How to Give Birth Naturally

A Birth Doula's Top 5 Tips for Having an Unmedicated Birth

Key Points:

• What is natural childbirth?

• how to prepare mentally and physically for childbirth

• comfort techniques and labor positions

• working with your support person

What is Natural Childbirth?

Natural childbirth, or unmedicated birth, is giving birth vaginally without pain medication.

As a birth doula, I offer many tools to help my clients get in touch with their own strength and feel empowered in their own birth experiences. If giving birth without pain medication is something that you want for yourself, this post will support you in doing so.

How to Give Birth Naturally

1. Journaling and affirmations

Birth is just as much in the mind as it is in the body.

We all carry our own beliefs and fears about giving birth and becoming a parent. This is normal. But it is important to make space for and identify what our beliefs and fears are as they can subconsciously paint our reality.

Negative beliefs and fears can signal to your body that you are unsafe and cause it to respond to those signals. This can cause labor to progress more slowly and even feel more painful. By addressing any negative beliefs or fears before being in labor, you are exercising your mind to work with you rather than against you in labor.

Consider journaling the answers to these questions: What are your beliefs about birth? Do you see it as a natural, physiological process or a medical event? Do you believe in your body's ability to give birth? If you were to draw or describe what birth looks like in your mind, does it look like the birth you want? Or might there be some conflicting beliefs within you?

Taking some time to write down the answers to the questions above can help you recognize any beliefs that are not aligned with the birth you want. You can also take some time to write down the beliefs that you want to carry into your birth - beliefs that do support the birth you want - so you can nurture a mindset that will be supportive of your own goals.

It can be scary, but it is also important to consider what fears you carry about birth or becoming a parent. By paying attention to your fears before birthing your baby, you allow yourself the opportunity to release some of your fears and learn to cope with the fears that you are unable to release.

The thing about fear is that it can make us feel powerless. But what if you practiced challenging your fears? Consider journaling about how likely your fears are to actually happen, what you can do to actively lower the chances of them happening, and if they were to happen, what you could do to take back control. This can help you feel less powerless against your fears.

Write out some positive affirmations that support the birth you want and help you manage your fears. Share them with the people you want to support you in labor so they can speak them to you.

Write down some things that help you ground yourself when you are feeling afraid or out of control of your thoughts. Share them with the people you want supporting you in labor so they can encourage you to use those tools if you need them to ground yourself in labor.

2. Prenatal yoga and exercise

The obvious benefit of prenatal yoga and exercise is that it tones your body so you can be more comfortable in supporting the weight of your pregnancy and prepares you for the physical strains of childbirth.

But, some of the less talked about benefits are that it allows you to explore your body's range of motion in pregnancy and it can align yours and your baby's bodies in a way that supports the natural birth process. This makes childbirth easier.

You will find yourself feeling more confident in your pregnant body and this can help you navigate how to move your body more effectively during labor.

If you want to take a prenatal yoga class, I personally know and love Bec Conant at Om Births. She offers in-person and virtual classes.

For some great prenatal exercises, check out FIT4MOM. They offer great fitness classes that you can start in pregnancy and continue throughout motherhood. If you are not local to any of their east coast locations, check out their virtual options.

I also suggest exploring the Spinning Babies website to learn more stretches and exercises that you can do in pregnancy to support physiological birth.

3. Practicing labor positions in pregnancy

Labor positions include:

• Hands and knees positions with your legs wide. You can rest in this position by leaning over a stack of pillows or a birth ball.

• Side lying positions are also great for resting. By putting a peanut ball or a stack of pillows between your legs, or even laying your top leg over a stack of pillows can bring comfort and help open your pelvis.

• Sitting on a birth ball and doing figure 8s, circles, or rocking your pelvis back and forth. Just make sure the ball is inflated enough that your hips are higher than your knees.

• Different variations of lunges. Here are a couple silly pics of me trying to hide my awkwardness around cameras while doing different lunge options:

Here, I am doing very shallow lunges, one in a kneeling position and one in a standing position. I recommend exploring movement in these lunges and in all the suggested positions above. See how they feel on your body throughout pregnancy.

All of these positions can help to open the pelvis, offer comfort in labor, and offer distraction in labor so you're able to focus on your movements rather than on the labor sensations.

Similarly to prenatal yoga and exercise, practicing labor positions in pregnancy can help you explore what feels good in your body and build confidence in using the different labor positions when the time comes.

