Anxiety and Fear About Labor: Your Birth Experience

Anxiety and fear is something that plagues every single pregnant person to some extent. Where does it come from? What are we so afraid of? Well, clearly, we’re afraid of pain. But let’s push that aside for a second and just talk about that general anxiety that comes up around this amazing experience in your life. It’s just human nature. We all feel anxiety and fear when we are embarking on something that we’ve never done before or something we’ve done only once or twice in our life. And something that’s so profoundly important to us. Something like giving birth to a child.

Fear of Birth

We know that we want our birth experiences to be safe (of course!). We want everything to go well. We don’t want to encounter any problems. Because we long for this so profoundly, it’s only natural that that we will have heightened anxiety and fear. Underlying all that anxiety and fear is the unknown. But it’s also what we’re surrounding ourselves with, and who we’re surrounding ourselves with. Fear is instilled by family and friends who only talk about the things that happen in pregnancy and birth as being scary and frightening, as if you’re going to be like a stick of dynamite ready to blow up; that something terrible is bound to happen.

Don’t Listen to Negative Stories

Surround yourself with the people who see your pregnancy and birth as being something totally normal and natural –  a process that your body is capable of going through – that it knows what to do. Physiologically, your body is meant to give birth, but if your friends and family are telling you that you must do things a certain way, that you must submit to your labor being managed and controlled by others if you want to avoid a disaster, your whole mindset and the subsequent experience will be influenced by these cautionary, angst-ridden persuasions. This can easily result from your exposure to this type of thinking, and the barrage of horror stories conveyed on social media as well. If this poison is what you’re absorbing into your brain, in your heart and your soul – you will walk through your pregnancy and birth journey feeling that constant fear. This is what you’ll embody.

Birth is Beautiful and Normal

You can, instead, manifest the feeling that you’re capable of doing this – that birth itself is such an amazingly beautiful and joyous event in your life. You have a choice. You get to choose how you believe, what you believe and how you see things. So choose. Choose to believe what is actually the truth in the vast majority of cases – that birth is normal, and you are going to have an amazing experience, however it unfolds for you.

Our Expert: Gail Janicola is a Certified Childbirth Educator, a Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach, a Pre and Postnatal Corrective Exercise Specialist, in addition to holding the position as instructor for Long Island Doula Association’s doula training program. She has been a “birth-worker” for over 25 years, as the founder of Moms On Top, an education and coaching resource for pregnancy and childbirth.

In addition, Gail is an author of the new book “The Ultimate Birth Experience” – How to take control and proactively choose the birthing options that are best for you and your baby.