The same study went on: ‘A large body of research has established the efficacy of mindfulness-based interventions in reducing … anxiety, depression, substance abuse, eating disorders and chronic pain, as well as improving wellbeing and quality of life.’
These findings are consistent with what is now a substantial body of scientific research. The message is clear: we have the internal tools to build mental resiliency. Every time we sit to meditate, we can enhance cerebral blood flow and renew cells in specific regions, which may underlie the promotion of positive emotions associated with good moods. Another interesting benefit is the reduction in cravings, and I’m not only talking about those that send expectant mums into the larder at two o’clock in the morning. ‘Craving’ is bound up in feelings of expectation and reward, and there may well be occasions, before and after birth, when you want things to be different (craving your old life/your old body/independence/peace and quiet, etc.). The emerging neuroscience suggests that mindfulness can dampen brain activity in those areas associated with craving, so the more we train the mind to loosen the shackles of want and desire, the more at ease we’re likely to feel.
But it’s not just the brain that responds to meditation, it’s our genes, too. A 2013 genomic study – again, at Harvard – demonstrated how eliciting relaxation with just one session created a ‘rapid change’ in genes linked to inflammation and stress-related pathways and even the maintenance of telomeres – the caps at the end of each strand of DNA. So imagine that your genes are a light switch: when you meditate, genes that protect our DNA are turned ‘on’, and genes that promote inflammation and stress are turned ‘off’. Obviously, the best effects are seen with a consistent regular practice, even if we don’t yet know how long these ‘rapid’ changes last.
While mindfulness can dramatically change the way you feel, its most fascinating impact is that which can’t be seen – the laying down of new neural pathways in the brain and the turning on and off of our genes. Taken together, all these mental and physiological alterations conspire to induce more calm – which brings us to the real heart of the matter …
A CALMING INFLUENCE
Everyone looks forward to that magical moment when mothers and partners get to truly connect with their new son or daughter; able to see and hold the little bundle of joy they have waited so long to meet. Sure, that feeling may not be immediate for all, but when it does happen, the surge of love is quite overwhelming. However, let’s rewind the tape and go back to being pregnant, a time when, for many, a connection with the unborn baby isn’t as strong or isn’t felt at all. Yes, the baby most definitely makes its presence known and triggers different physical sensations, but for many women it’s hard to find ways to relate to their offspring in utero.
That’s where the practice of mindfulness comes in. Our thoughts and the emotional environment we create can actually begin to have a significant influence on our relationship with the baby – even when he or she is still in the womb. In the same way that these tiny beings feed off a mother’s nutrients, they are also impacted by a mother’s state of calm or otherwise. How can they not be? Only skin and a layer of muscle wall separate them from the outside world. They are living human beings tucked away in a cocoon, detecting our every reaction.
Although there is a widely held belief that a child’s learning only truly kicks in once they are born, there’s plenty of science to suggest otherwise. In 2013, a study by researchers from the University of Helsinki asked expectant mothers to place headphones on their bellies and play non-native sounds, interspersed with pieces of classical music or children’s melodies. By the time of childbirth, these recordings had been played thousands of times, and the findings showed ‘enhanced brain activity’ among those babies who responded to the same sounds they had heard in utero. This implies that certain learning and memory capacities do exist in the foetus, the study concluding that ‘prenatal experiences have a remarkable influence on the brain’. This research demonstrates that sound-processing in the brain is certainly active in the third trimester, and that sound carries into the womb. ‘If you put your hand over your mouth and speak,’ said the university’s neuroscientist Eino Partanen, ‘then that’s very similar to the situation the foetus is in.’
When Lucinda was six months pregnant, and I was away with work, she would lie on the sofa, with headphones on her belly, playing Headspace’s Take10 programme – not only was Harley listening to guided meditations before being born, he was growing accustomed to his dad’s voice, too! I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from playing meditation to their ‘bumps’ two or three times a day. Not because I believe the baby is going to sit in an upright position and focus on his/her breaths, but because of the calming, soothing feeling this activity tends to create.
