How can breathing help with birth?

Hi, I’m Sam Meachin, I’m a hypnobirthing teacher and here are a few of my top tips to prepare for birth.

I often get asked can breathing, help you give birth? And if so, how? why?

My answer to this and my top tip is yes, breathing is the best thing that you can possibly practice during your pregnancy. It will set you up for birth and honestly for the rest of your life. It’s incredible.

So the three reasons why breathing is so powerful and really, really helps with labor and birth, is firstly, it increases your oxytocin. So oxytocin is your birth hormone, which is going to keep everything happening, moving, flowing. So oxytocin is key.

The second reason that breathing is so important is because it releases tension for tension is going to mean that your muscles aren’t working as efficiently as they can be. So if you’re going to breathe and that’s going to relax all your muscles, your jaw, your shoulder, your uterus, that tension is going to be gone, and you’re going to be so free and your muscles can move as efficiently and easily as they would like to.

The third reason that breathing is going to be really important for your birth is that increases blood flow to your uterus. And if your uterus has enough fluid, that means your baby’s happy and your uterus can perform to the best of its ability. And make your labor much, much more efficient.

So I’m going to teach you a really, really quick breathing technique. It’s called up breathing. So during the first stage of labor, everything is moving upwards. So this breathing technique ties into that and helps that process happen. So I’m going to show you how to do this really quickly, and then you can practice.

So all you need to do, it’s really simple, breathe in through your nose. And I would suggest in this for the count of four, and then all you need to do is breathe out through your mouth and make sure your mouth is slightly open, but really relaxed.

And you don’t need to count on this out-breath but just make sure that it’s longer than the in breath, because that out-breath is when you’re producing the oxytocin, so it’s going to be key. And practice this breath as much as you possibly can during your pregnancy. And it will really, really help for it to come naturally and flow really easily when you’re in labor.