Reducing the Fear of Giving Birth
“Stress, anxiety, and depression before, during, and after having a baby can create long-lasting negative outcomes for all involved. We ought to do anything we can to reduce that stress and lessen those outcomes,” says Nancy Bardacke, founder of Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting (MBCP) and author of Mindful Birthing. In a recent study—overseen by lead researcher Larissa Duncan, associate professor of human development and family studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison—Bardacke taught an 18-hour intensive workshop, The Mind in Labor, to 30 first-time mothers, all of whom had reported fear of the pain of childbirth. The encouraging results: Participants had lower scores for prenatal & postpartum depression and a trend toward less opioid medication use during labor than those who participated in a traditional childbirth class. “This is a very promising result,” says Bardacke. “Now what we need is more robust research to demonstrate the long-term effectiveness of these methods and more trained MBCP instructors.”
Talk, Don’t Type
Some Canadian coffeehouses have decided to cut off or limit WiFi. “People have socially taken for granted that the coffee shop is a workplace. We don’t want to be an office. We wanted to do it…