If the mind’s tendency leans towards negative thinking – with thoughts spinning into worry, anxiety or fear – the body will respond, creating the ‘stress hormone’ cortisol. Increased cortisol levels not only lead to impaired cognitive performance, but they amp up the body, creating tension in the muscles, and leaving us in a state of ‘fight or flight’. If a mother is sweating cortisol or tied up in knots on the inside, it’s not as if the baby can take five, leave the room, shut the door and wait for her to calm down.
What happens, as Dr Aguirre explains, is that cortisol is released from the mother’s adrenal glands, sending a signal to the placenta that the external world is all stressed out; this, in turn, triggers a matching response within the embryo which, as an autonomous unit with its own DNA make-up, generates its own stress hormone.
It might be difficult at first for expectant parents to grasp that nervous, anxious or depressed energy can be transferred within the womb. But it is not really such a big leap in imagination. Think back to when you were last in a room with someone who felt really angry – how did that feel? Probably not pleasant – and that’s just with someone external, who is simply in the same room, whereas the baby is part of you. There is enough research out there to suggest that if the mother gets consistently stressed or anxious, the child can then have a hard time regulating its own emotions and anxieties later in life. Everything we experience, they experience – most especially the stress.
Tiffany Field, a leading researcher in this area, published a landmark paper in 2004 which showed that ‘newborns of mothers with depressive symptoms had higher cortisol levels and lower dopamine and serotonin levels, thus mimicking their mothers’ prenatal levels’.
In 2011, Field built on this earlier paper, saying that such levels of cortisol were also associated with a baby’s low birth weight, reduced responsiveness to stimulation, disorganised sleep and temperament difficulties. Dr Amersi concurs, adding that stress also raises blood pressure, heightening the risk of pre-eclampsia, miscarriage and complications during labour.
High-pressured mothers tend to have more active and irritable babies, and stress contributes to that make-up as much as a bad diet and toxins. Unsurprisingly, more than 50 per cent of women experience significant anxiety during pregnancy. If you are one of them, then I appreciate that ‘not worrying’ is a challenge, but this is why you are exploring mindfulness – to find an effective coping mechanism – and this is a unique window of opportunity to positively impact your baby’s developing neural pathways and nervous system.
I can’t think of a better support system than the one you can give yourself. Neither can Dr Amersi: ‘Meditation is the safest and most effective way to non-pharmacologically reduce anxiety and stress, thereby restoring and promoting the immune system of both the mother and her baby,’ she says.
The danger in reading all this is that your mind, perhaps already predisposed to worry, could potentially reach a new level of anxiety, thinking back to every little incident of emotion. Just to be clear, what we’re talking about are tendencies as opposed to one-off events. Of course you will experience a welter of emotions during pregnancy, but the point is that you do not have to be taken hostage, controlled or overwhelmed by th
em. Mindfulness will reduce the stress response in the body, and it will stabilise the heart rate. You will, with practice, learn to step back from it all, and let go. So please be reassured that there is no cause for alarm.
The key message here is that a baby’s behaviour doesn’t begin at birth, but in utero – and that is an important awareness to have. No one can change the biology. No one can prevent the fact that, when our babies are in the womb, they are swimming in a cocktail of hormones that match their mother’s. So the foetus requires reassurance, to know it is safe and protected. This, according to Dr Amersi, is essential ‘because it sets the temperament of calmness versus anxiety traits in the baby’.
With this in mind and, assuming we have the ability to create the most conducive conditions possible for the baby by mixing our own unique cocktail, we might prefer to add less cortisol and adrenaline, and a little more oxytocin instead. Often referred to as the ‘bonding hormone’, oxytocin is capable of stimulating feelings of relaxation and bliss in both body and mind. In creating a state of relaxation, a regular meditation practice leads to the body generating more oxytocin. So as the bonding hormone elevates, the stress hormone decreases. Not only that, meditation also promotes the production of endorphins, the so-called ‘pleasure hormone’, which helps to relieve pain, so why not add some of that into the mix too? These are very real things we can do for our baby before he or she is born.
