Learning to Use Relaxation for Labor
Since relaxation holds the key to managing pain in labor, it is important that you take the necessary time to learn and master techniques to relax your body, and to keep it relaxed during contractions. Relaxing through pain takes practice. Even if you have tried relaxation methods in the past, chances are your first response to pain (headaches, muscle cramps, stubbing your toe) is to tense the offending part of your body.
The information contained in this page is meant to help you learn to relax. Do not rush this process. Try each exercise for a week or more before moving on to the next. Practice in various situations, in different positions. Try it when you have a headache or other pain to see if you are able to concentrate enough to relax through the pain.
Start slow. Active muscular relaxation takes practice. If you are the average American woman, sitting still for five minutes will be a difficult task for you, as we are constantly on the go. Gradually increase the amount of time you spend in relaxation daily until you have the concentration necessary to relax for at least half an hour. During labor, your contractions will be 60 to 90 seconds long at their most intense, but you may desire to continue relaxation between contractions when the labor nears transition.
Learn What Tension Feels Like
Your first job will be to learn to recognize tension in your body. Quite possibly your body is carrying a lot of tension right now, only you are so used to feeling it that you don't even recognize that you are tense! Understanding the difference between a tensed and a relaxed muscle is key to being able to relax on demand.
Begin this exercise by assuming a comfortable position lying on your side, whichever side is most comfortable to you, with the top leg bent forward reaching past the bottom leg. The actual position you choose will be personal to you and your bodies intricacies. For some women, a pillow under the knee of the top leg will improve comfort. For other women, a pillow under the head. Do not be too concerned about the placement of your arms, do what feels comfortable.
This side-lying position will be the basis for most of your relaxation exercises. That is because it is one of only two positions that allow you to relax every muscle in your body as much as possible. You see, every muscle in your body has an opposing muscle so that you can move the parts of your body in many different directions. When one muscle is fully relaxed, its opposing muscle is fully tensed! For that reason, straight legs and arms should be an indication to you that your muscles are not as relaxed as they should be.
Lying on your side will allow you to bend your joints half way, without putting too much pressure on any muscle group. Allowing your muscles to be as relaxed as possible to start helps you achieve the most relaxation possible.
In your comfortable side-lying position, choose a part of your body and tense it as much as possible. For example, if you chose your shoulders, lift them high to your ears really crunching your neck. Feel the discomfort and tightness in these muscles. Recognize how the tightness carries to neighboring muscles.
Then, after holding that tension for about ten seconds, release the muscles, letting the body part go limp or get soft. Remember not to take the muscles into the opposite tensed position yet, we are trying to learn the difference between tensed and relaxed, not between the two possible tensions for each body part. Feel the looseness in the muscle, and the difference in comfort. Repeat the tensing and relaxing a few more times, trying to achieve a deeper relaxation of the muscle each time.
After you have tensed and relaxed that muscle group in one direction a few times, switch to the other direction. For the shoulder example, you will now press your shoulders down toward your waist, as if you were trying to stretch your arms to reach something low without bending over. Feel the tension that is created by the muscle this way, and the difference between the tensed position and the relaxed position.
There may be other directions you can try with certain muscle groups. For example the shoulders can be tensed forward or backward, each time tensing a different set of muscles. Become as familiar as possible with the feeling of tension in your muscles. Once you have explored all possibilities with a muscle group, move on to a different group. Don't forget to do your face and neck, back and buttocks, chest and stomach.
What you will find during the week or two that you practice this exercise is that some muscles will come under your control very easily, and you will be able to relax them without tensing them first. That is good, in fact that is what you ultimately want to achieve. You will also find that there are muscles that seem resistant to your desire to have them relax. That is ok, you need to know what muscles you need help relaxing so your coaches will know where to concentrate efforts.
Many women find that doing these exercises before they go to bed helps them achieve a more restful nights sleep. That should not be surprising to us, as experts have been telling us that stress in our lives affects our sleep for years. Relaxation is a way to alleviate some of the stress your body is feeling. It will not remove the source of your stress, but it can help you manage it more effectively.
