A healthy pregnancy starts with a healthy nervous system which is essentially your engine that makes the entire car run! The nervous system controls every single organ, tissue, and cell in our body- coordinating all processes including hormonal cascades involved in pregnancy and birth.

Optimizing neurological function before and during pregnancy may decrease nausea (morning sickness), regulate blood pressure (pre-eclampsia), regulate blood sugar (address gestational diabetes), destress/reduce anxiety, improve sleep, reduce pain, and optimize mood and energy levels!

The scan above is one of our scans we use for pregnant moms or those seeking to conceive- it’s called Heart Rate Variability- this measure is used to determine overall ability to handle stress. This is incredibly important for a pregnant mom to have a high function on this test. Lower scores here are associated with morning sickness, low fertility, poor progression in labor, increased interventions, low energy, poor postpartum recovery, and increased rate of postpartum depression.

A healthy pregnancy and birth requires optimal space in mom’s uterus and pelvis for babe to do all the dancing, twirling, and kickboxing they want until baby’s birthday!

When muscles get tight in the wrong places to compensate for injuries, poor posture, sedentary behavior, and pain, baby is forced into more cramped quarters which can influence delays in birth, dystocia, increased risk of birth interventions, increased risk of torticollis, breech babies, or difficulty with descent into the birth canal.

Some important considerations in the passageway include the muscles of the pelvic floor, the psoas muscles, the sacrum/pelvis, the pubic bone, the diaphragm, the core, the round/broad ligaments, and the piriformis muscles.

What prenatal care often fails to address is the importance of prenatal care simply to provide baby’s nervous system with the healthiest start to brain development possible. Our nervous system’s are like a computer hard drive- meaning that all the toxic stress that builds up over time gets downloaded onto this hard drive and the body literally keeps the score.

Mom and baby are intimately connected in utero by the umbilical cord- which not only supplies critical nutrients and blood flow, but also is the power cord to baby- sending important messaging. Nervous system care ensures that mom’s nervous system is prioritizing the calm/relaxed side of the nervous system to decrease the stress that baby is facing through the power cord.

Prenatal stress or chronic stress during this time has been shown to be a major prerequisite to neurodevelopmental challenges in children early on in life.