Episode 28: Hormones of Labor Part I

In this Part I of the series on hormones in labor, we focus understanding the hormones of labor and their effect on your labor.

Next week we'll cover the helpful and protective altered mindstate of labor brought about by these hormones, (sometimes called 'Laborland'), and how to encourage the helpful hormones of labor.

A summary:

• Oxytocin brings feelings of well-being and contractions. As oxytocin builds, so does the strength, frequency, & effectiveness of your contractions.
• Endorphins, release in response to manageable pain and manageable stress and bring euphoria, elation, and pain relief.
• Adrenaline, released in response to extreme fear or extreme pain, slows or stops your labor completely.

Full Transcript:

Hello, and welcome to the next episode of your free weekly, Brave Journey Birth Preparation Videos, where I pick a topic related to birth and postpartum and I talk about it.  Today we're talking about the hormones of labor. I'm going to split this into a two part series this week. We're going to talk about the three main hormones involved in labor, oxytocin, endorphins, and, uh, adrenaline. And two of them are helpful. One of them is less helpful.

Next week. We'll talk through labor land, that altered mind state of labor, how it's helpful and protective, and then also how to curate an environment and a birth team, and how to think about who to have on your birth team, to ensure that you're protecting your environment. Which will then encourage the more helpful hormones and discourage the less helpful ones.

But we'll talk about that next week. In this part one, we're going to go through the three main hormones involved in labor. And we'll discuss their effect on labor. I'm Cara Lee. I'm a birth doula and a childbirth educator and a mom of two. And let's get started.

 Now a little bit of a caveat. If you are a trained endocrinologist or hormone specialist, you may find that I have oversimplified the hormones here.

The way I'm conveying this information to you is in a way that maybe, hopefully, helpful to you when you are actually in labor and a way to think about these subsets of hormones, but I'm not going into these specifics of all the little, uh, beautiful, fascinating, complex details within these classes of hormones. So we'll just talk about them generally today.

But let's start with oxytocin. Oxytocin is known as the labor are the hormone of love. I can't tell you how often I say the labor of love and the oxytocin is known as the hormone of love. And it's a favorite of birth workers. I even have a mug with the oxytocin, um, uh, diagram on it. Oxytocin has two purposes.

And one is super important, and that is, it brings your contractions. So oxytocin is the hormone responsible for contractions, the contracting pattern of the uterus. Oxytocin's second impact on the body, which is super helpful it bathes your body with feel good feelings in your brain. So oxytocin is known as the hormone of love because there's involved when you get a really fantastic hug from someone and it just feels so good in your body. That's oxytocin. When you are having sex and it feels so good in your body. There's oxytocin involved there. Breastfeeding, oxytocin is released when you breastfeed. So that's a protective, like a feel good feeling. And in labor, when you have oxytocin flowing through your body, it creates this feel good, wonderful feeling in your brain. And so it's beneficial, it's protective. It makes labor more manageable.

So Pitocin is a synthetic form of oxytocin. So if you've heard of Pitocin, it's given via I V it's a synthetic oxytocin, and it's to induce labor. So pitocin brings the contractions. But. It doesn't cross the blood brain barrier. So only spontaneous oxytocin gives you those wonderful feel, good feelings in your brain. Pitocin doesn't cross the blood brain barrier. So it doesn't give you those feel good feelings, but it does give you contractions. So oxytocin is super important.

And the more oxytocin that is flowing in your body, the more regular and strong and effective your contractions will be, which effective contractions and an effective labor is what you want. Because weak, gentle contractions, as manageable as they are, may make your labor last longer. And I don't care how weak your contractions are. If they keep you awake for a few days, you're going to get very, very tired and it's going to be hard to push that baby out. So we want to do things that encourage oxytocin in our body. And we'll talk about that in the next video. How do we encourage oxytocin and helpful hormones and encourage our labor to progress.

So the second hormone of labor are endorphins. Endorphins also create a feeling of euphoria and joy and elation in the brain endorphins are caused by manageable pain and manageable stress. So this is different than terrifying pain and terrifying stress, which causes adrenaline, which we'll talk about in a second, which is not helpful. But manageable pain, manageable stress brings about these endorphins. Think about the runner's high, it's a little bit of pain that then brings this kind of euphoric feeling in the brain. So as your labor progresses, as it gets more stressful, remember stress, isn't always a bad thing, as it gets more stressful, but manageably stressful as it gets more painful, but manageably painful your endorphins build and they blend with that oxytocin.

And this is when we start getting what we're going to talk about next time, which is labor land that altered mind state of labor, which is helpful and protective. So euphoria, and these endorphins are really important to encourage. And we'll talk about how to do that also in part II. One last bit about endorphins is that they have natural pain relief. So not only do they create feelings of euphoria and joy, there is a natural pain relief, a pain relieving effect in your brain that come from endorphins, which is so cool.

And then the third kind of hormone that we're going to talk about today is adrenaline.

So adrenaline is not helpful when you are fearful of experiencing extreme pain or extreme fear, adrenaline floods your body and the impact of, of adrenaline on your labor is it slows it down or stops it? And I have seen this with nearly every person I've attended their birth, where I'm laboring with them at home and their contractions are getting stronger and stronger and stronger.

And we realize, okay, this is it. It's time to go, which either the birth center or the hospital. And when we change and we get in the car, contractions slow down. And when we get to the hospital and we're walking through the halls, contractions almost completely stop or they're really spaced out, we get to triage and there's people asking questions and poking and prodding and taking their blood pressure and no offense nurses I know you got to get all this data and it's super important, but it mucks with labor, rhythm and contraction slow down and labor slows down.

But once we get into the birth room once we get settled in and the birthing person starts to find their rhythm again, contractions will boost back up again. And so that's adrenaline at work when you're afraid and you're changing locations, and you're having to answer questions and people are talking to you. Your contractions will slow down. And this is protective. Think about before, you know, we are animals. We are, we are beloved beings in animal bodies and our bodies say, if this isn't a safe place for this labor to continue, if I'm feeling extreme pain or fear, I'm going to shut this down. This isn't a safe place for this baby to be born.

So when we talk in part two about how to encourage helpful hormones, it's going to be decreasing extreme fear, decreasing adrenaline, decreasing inner interruptions and distractions. So we'll talk about that in part two next week.

So those are the three main hormones involved in labor. We have oxytocin the hormone of love, feel good feelings and bringer of contractions. We want to encourage lots of oxytocin.

We have endorphins which are brought about by manageable pain and manageable stress that slowly build over the course of our labor and bring these feelings of euphoria and joy and elation.

And then we have adrenaline, which is not helpful. Is it a response to extreme fear or extreme stress? And if we have adrenaline flooding our body, our contractions will slow down or space out or stop completely.

So that's it. That's it for today for part one, I look forward to seeing you for part two, again, go to bravejourney.com my website, and you can find all the free videos I've ever made are there. And you can also find courses that are available for you to sign up for. Okay. Thank you so much. I'll see you next week.