Progressive Relaxation
Once you have learned to tell the difference between a tensed muscle and a relaxed muscle, and have gained the ability to relax some muscles at will, you are ready to go onto the next step. Perhaps you have heard of progressive relaxation before and thought it had to do with self-hypnosis or the new age movement. It may be used for those purposes, but there is nothing anti-Christian about the act of relaxing your muscles. The name simply refers to an exercise of working from one end of your body to the other trying to make every part relaxed at one time.
Begin as before in the side-lying position. Choose a part of the body to begin with (many women find it is easier to work from one end of the body to the other rather than try to start in the middle and work towards both ends). Relax the muscle group you choose to start with, if you need to tense and relax it a few times that is ok. Be sure the muscle group is very well relaxed before moving on.
Now, keeping that muscle group as relaxed as possible, relax the muscle group that is next. So, if you are starting with your feet you will move on to your ankles and calves and then to knees and thighs. The key is to relax each part of your body without losing the relaxation in the muscle groups you have already relaxed.
This may take time to learn, but do not get discouraged. If you lose the relaxation in your feet while you try to relax your thighs, continue until your thighs are relaxed then go back and relax your feet again. Then you can either work your way back up your leg or jump to your hips if the leg has remained relaxed.
The idea is to be able to relax your entire body at one time. This may seem an overwhelming task, but it is one that will get easier with practice. You may soon find that you surprise yourself with how well you are able to relax your body. It may become difficult to get up quickly if the phone rings or your toddler wakes from a nap, so be sure that you have set aside time to practice your relaxation when you will not be disturbed.
Abdominal Breathing
This next exercise may seem unusual to you, most people to consider their breathing to be a source of tension in their lives. And yet, there are very few things that have as much effect on your ability to relax as your breathing.
Shallow chest breathing, the breathing style you probably use every day, uses the muscles of the chest and the ribcage to expand and collapse the lung cavity. The change in size changes the air pressure and either forces are in or out of your lungs. But chest breathing uses a lot of muscles to perform this task, wasting your energy and keeping your chest in an almost constant state of tension.
Abdominal breathing uses the diaphragm muscle to change the size of the lung cavity. Not only does this save energy by using only one muscle, but it also provides you with more "air" because the diaphragm is able to enlarge the lung cavity more than the chest muscles. You get more oxygen with less work.
Another advantage is that because abdominal breathing is so much deeper, it is performed slower than chest breathing. This slowness serves to encourage you to relax your mind and body. Fast breathing, on the other hand, can make you feel tense and rushed.
Begin this exercise by sitting in a semi-upright position with your arms and legs propped up with pillows. You should look as if you are sitting in a recliner chair, and if you have one you can use it in place of the pillows. This is the second position in which all your muscles are able to be evenly relaxed (the first was side-lying).
In this recliner-chair position you should be able to let your head drop so you can see your protruding stomach. Relax your abdominal muscles and your back muscles and begin to breathe slowly and deliberately using the diaphragm rather than the chest muscles. You should see your abdomen rise as you inhale and sink as you exhale. You can place your hands on your stomach and feel the abdomen rise and sink as you breathe.
Once you feel comfortable with the breathing, begin to relax your body using the progressive relaxation. Periodically come back to your breathing to ensure that you are still using the diaphragm and not the chest muscles. Do not be surprised if this exercise makes you sleepy!
You should find in a few days that you are beginning to breathe abdominally throughout the day, not just when you practice your relaxation. That is good because you want to breathe abdominally throughout labor, and it can help you relax if you don't have to keep checking to be sure you are breathing correctly. Be sure to demonstrate this breathing to your coach or coaches to that they know what to look for to help you relax in labor.
Mental Relaxation
Now that you have mastered relaxing your body, you will also need to master relaxing your mind. This does not mean that your brain should become useless and mushy, but rather you need to learn to keep your attention on something for more than twenty seconds. In effect, mental relaxation is training your mind to work better.
It is very easy to get distracted while you labor, and being distracted can cause you to loose your physical relaxation. If you loose your physical relaxation you will feel more pain. So to prevent this distraction, you must learn to focus your attention.
It does not matter what you focus your attention on, simply that you are able to focus it. There are various techniques you can try to, some that you can do alone and others that require the help of a coach.
The most common technique that is taught in childbirth classes is visualization. This is when you close your eyes and imagine a scene being played out in your head. The scene may be a vacation you enjoyed, your favorite movie, you holding your baby or even you sitting at the feet of the father basking in His glory. It should be a scene that is relaxing to you, and that you enjoy.
