Up and Down Breathing Techniques

How to Breathe your way through birth

Here at The Positive Birth Company, we teach two BRILLIANT breathing techniques to support you through your labour & birth.  You may hear your midwife or doctor discuss the stages of labour as first and second stage - we prefer the more descriptive  up stage and the down stage. The up stage is where the uterine muscles are drawing up and your cervix is dilating to 10cm. The down stage is where the uterine muscles work in the opposite direction, pushing your baby down and out.  Of course the length of labour varies from person to person, but generally the up stage of labour will last longer than the down stage. 

With that in mind, in hypnobirthing we teach two breathing techniques. Can you guess what they are? Yep. Up breathing and down breathing. So simple but SO effective. Let’s get into it.

Up breathing

This breathing technique will literally change not only your birth, but your LIFE. It will help you feel immediately calm and relaxed, whatever situation you’re in. Let’s talk about what it is, how it works and why we use it in the up stage of labour.

This breathing technique isn’t actually specific to birth. It’s used by people with insomnia and anxiety, and also in mindfulness practices. The reason why it’s great for all of those things (including birth, obvs) is because it slows the heart rate down, relaxing us. That’s what we want in labour - to be relaxed. The more relaxed we are, the easier everything will be.

SO HOW DOES IT WORK? You simply breathe in for 4 and breathe out for 8. Yep. That’s it. How easy is that?! By breathing in for 4 and out for 8, 4 times over, you will have breathed your way through a surge, and be one step closer to meeting your baby!  By extending your exhale, you tell your body and your mind that you are calm and safe (even if you don’t feel it right at that moment!).  This tells your brilliant nervous system to stop producing Adrenalin as you have no need for your flight or fight response when you are calm and safe.  Once your Adrenalin response has been tamped down, you will start to feel calm and safe for real - clever, huh?!  The really great thing is that it works not only in labour, but at any time that you feel stressed or anxious - so it’s a real life skill!  Practice Up Breathing daily in pregnancy, it will help you feel calm and relaxed, and the more you practice the easier it will be to enter into that state of relaxation when you really need it!

Watch our video on how to nail up breathing below.

Down Breathing

Think back to the last time you saw an actor giving birth in a film or television programme.  In all likelihood that woman was lying on her back, possibly with her legs in stirrups, surrounded by people in scrubs shouting PUSH PUSH PUSH! While she screws up her face and goes bright red from the effort! Remember that we are simply mammals - and if other mammals don’t need to be told to push, then there is no reason you do!  The World Health Organisation tells us that midwives and doctors should support ‘self directed pushing’ - encouraging a woman or birthing person to be in tune with their own body and to respond to it’s cues.  Giving birth is like doing a poo for lots of reasons, one of them is that you trust your body to be able to push out a poo when you feel the need to go.  Have the same faith in your body’s ability to push out a baby - giving birth is another biological function that you were designed to do.

Up Breathing is all about being relaxed and allowing your body to work.  With Down Breathing, although we still want to be relaxed and discourage Adrenalin, we need to be more actively involved; to use our breath with purpose.  Imagine the difference between a slow exhale, and blowing out a candle on a cake - you use your breath differently when it has a purpose.  

So as you enter the down stage of labour, you will feel your muscles beginning to push down - at first that will feel like you need a big poo, but then you will realise that actually that is your baby’s head!  As you feel your body begin to push down the idea of Down Breathing is you use your breath to help, rather than hinder your body.  So at the start of the surge you take a quick, deep breath in - no need to count - and as you breathe out you send your breath down through your body, with purpose.  If you place your hands on your abdomen when you send your breath down, you will feel your muscles engage.  As the surge ends you will feel that downward pressure relax, and you go back to normal breathing, then as your feel the next surge build you breathe in and send the breath down - and keep doing that until the surge ends.  As you breathe down you will feel your baby’s head move down the vagina and as the feeling passes, the head will bob back up, slowly kneading the walls of the vagina, allowing gentle stretching of the tissues and a slow gentle birth for your baby.  The best time to practice Down Breathing is when you go for a poo, so put a note on the back of the toilet door to remind you, and that’s your daily practice done!