EMPOWERING THIRD TRIMESTER AFFIRMATIONS

Hello and welcome to my first blog post! I'm Anja, mum to a 3 year old, a pregnancy and hypnobirth coach and passionate about helping pregnant women all over the world to prepare for their babies' births with calm and confidence! In my first post, I am going to share my 5 top tips on how to get over the fear of giving birth! If you are anything like I was when I was pregnant, as your baby bump grows you will most likely be feeling increasingly anxious about what your labour and birth is going to be like! When I hit 6.5 months of pregnancy, the fear and panic really started to set in so I knew that I had to seek support and guidance to overcome my fears before they got the better of me! What I discovered and learned in my third trimester totally transformed the way I looked at childbirth and because of my mindset shift, I went on to have a very peaceful and straightforward home water birth. Now I am going to share my pearls of wisdom in the hope that I can help you! MY TOP TIPS: 1. Trust Your Body Women have, literally, been giving birth for thousands and thousands of years (approximately 200,000 years actually!) and the female body is perfectly designed to give birth! If you observe other female mammals on this planet, they give birth calmly and with no assistance. They go to a dark, quiet and safe place in their habitat, their baby is born and then they go about the rest of their day. I am not saying that you have to be by yourself when you give birth or that you may not need a bit of help. What I am saying is that your body, like other animals' in this world, instinctively knows what to do. So, trust your body’s natural and innate ability to birth your baby! 2.Choose Your Support Team Carefully At your birth, ideally, you should have a birth partner with you. This could be your husband, your intimate partner, your mother, your sister or your best friend. Maybe you fancy having more than one birth partner but make sure that you select people who will have a calming influence on you, who will stand up for you and support all of your decisions. It is no good inviting your mum to your baby's birth if she is going to be a stress head and get into a panic! This will not help you in the slightest! Never feel obliged to invite people to your baby's birth simply because they want to be there. You have to choose wisely and be really mindful about whether the people you are considering are going to provide the emotional, physical and practical support you'll need. Also, during labour, if you don't like a certain midwife or doctor you have the right to ask for someone else to replace them. Get your birth partner to do this for you! There is nothing worse than giving birth with someone there who you don't like! 3. Surround Yourself With Positivity If you are scared of giving birth, I advise that you avoid watching any negative portrayals of childbirth in films or on TV. Don’t listen to people’s negative birth stories! There is always someone lurking about who cannot wait to tell you about their horror story! So, keep all of this horror out of your life starting right now! If someone does start telling you about their traumatic birth experience. you can politely decline by saying “I would love to hear your story, but please could you tell me about it after I have given birth?" Instead, fill your mind with positivity! If you search for positive birth stories on YouTube, you will find loads of amazing vlogs and videos of women sharing their inspiring tales. Also, be sure to write out positive pregnancy and birth affirmations on colourful pieces of paper and display them around your house. Positive language is so powerful and the more you are exposed to positive words related to childbirth, the more you will have faith in your ability to have a positive birth experience yourself! 4. Learn To Relax & Breathe A relaxed mind means a relaxed body. During labour, your mind needs to be relaxed so that your body is free of tension and stress. A tense and stressed body will cause your uterine muscles to tighten and this will lead to pain. When you experience pain, you will become more fearful. You do not want this! Your body needs to be relaxed and tension free so that your baby can smoothly make its way into the world. One of the easiest ways of keeping your labouring body relaxed is to focus on long slow breaths in and out. By focussing on your breathing, you do not focus so much on the sensations of birth. Also, you allow optimal oxygen and blood flow to get around your body and down to your uterus and baby. 5. Educate Yourself To The Max! Educate yourself about everything to do with childbirth. You can attend an antenatal class, read books, blogs, magazines and ask your care team to answer any questions that you have. The best way I found of getting the information that I needed was through attending a hypnobirthing course. By learning about the physiology of birth and how to navigate through each stage of labour with simple but highly effective techniques, I was able to have an amazing intervention-free birth that was so empowering I changed my career completely! The birth of my daughter inspired me so much that I became a qualified hypnobirthing practitioner because I knew that my true calling was to educate and inspire other women so that they could have empowering births too! If you are pregnant, and interested in finding out how I can help you prepare for birth through my amazing online hypnobirthing course, check it out here: