Labor Pain Relief: Deep Breathing

Video Transcript

"A pain coping technique that is extremely effective, and that everyone can do, is deep breathing. This is also called abdominal breathing, or yoga breathing, so if you do yoga, you already know what I'm talking about. If you don't do yoga, it's really easy to learn, and everyone can do it. When we breathe, we tend to breathe pretty shallow, and we're breathing with our lungs and our chest. What I want you to do, is to breathe with your abdomen. That's with your diaphragm. I want you to think about filling in, and making your stomach as big as you possibly can. I don't want you to look nine months pregnant. I want you to look twelve months pregnant, so you're going to breathe in, and you're going to make your stomach as big as you can. You're feeling all your air right here. Then you're going to very slowly breathe out, and when you breathe out, you're exhaling that air nice and slow. When you breathe this way, it does a lot of things. It immediately relaxes you. It also slows your heart rate down in a good way, and it also just makes you let go of tension. You might not even realize that you're holding tension in your body, so I want you to practice this for sure with the ice cube. Get your ice cube. Hold it for a minute. Time yourself. Do deep breathing in. Fill that stomach up, and then blow out, and it goes back in. This can be a great exercise all the time. This is not just about giving birth. This is about an everyday life. You can practice this one all throughout the day. If you're driving somewhere, and you're stuck in traffic, and you're feeling stressed, do deep breathing. If you're in the grocery store and somebody cuts you off in line, and you have to wait behind them, and they've got all their coupons, and they're going to write a check, do some deep breathing. No one even has to know you're doing it. Just do deep breathing. The more you do it, the more your body is going to get used to it. Your brain is going to get used to it, and subconsciously, you're going to start doing this. I want you to definitely practice this with the ice cube, and know that this can also be mirrored wonderfully. You could talk to your partner about this. If you're having a rough spot in labor, and you need some extra support, sometimes if you make eye contact with someone, and you breathe together, you can mirror each other, and it gets you in a really nice rhythm, so one excellent pain technique of dealing with pain, is deep breathing, or yoga breathing, or abdominal breathing. So you're going to get your ice cube. Get it in a nice fist, and then you're going to deep breathe, so you're going to breathe in."