How every day stress can influence your unborn baby.

We spend every day talking to our practice members about stress. That hasn’t changed since our doors opened seven years ago in 2014. This past year, however, was a whole different animal. Most of this stress has absolutely nothing to do with a virus, but instead, the stress of the environment that has consumed our every day life. Few of us can say we’ve experienced stress anything like what 2020 brought, and unfortunately a lot of it is carrying over into 2021.

When you first find out you are pregnant a whole mix of emotions typically floods in – from joy, elation and excitement, to fear, worry, doubt, and everything in between. It is completely natural to have some anxious feelings, especially if it is your first. This past year, however, has been overwhelmingly filled with one – stress! Sadly, most of it is completely outside of our control, but, just because we can’t control it, doesn’t mean it needs to control us.

At Experience Wellness Chiropractic we are obsessed with helping moms navigate this stress and experience the pregnancy and birth of their dreams. When we first sit knee to knee with a new expecting mom they typically don’t understand just how deeply their own stress levels are impacting their pregnancy and even their unborn baby. Nobody gives you a manual on the in-depth inner workings of your body and the nervous system. Did you know that from the moment a baby is conceived they are sharing a nervous system with their mom? The system that you experience your entire life through is directly linked to your unborn baby. This means that every stress you encounter is imprinted on them as well. It has actually been studied to show that when a woman experiences severe stress during her pregnancy, it puts the fetus a risk for serious problems. (check out this study below)

https://cds.psych.ucla.edu/documents/RamosDunkelSchetterPregnancyAnxietyStress.pdf

Research has shown that babies whose mothers experienced high levels of stress while pregnant are statistically more likely to have respiratory and digestive problems, irritability, or sleep problems in the first three years of life. This is directly linked to the stress response called fight – flight – or freeze, or the sympathetic response. This response is an inborn survival mechanism that gets stuck on when we are under consistent levels of stress leading our bodies to think we are always in danger.

It is easy to see how these past 10 months has lead to increased stress for new parents. The constant fear promoted by every news outlet, isolation, school closures, stay at home orders, skyrocketing unemployment, financial struggles, cancelation of sports, reduced access to healthcare, just to name a few. On top of that, finding out you are pregnant and not knowing if your spouse or partner can even be there with you or what the regulations at the birth place you choose are. So much stress with every situation.

This can all seem rather daunting, but I have some good news for you. Your stress level and in turn the stress on your baby can be measured and you can do something about it! So few people truly understand the power of Chiropractic. Many women already seek chiropractic care for low back pain and sciatica issues to help with pain relief, but we are seeing more and more women seeking us out early in their pregnancy. Why? Many women want to optimize their experience throughout their pregnancy journey and give themselves the best opportunity for the birth that they desire. The technology we have makes it so simple to measure your body’s stress through Heart Rate Variability (HRV), EMG scans (muscle tone) and thermal scans (neurothermal regulation). This simple, painless, and perfectly safe assessment opens the conversation to how you can start truly caring for your unborn baby. Through gentle, specific, chiropractic adjustments we can see the changes not only in how you feel, but how your body adapts to stress – that is true gift of chiropractic during pregnancy.

We can’t wait to continue this conversation with you. If you want to learn more about how stress could be impacting your pregnancy get signed up for our live workshop, The Bump and Beyond! Here we will dive deep into this exact topic and how you can best prepare your body (and baby) for this journey you are on. Stay tuned for our next blog post and the videos we will be posting on our social media as we continue this vital conversation.