And hey, if you’re still not convinced by the idea of a mindful pregnancy, here are two other scientific titbits which might just tempt you into giving it a go: firstly, mindfulness heightens levels of melatonin, which improves our quality of sleep and mood, meaning that both mother and foetus feel more calm and rested; and secondly, it actually improves the quality of breast milk, which contains fewer harmful hormones and more of those that are beneficial. The result for your baby? Well, the science suggests higher immunity, better sleep, less colic, higher tolerance for discomfort and better self-soothing. Need I say more?
If we accept that mindfulness is instrumental in buffering us against negatively stressful situations and reactionary behaviour, then it naturally follows that this gift must be afforded the foetus that absorbs our stress in utero. That is surely the highest goal of mindfulness within the context of this book: setting the intention to create the most favourable conditions for the baby’s optimal wellbeing.
Imagine you could design the perfect environment for your baby to grow in. Imagine you knew how to shelter it from stress, provide it with comfort, every single day. Imagine that as parents, you are both on the same page, understanding each other’s wants and needs, supported by a loving relationship. It is hard to imagine any parent in the world who would not want this for themselves and for their child.
Mindfulness offers us the opportunity to live a life we could once only imagine. It offers us the opportunity for a calm mind and a calm baby.
CHAPTER SIX
A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE
Here is a tale about perspective. I’ve changed names to protect people’s identities, but the situation is a true story:
Sally, a young mother, has her hands full, looking after a three-year-old boy and four-month-old girl. This Saturday morning, even before the day has started, Sally is worn out: she’s had a tough night – the toddler was up twice and the baby still needs to be breastfed every two hours. Sleep-deprived, Sally, who feels like her body has been wrecked and her boobs are not her own, is exhausted but, as she told her mother on the phone the previous evening while weeping with frustration, ‘This is what we do. I’ll be fine.’
Sally is a brilliant mother and a trouper, but this is one of those mornings when it feels like she’s trudging through treacle wearing a pair of wellies two sizes too big. As she makes toast for her son, Billy – who repeatedly bangs a toy car on the table and doesn’t listen to requests to stop – Emily, her daughter, starts wriggling and wailing in the baby carrier. Sally’s mind feels and sounds like a warbling radio struggling to find its frequency; she’d do anything for just ten minutes and a cup of coffee, but doesn’t even have time to do that, let alone shower, wash her hair or do her make-up.
Her husband, Oliver, walks in, panting and sweating from the morning run that he just had to do in order to unwind from a hectic, stressful week at the marketing firm he runs. This was how they decided it would be: she’d give up her well-paid job at a PR agency; he’d go to work and bring home the bacon, even though it meant tightening the purse strings. The truth is – even if Oliver won’t express it, because to admit it would mean, in his mind, he’s failing – that he feels like he’s running on a treadmill just trying to keep up with the rising costs that come with parenthood. Sometimes the pressure and chatter in his head feel as noisy as his two children screaming.
Oliver is back for 9am as promised, aware that Sally has her once-a-week coffee meet with two other mothers at 10.3oam. That interlude is, she says, her ‘two hours of sanity in which I start to feel like myself again’. Oliver kisses his wife and kids, grabs a slice of toast and rushes upstairs to change. He spends twenty minutes with a magazine while sitting on the loo, enjoys a ten-minute shower, gets dressed and spends another fifteen minutes reading and sending emails and, Sally suspects, checking Facebook on his mobile phone.
He bounds down the stairs in an upbeat mood – he slept well, the run has done him the world of good and he feels refreshed. He takes Emily in his arms and sits down at the table with Billy, allowing Sally to throw on some clothes and put her hair in a bun. Just as she’s about to head out the door, Oliver shouts after her: ‘Can you be back for noon today?’ Sally pauses, leaves the front door ajar to step back inside the sitting room, looking at her husband in the kitchen.
