Positive birth affirmations;
What are they and why should I do them?!
Positive birth affirmations - have you heard of them? I’d heard of positive affirmations and I knew that manifesting things was pretty popular before I got pregnant. Never something that I was really into though. On face value it all just sounded a bit like wishful thinking, wishy washy, to me.. but actually there is so much science to back them, its pretty cool to be honest!
So what are positive birth affirmations?!
Positive birth affirmations are sentences or small phrases of positive words and statements to try and help turn around any negative thinking or fears. They try and help to challenge fear and anxiety we may have ingrained in our minds from years of negative information around birth. For example, ‘my body is able to birth my baby safely’, or ‘my body is strong and can birth this baby’.
The idea with positive birth affirmations is that if we continue to repeat them to ourselves and to our brain that this will help to change our pattern of thinking and rewrite our opinion and view. So I guess what I mean is that if we perceive birth to be scary and dangerous because we have seen this dramatised on the television, then using birth affirmations repeatedly helps to rewrite that opinion, making birth feel positive, and hopefully reduce some of the fear that birth is dangerous.
The power of our mind is really quite crazy and it is absolutely possible to rewire our minds on something. I feel like I’m a great example of this. I was terrified of tearing during my labour. This is simply because you only ever hear stories about people that have experienced this and the trauma around it. I won’t get into it now, but the statistics on tearing aren’t even as bad as you would think based on how many horror stories you hear… Anyway! I was so afraid of tearing, but one of the affirmations I used prior to birth was ‘my body has grown my baby to be the perfect size for my body to birth’. Despite feeling like I lost my head a bit when I pushed my son out, I didn’t tear.
What is the science back these positive birth affirmations then?
I’ll try not to use too many fancy and confusing words, but in a nut shell this just comes down to the reticular (I’m not 100% sure how to actually pronounce this one out loud.. haha) activating system. This is just a part of the brain that helps to filter out unnecessary information so not to overload out minds. If you think about it, there is so much going on in the world that if we really took everything in, we would completely overrun with data. So the reticular activating system just lets in the essentials. Let me try and explain this with an example. My boyfriend and I got a white camper van last summer. Prior to that I don’t know that I’d ever really noticed any, but as soon as we got ours, it felt like every other vehicle we passed was a camper van. Not even just that, most of them were white… So much so, that my boyfriend joked it was a glitch in the matrix! Its a bit like pregnancy, you don’t see any pregnant people until you are pregnant, then every other person is pregnant! Unless something is of interest to us, our reticular activating system just filters it out.
Affirmations work using the reticular activating system because we need to actively tell this part of our brain that we want to start noticing positive things about birth. A lot of our views and opinions of birth have been tarnished with negativity over the years from various sources and by actively trying to override these, its helps our brain to build positive associations with birth. This part just has to be done actively, whereas previously its been an unconscious build up of bad things.
Why should we use positive birth affirmations?
Positive birth affirmations start helping us to feel more positive and takes part in changing our mindset when going into labour. Being calm and relaxed is key in labour to having a smoother birthing experience. The full course I run goes through lots of different methods for helping you stay calm and relaxed. For more details click here! By putting the groundwork in prior to labour, it can help the brain have less negative associations with birth and helps to put it in a state of calm when the time comes that labour arrives!
Research has found that it can promote a positive mindset, decrease stress, change unwanted behaviour and give a better resilience in labour and birth!
