanding the belly, but towards the end of pregnancy this becomes more challenging. There is- after all- a full baby pushing the internal organs up against the abdominal diaphragm by the beginning of the 3rd trimester. As a result I have often heard students say they feel short of breath in later pregnancy, and this in itself can also lead to some anxiety. The solution: first clear whatever leftover air remains in the lungs before trying for a full breath. To do this take a comfortable breath in, and then sigh it out through the mouth. Then at the bottom of the exhale, close the lips and direct the inhale towards the back of the throat allowing the abdomen to expand as you inhale. If the body is well aligned, you will be able to also feel the pelvic floor expand as the organs press down. When it seems the belly is full, allow the expansion of the breath to flow up into the ribcage and eventually under the collar bones, creating a full expansion of the torso from base to top. Once the body is full, slowly exhale feeling the release dropping from the shoulders through the ribs, belly, hips and even down into the legs, as though the whole body was flowing along an internal wave. Once the exhale has reached the bottom, repeat the inhale, beginning at the pelvic base and flowing up to the top.
The impact of slowing both the inhale and exhale is that the body is able to sustain a greater feeing on expansion. During labor, this can mean that instead of focusing on the tightening of the uterine muscles, our attention becomes expanding around them. As one doula client described to me following her labor “It’s the strangest sensation. You’re expanding, and releasing, and you expect that everything will release with you, but there is one muscle which doesn’t follow the pattern. It keeps tightening even after that first exhale. So I breathed in again, and made more space around it, allowing it to just be there while everything else let go. After a few breaths, it let go with me as the contraction ended, and I was able to fully release and relax so I was ready when the next one came.”
Tl:DR
The breath is the physical expression of your nervous system. Fast breathing stimulates the system, slow breathing calms it
Doing deep belly breathing in labor can not only help calm the nervous system, but can get other muscles out of the way of the contraction uterine fibers
To practice: Clear leftover air in the lungs, then take a long slow breath in, filling the body from the base of the pelvis to the top of the collarbones, making the belly as big as possible. Exhale in a similarly slow, smooth wave.
If your contraction isn’t over by the end of the full body breath. Do another one until it finishes.