Another technique would be to listen to music or to sing yourself. Some women enjoy having a coach sing or read to them and focus their attention on the voice. Other women enjoy having their coach relate a story about their lives together, or simply tell them how much they are loved. Learn to shut out the other noises in the room as you focus only on the voice of your coach.
Some women find it helpful to make an audio tape of favorite songs or poems and use that to focus their attention on. Other women enjoy watching a favorite movie or television show to hold their attention. Some women find it helpful to focus on a picture. There is no right or wrong way to keep yourself mentally relaxed, but it will take practice.
After going through the steps to achieve physical relaxation, spend five minutes trying to focus your attention on something without allowing the surrounding environment to distract you. Try a few techniques to see what works best for you. You should find that certain songs, stories or visualizations keep your attention better than others.
Don't worry about increasing your ability to focus beyond five minutes. Five minutes should get you through two contractions and the rest between them during the hardest part of labor. You will most likely find that it is easier to focus your attention during contractions if you allow yourself to pay attention to what is going on around your between contractions.
Like the rest of the relaxation, this will be difficult to learn, but is a very useful tool to have while laboring. Hospitals are busy places with lots of smells, sights and sounds that are unusual. Even if you are planning a homebirth, those who are with you will not be able to keep the house silent. Your goal is to be able to ignore what is happening around you while you relax through a contraction.
It is important that you don't wait for labor to start to try to figure out how to focus your attention. It takes time to increase your ability to not be distracted, and you won't have the time you need once labor starts. Begin practicing this now, to allow you the most benefit in labor.
Learning to Use Relaxation In Labor
Having mastered the techniques to relax, you will also need to understand how to use these techniques once labor begins. There are no hard and fast rules that you must learn to apply, because there are no hard and fast rules about how a labor will proceed.
For most women, labor begins with mild to moderate contractions that range from painless to uncomfortable. These contractions will build in frequency and duration as the labor progresses and their intensity will also build. The key to using relaxation is to match the intensity of your relaxation to the intensity of the contractions.
You may find that at the beginning of labor you do not need to relax, the contractions are not intense or painful and do not demand your attention. That is fine, ignore the contractions and continue on about your day. You will know when to start paying attention.
When the contractions begin to get uncomfortable you can begin to relax appropriately. This may mean that you relax only your abdominal muscles during the contractions, or that you relax only during the peak of the contraction. The amount of relaxation will depend upon the intensity of the contractions. You will have to determine the amount of attention the contractions are demanding.
Eventually, you will get to a point that you have to relax through the entire contraction, and you may find it more comfortable to sit or lie down. That is fine, do what is most comfortable for you. Understand that it may be easier to relax during a contraction if you stretch your muscles or change your position a little between contractions. You may also find that it is easier to relax in certain positions rather than others. You may find that towards the end of your labor it is uncomfortable to be disturbed between contractions and so you continue to actively relax even between contractions. Listen to what your body is telling you, where the pain is most felt and how intense the contractions are to guide your relaxation.
To help you prepare for using relaxation in labor, it is important for you to practice your relaxation in various positions and situations. Try to relax through a few "contractions" while standing up to see how it feels to lean against the wall or a counter top. Try to relax while being supported by a coach. Try some relaxation while sitting in various chairs, or kneeling over various chairs. Try to relax in your car or while walking around the block. Try to relax while in the bathroom or in the tub.
You will find that certain positions are more comfortable to you than others. You will also find that certain positions cause you to tense parts of your body to support your weight. This does not mean that you should or should not use these positions during labor, simply that you and your coach will need to be aware of the extra tension in certain muscles and work to keep them as relaxed as possible if you choose that position for labor.
After running through a few "trial labors" you should be prepared to use your relaxation skills when the real labor begins. Having tried out various positions should help you respond quickly and accurately to the cues your body is sending, allowing you to remain as comfortable as possible while your contractions continue.
You May Also Be Interested In:Learn what normal labor is like. Practice your new labor skills with virtual labor. The Natural Childbirth Directory can help you find more information about birth and locate childbirth professionals. The Coach's Notebook helps you learn tools and techniques to manage labor. Do some self exploration to discover how you will act in labor. |
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