Hypnosis for Anxiety during Pregnancy
Often when I’m teaching prenatal yoga in Broward county in the South Florida area, I do a meditation at the end of the class for an easier birth or to release stress or to release fears around childbirth. The students love it. I love it and for years I didn’t realize how similar it is to hypnosis for pregnancy.
The difference is that a hypnosis is truly customized to you. We meet beforehand and get to know each other and figure out what would be most helpful for you during pregnancy and also during birth. Pregnant women have so many fears come up and hypnosis can help take that anxiety down some or in some cases completely away.
Pregnant women get anxious in the middle of the night and they can’t sleep. Or they obsess about upcoming tests, the health of the baby, how to keep their weight down, how their left arm hurts and does that mean something about the baby. You name it and they’re obsessing about it.
Anxiety can get completely out of control for some women and hypnosis can be truly useful to get a handle on it again. Before I became certified in hypnosis, I sometimes felt ineffective for pregnant women who were anxious.
Anxiety has to be really severe for most women to consider medication during pregnancy (which is a truly personal decision with lots of factors to weigh but can sometimes be helpful). Sometimes the anxiety gets so bad though that a mom can become suicidal, which wouldn’t be good for anyone – the mom or the baby or any other kids that she has. Anxiety during pregnancy is certainly a risk factor for a postpartum mood disorder (PMD).
Talk therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can definitely help. Prenatal Yoga definitely helps. I did a study through Yogafairy Prenatal Yoga and found:
- About 75% felt that skills learned during prenatal yoga helped reduce anxiety and/or depression during pregnancy.
- And 89% felt that the skills helped reduce anxiety and/or depression post-partum.
I believe some of that is because we always do meditation and relaxation at the end of yoga. I would imagine that to have someone come in and have the meditation and/or hypnosis customized to them to reduce the specific anxiety they are dealing with would be even more effective. And not everyone can go to prenatal yoga anyway. The classes are often full or not at a time that they can get there.
Hypnosis for pregnancy and for anxiety during pregnancy takes about an hour and a half appointment. Sometimes people want to come in for a couple more session, but often one session is enough.
Women come out of the session feeling incredibly rested, deeply peaceful. They seriously glow (whether they’re pregnant or not – male or female). That kind of rest is almost unheard of these days and is well worth an hour of your time. You get a personalized mp3 of the session and can listen to it at home anytime you want. It’s so effective because of that.
If you would like to come in for a pregnancy hypnosis, call me for a free consultation 954-309-9071.
Yours in health,
Dr. Liz