‘Ollie, really?’ she says, exasperated.
‘What?’ he says, genuinely nonplussed.
‘You know I’m with the girls until twelve-thirty. If I’ve to be back here for noon, it means leaving around twenty to twelve!’
But Ollie has lined up a conference call on an important project; there is nothing he can do and, in the blur of the previous week, he forgot to mention it. Sally has no choice but to accept it, yet his lack of consideration is all she can think about in the car. Her mind keeps churning away, screwdriving her into feeling angry, upset and cheated.
Sally doesn’t get to truly enjoy her catch-up with friends. Yes, she vents to them, knowing they’ll understand, but even when they talk about something else, her grievance simmers in the background, removing her from the moment. When she gets home just before noon, wearing a smile for the children, she looks around the sitting room and it looks as though a Toys R Us warehouse has been ransacked. Billy is among it all – playing on the carpet, lost in his imagination – but Emily is screaming. You can tell she’s been screaming for a while, not just from her red cheeks and teary eyes, but because Oliver looks frazzled and utterly overwhelmed. ‘Thank God you’re back!’ he says, with the relief of a man whose sanity depended on her return.
A few minutes later, as the house recalibrates and restores its calm under Sally’s influence, Oliver goes upstairs to his office to jump on his call. Later that night, with both children sleeping soundly, this couple finds the room to talk. Oliver mentions that he’s had a hellish week, has been feeling the pressure of one project, but was grateful he ‘could look after the kids and provide you some respite’.
Sally looks at him, hears the well-intentioned words spill from his lips, but thinks: he genuinely believes he was a hero for those ninety minutes, coping on his own like that. She laughs; she’s that hysterical with sleep deprivation that she actually laughs.
‘What’s funny?’ he asks.
Sally tries to help him understand. ‘You slept, had a run, had a leisurely toilet break, a refreshing shower, sent emails, probably scrolled through Facebook and the one time – the one time – I get to unwind with friends, you don’t even think about pushing back your conference call, which means I lose time with my friends – time I rarely hav
e these days. Yet you make it sound like you deserve a Pride of Britain award for giving me those ninety minutes. Do you know what I’d do to go for a run, spend ten minutes on the loo or read and reply to just five emails? Do you have any idea what this is like from my point of view?’
Looking at life through the lens of someone else is one of the tenets of mindfulness. More accurately, when we let go of our own firmly held opinions, we simply meet the other person where they are. This is why perspective matters, though no single perspective is either right or wrong. Standing in Oliver’s shoes, we see that he’s overworked and overstressed; he still needs to keep juggling the professional balls, privately worries if they’ll cope financially and feels pushed to the limit in looking after the children by himself. Standing in Sally’s shoes, she’s overworked and overstressed as a full-time mum; she’s juggling the needs of an infant, a baby and herself; privately worries if she can cope and is already beyond her limit, yet powers on regardless.
This sense of appreciating both sides – of seeing the bigger picture – can only come about with the clarity that visits a calm mind; otherwise, we are just immersed in our own thinking and attached to our own opinions, and our perspective is equal to our level of clarity.
When we start training in mindfulness, we usually obtain a fleeting glimpse of clarity which provides a new perspective; it’s more than just a thought, it’s an insight that alters our whole experience – like we’re suddenly looking through a window with a different view. ‘How have I never seen things this way before?’ we ask. But that new experience is quite unstable, so when we finish the meditation and return to ordinary life, we will, more often than not, fall back into the habitual grooves of thought, remembering the experience, but no longer feeling it. The more we practise though, the more our perspective shifts from a fleeting sensation to an ever-evolving insight; from our own viewpoint to an outlook that considers our partner’s position, too, taking ourselves out of our own thoughts and coming back to a more compassionate place.
The Headspace Guide To A Mindful Pregnancy Page 5