By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.
“Mindful awareness practices helped me so much during the adventure of pregnancy and early motherhood that I began to turn my professional interest toward how mindfulness might help reduce stress and improve mood among pregnant women and early moms, enhance their connection with their babies, and really thrive through the transformation of motherhood.” – Cassandra Vieten
Pregnancy produces vast changes in the woman’s life, her body, her emotions, and her family. These changes may well be desired and welcomed, but they produce stress. Indeed, stress is a common experience in pregnancy. But, it must be controlled. Too much stress can produce sleeping problems, headaches, loss of appetite or its opposite, overeating. If the levels of stress are high and prolonged it can produce health problems such as hypertension (high blood pressure) and heart disease in the mother. It can also make it more likely that the baby will be born prematurely or with a low birthweight, both of which are indicators of health problems for the infant and in the later child’s life.
So, it is important to either control stress during pregnancy or find ways to better cope with it. Mindfulness training has been shown to reduce the individual’s psychological and physiological responses to stress. It does not lower stress. Rather, it lowers the individual’s responses to the stress. Mindfulness has been shown to be helpful during pregnancy. It can help to relieve the anxiety and depression that commonly accompany pregnancy and even appears to benefit the neurocognitive development of the infant. Hence, mindfulness training may be a safe and effective method to assist the pregnant woman in coping with the stresses of pregnancy.
In today’s Research News article “Effect of Mindfulness Meditation on Perceived Stress Scores and Autonomic Function Tests of Pregnant Indian Women.” See:
or below or view the full text of the study at:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4866093/
Muthukrishnan and colleagues studied the effects of mindfulness meditation on stress in pregnant women. They randomly assigned women who were 12 weeks of gestation to receive either 5-weeks of mindfulness meditation training in addition to treatment as usual or treatment as usual only. The meditation group received 2 training sessions per week and were asked to meditate at home for 30-minutes per day. The women were assessed prior to and after the training for perceived stress, heart rate, and heart rate variability responses normally and in response to a stressor.
They found that the meditation group had a significant decrease in perceived stress, respiration rate, and lower blood pressure changes in response to a physical and a mental stressor. There was also a significant increase in heart rate variability in the meditation group. These measures indicate that autonomic nervous system tone has been improved with an increase in vegetative (parasympathetic) activity. These are important findings that indicate that meditation training decreases the pregnant women’s responses to stress and improve her overall peripheral nervous system functioning.
Hence, mindfulness meditation is a safe and effective method to reduce the psychological and physical responses to the stress of pregnancy. So, practicing meditation should be encouraged for pregnant women.
“By cultivating a mindfulness practice in pregnancy you’ll be better able to switch off from worries and stay relaxed on the big day, allowing your amazing body to simply do what it is more than capable of doing: to give birth smoothly and without fear.” – Susan Morrell
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies
This and other Contemplative Studies posts are also available on Google+ https://plus.google.com/106784388191201299496/posts
Study Summary
Muthukrishnan, S., Jain, R., Kohli, S., & Batra, S. (2016). Effect of Mindfulness Meditation on Perceived Stress Scores and Autonomic Function Tests of Pregnant Indian Women. Journal of Clinical and Diagnostic Research : JCDR, 10(4), CC05–CC08. http://doi.org/10.7860/JCDR/2016/16463.7679
Abstract
Introduction: Various pregnancy complications like hypertension, preeclampsia have been strongly correlated with maternal stress. One of the connecting links between pregnancy complications and maternal stress is mind-body intervention which can be part of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). Biologic measures of stress during pregnancy may get reduced by such interventions.
Aim: To evaluate the effect of Mindfulness meditation on perceived stress scores and autonomic function tests of pregnant Indian women.
Materials and Methods: Pregnant Indian women of 12 weeks gestation were randomised to two treatment groups: Test group with Mindfulness meditation and control group with their usual obstetric care. The effect of Mindfulness meditation on perceived stress scores and cardiac sympathetic functions and parasympathetic functions (Heart rate variation with respiration, lying to standing ratio, standing to lying ratio and respiratory rate) were evaluated on pregnant Indian women.
Results: There was a significant decrease in perceived stress scores, a significant decrease of blood pressure response to cold pressor test and a significant increase in heart rate variability in the test group (p< 0.05, significant) which indicates that mindfulness meditation is a powerful modulator of the sympathetic nervous system and can thereby reduce the day-to-day perceived stress in pregnant women.
Conclusion: The results of this study suggest that mindfulness meditation improves parasympathetic functions in pregnant women and is a powerful modulator of the sympathetic nervous system during pregnancy.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4866093/