Lunges, kneeling, and even side-lying positions are generally positions that our bodies would naturally go into if we were left alone to labor however we wished. Our instincts would guide us into them because they support natural birth, and your body knows how to birth!

And that is why practicing these positions is so helpful. You are reminding yourself of your body's instincts. You are reinforcing your body's natural birthing knowledge. And when labor begins, you are more likely to naturally find yourself going into these positions and finding the ones that feel right for you in the moment.

And like I said above, explore in these positions! Don't just go into them and do them "right," but listen to your body. Because listening to your body is part of how you support natural labor.

4. Practicing labor comfort techniques in pregnancy

Comfort techniques are non-medical methods of coping with pain in childbirth. Just as the body is meant to give birth, it also has its own natural pain management hormone called endorphins which comfort techniques help the body to release.

According to Evidence Based Birth, there are two main types of non-medical pain management: gate control methods and central nervous system methods.

Gate control methods are essentially strategies to overwhelm the nervous system with other sensations. Because only so many signals can be sent to the brain at once, overwhelming amounts of sensations block the pain signals from getting to your brain.

Gate control methods are things like squeezing a comb in your hand, massage or counter pressure, being in water like a shower or a bath, using hot or cold packs, even eating ice chips.

The central nervous system method is where you control where your mind is focusing. Rather than focusing on the pain, you can do things like controlled breathing, visualizations, or listening to music or relaxation scripts. You are essentially not allowing your brain to perceive your pain, at least not as strongly as you may feel it if you were to focus on it.

By practicing these techniques during pregnancy, you can actually improve the effectiveness of them. The idea is that you practice these techniques in a calm, comforting environment when you are not in pain. This creates positive associations with these techniques and can bring your mind back to a time where using these techniques were nothing but pleasant.

5. Having a strong support team

Even with all this preparation in pregnancy, childbirth can still be so overwhelming and challenging. To try to take everything you've been working on--the positive mindset shifts around childbirth, the body preparations you did, and practicing laboring positions and comfort techniques--you may still find yourself going back to an old mindset or forgetting about what you prepared for.

Having someone there who can reinforce all that you've been working on can ensure that all your hard work makes it into the birth space in an effective way. You may even want to recreate the situations in which you practiced your comfort techniques by having someone who you practiced them with supporting you in labor.

This is where doula support is often helpful. Your doula can work with you and your partner during pregnancy to prepare you in all the ways listed above and offer guidance to you and your partner during labor.

Conclusion

Preparing for an unmedicated, natural birth is all about the preparation you do in pregnancy. You are unlearning centuries of over-medicalization and fear in childbirth. You are reminding yourself that your body is capable of birth and capable of managing the powerful sensations of birth.

Work through the mental blocks you hold in your mind and body about birth. Explore and strengthen your body through yoga and exercise. Practice positions and comfort techniques to bring your body back to its roots and promote your body's release of natural pain relieving endorphins. And find support that will guide you in using all the powerful tools you learned and worked on in pregnancy.

References:

Adams, Kathleen and Ross Deborah, "Your Brain on Ink: A Workbook on Neuroplasticity and the Journal Ladder," 2016

Anyang, Mark, "The Power of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Journaling: A Pair for Mental Wellbeing," Umbrella Journal, https://umbrellajournal.ca/about/science

Daltrey, Debbie, What are neural pathways," Great Minds Clinic Blog, https://www.greatmindsclinic.co.uk/blog/what-are-neural-pathways/

Dekker, Rebecca PhD, "Pain Management during Labor," 24 January, 2018, https://evidencebasedbirth.com/overview-pain-management-during-labor-birth/

Feldman, David B., PhD, "The Power of Journaling," Psychology Today, 20 September, 2020, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/supersurvivors/202009/the-power-journaling

Fit4Mom (https://fit4mom.com/workout-classes)

Fit4Mom On Demand (https://ondemand.fit4mom.com)

Lythgoe, Andrea D., LCCE, "Peanut Balls for Labor- A Valuable Tool for Promoting Progress?," Lamaze International, 7 April, 2014, https://www.lamaze.org/Connecting-the-Dots/peanut-balls-for-labor-a-valuable-tool-for-promoting-progress

Om Births Boston (https://www.ombirthsboston.com)

Spinning Babies (https://www.spinningbabies.com)

Spinning Babies, "What is a Lunge?," https://www.spinningbabies.com/pregnancy-birth/techniques/other-techniques/lunge/#:~:text=Why%20do%20a%20lunge%3F,to%20a%20narrow%20pelvic%20outlet.