Dear Mama,
You're doing everything right. The prenatal vitamins, every appointment, reading all the books, and preparing the nursery. But if you're honest with yourself, you might realize you’re white-knuckling your way through pregnancy. Your shoulders are tight, your jaw is clenched, and no one seems to be addressing the stress you carry in your body every single day.
You deserve more than generic advice to "just relax." You deserve to understand what's really happening in your body — and your baby's — and what you can do about it.
Two Very Different Birth Stories
Let me paint two pictures for you.
Birth Story #1: Mom arrives at the hospital already exhausted from weeks of poor sleep and chronic stress. Labor isn't progressing "fast enough," so Pitocin is started. The contractions become overwhelming. An epidural is placed. Hours pass. The baby's heart rate dips. Suddenly, there's urgency in the room. Vacuum extraction. Maybe a c-section. Baby is whisked away for evaluation. When they're finally reunited, baby struggles to latch. The crying won't stop. Everyone's nervous system is screaming.
Birth Story #2: Mom has spent her pregnancy learning to regulate her nervous system. She arrives at the birth center breathing deeply, moving intuitively. Her body knows what to do. Labor progresses steadily. She flows between rest and active pushing. Baby emerges alert and calm, immediately placed on her chest. Within minutes, baby finds the breast. The room is quiet except for soft coos. Everyone's nervous system is singing the same serene song.
What's the difference? It's not just the birth setting or the provider, though those matter. The foundational difference is the state of mom and baby's nervous system.
Your Nervous System Is Running the Show
Think of your nervous system as the air traffic controller for your entire body. It's coordinating your heartbeat, digestion, sleep patterns, immune response, and stress reactions — all without you consciously thinking about it.
Your autonomic nervous system has two main branches:
The Sympathetic System (Your Gas Pedal): This activates when you need to respond to something — a deadline, a perceived threat, or even exciting news. It increases your heart rate, diverts blood to your muscles, and sharpens your focus.
The Parasympathetic System (Your Brake Pedal): This helps you rest, digest, recover, and connect. It slows your heart rate, promotes healing, and allows your body to do its maintenance work.
In an ideal world, you press the gas when needed and the brake when needed, flowing smoothly between the two. But chronic stress — the kind so many pregnant moms experience — causes these systems to get stuck. You might be riding the gas pedal 24/7, or you might have a brake pedal that won't fully engage. Either way, you've lost the ability to flow.
Your Baby Is Learning From You Right Now
Here's what most prenatal care doesn't tell you: your baby's developing nervous system is being shaped by yours. Every moment.
When you're chronically stressed, your body releases cortisol and adrenaline. These hormones cross the placenta. Your baby's brain — which is developing at an astounding rate — is bathing in these stress chemicals. This isn't about making you feel guilty; it's about giving you power. Because when you understand this, you can do something about it.
Your nervous system is literally your baby's first teacher. Before they take their first breath, before they hear their first lullaby, they're learning regulation from you. Are they learning that the world is safe or dangerous? That their body can rest or must always be on alert?
Birth Isn't Just Physical — It's a Nervous System Event
Here's something most people don't understand about birth: it actually begins in a parasympathetic-dominant state. That's right — your brake pedal needs to be engaged.
Oxytocin, the hormone that starts and sustains labor contractions, is released most effectively when you feel safe and calm. This is why dim lighting, quiet spaces, and supportive people matter so much. Your body won't fully release oxytocin when it's in fight-or-flight mode.
As labor progresses into the pushing phase, your nervous system must shift to sympathetic activation — but only at the right time and in the right way. This is the flow we talked about earlier. Gas and brake, working together in perfect rhythm.
But when mom enters birth already stuck in stress mode — or can't flow between these states — the entire sequence gets disrupted. Research consistently shows that mothers who feel safe during birth experience shorter labor, increased oxytocin release, and lower pain levels. This isn't just about comfort; it's about physiology.
And after birth? Your baby's first regulation comes through co-regulation with you. Skin-to-skin contact, eye contact, the rhythm of your heartbeat against theirs — these aren't just sweet bonding moments. They're your baby's nervous system, learning how to regulate by syncing with yours.
If your nervous system is dysregulated, it's harder to establish that co-regulatory loop. This can affect everything from breastfeeding to sleep patterns to your baby's ability to be soothed.
The Missing Piece of Prenatal Care
Standard prenatal care is essential. Your provider monitors your baby's growth, screens for complications, checks your blood pressure, and tracks development. All crucial work.
But there's usually no assessment of your nervous system function. You might get told to "reduce stress" without any objective way to measure whether your system is actually regulated or stuck in survival mode.
This is where Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care comes in, which is what we do at Pure Chiropractic. Through advanced technology like INSiGHT Scans — including thermal imaging, surface EMG, and Heart Rate Variability testing — we can measure how your nervous system is functioning.
These aren't subjective assessments. They're objective data showing us:
Whether your sympathetic and parasympathetic systems are balanced
Where tension and stress are being held in your body
How well your nervous system adapts to stress
Whether you're stuck in fight-or-flight or able to access rest-and-digest
Then, through gentle, specific chiropractic adjustments, we work to restore balance. We're not treating symptoms; we're helping your nervous system remember how to flow between gas and brake. And when your nervous system learns regulation, your baby's developing system learns it too.
When Should You Start?
The honest answer? Earlier in pregnancy is better. The more time we have to work with your nervous system before birth, the more deeply we can support regulation for both you and your baby.
But it's never too late to start. We've seen profound changes happen in the third trimester, even in the final weeks before birth. Your nervous system has an incredible capacity for healing and adaptation when given the proper support.
What You Can Control
You can't control every variable of pregnancy and birth. Sometimes life-saving interventions are needed, and we are deeply grateful for modern medicine when those moments arise.
But even when interventions are necessary, we need our nervous system to know what to do. A regulated nervous system helps you recover faster, bond more easily, and navigate postpartum with more resilience.
Before birth comes, you can choose to support the one system that influences everything else: your nervous system. You can choose to give your baby the gift of learning regulation in the womb. You can choose to prepare your body not just physically, but neurologically.
Your Next Step
You could do all the traditional preparation — the miles circuit, raspberry leaf tea, eating dates, and practicing birth positions. And those things are wonderful.
But if we could give you only one tip for preparing for birth, it would be this: nervous system repair and regulation.
Your baby's nervous system is being shaped right now, in this moment. Every day of your pregnancy is an opportunity to teach them regulation, safety, and calm.
If you're ready to get real answers about your nervous system function — not just reassurance that "everything looks fine" — we'd love to help. Please reach out to Pure Chiropractic today to schedule a consultation. If you are not local to us, check out the PX Docs directory to find an office near you.
Our Neurological INSiGHT Scans will show you exactly what's happening in your nervous system. And our care will help you restore the balance and flow you need for the birth you deserve.