Knowing how to make labor less painful helps you get a more comfortable and easier experience before you start the delivery.
You can use different ways to reduce pain during labor, including medication and natural methods.
Taking medicines may relieve your labor pain, but you consider choosing the safe and good types to get the best result.
Meanwhile, applying natural methods is also useful if you want to restrict the side effects of medicines. These medicine-free methods are various and simple to do whenever you want.
Keep reading for a comprehensive understanding of these methods!
How To Make Labor Less Painful?
You can use medicines, such as Epidurals, Analgesics, Tranquilizers, or Spinal Block to alleviate the pain.
Otherwise, natural methods, like massage, exercise, kegels, relaxation, warm bathing, or frequent movement, can help.
Yet, before applying these ways to ease labor pains, you need good preparation, including making a birth plan and getting information about intense contractions.
Preparation
Make a Birth Plan
Writing your birth plan, a useful document in preparation for your labor process and the delivery, is necessary.
Discuss with your doctor about birth plans early to ensure that the medical team can accommodate your wishes.
Learn About Labor
Learning more about delivery and labor helps you better prepare both about mental and physical health conditions to overcome labor and childbirth without trouble.
You understand more useful knowledge about the labor process and delivery through reading magazines, books, news on websites, and watching videos.
Besides, discussing with your doctor, friends, or family is an ideal way to have more information about labor.
Use Pain-Relief Medicines
Different pain relievers may be effective solutions during labor, depending on the circumstances.
You can choose medicines with huge contraction pain relief in a short time. Yet, ask your doctor about the benefits and side effects of each treatment you use in labor.
Epidurals
An epidural, a type of local anesthesia, relieves the pain in the walls of the vagina and throughout the body when you’re in labor and delivery.
With epidural anesthesia, the anesthesiologist will give you medicine via a thin tubular catheter inserted into your lower back.
Increasing or decreasing this medicine amount will depend on your demands. This effective pain-relief method with little medicine usually doesn’t affect your baby.
Analgesics
One of the common medical methods you can use with the monitor and support of the health provider or expert doctor is analgesics.
This method helps relieve pain but does not completely numb it. It does not affect your muscle movement or sensation. You can receive this method in various ways.
Yet, it may leave impacts on the entire body when it goes intravenously, through injection into a vein or a muscle.
These medicines often have side effects such as nausea and drowsiness in the mother and might affect babies.
Tranquilizers
Although these medicines are not popular during delivery, tranquilizer injections into a muscle or through IV (an intravenous) catheter may relieve anxiety.
It will take 10-20 minutes to work, but it will give you 3-4 hours of relaxation.
You will forget some labor pains or feel drowsy, but it doesn’t relieve your pain. Also, it can take a toll on the baby, such as being sluggish or sleepy once born.
Thus, ask for your doctor’s advice before using this method to restrict the unexpected impacts on your health and baby.
Spinal Block
This method may accompany epidural anesthesia, known as CSE (Combined Spinal Epidural), or is applied alone.
An anesthesiologist administers medicines using a needle placed in the spinal canal and lower back.
This way gives you immediate pain relief and lasts 1½ to 3 hours. I felt numb from my stomach to my legs and no longer felt the uncomfortable pains during my labor.
Spinal blocks may be effective for both planned C-sections and vaginal delivery.
Apply Natural Methods
You can look for and choose simple methods as a natural birth pain management without using medicines to relieve labor and childbirth pains.
Get A Massage
If you don’t know how to reduce labour pain without medicines, try massage therapy for your muscles and the whole body to feel better.
Frequent massage is a good way to help you easily get comfortable positions and loosen tight muscles.
Get a gentle massage from a professional therapist treating pregnant women to feel more comfortable during labor.
This method will relax your muscles when you’re in labor or delivery. Also, it helps you shorten the waiting times between contractions.
Do Exercise
Apart from massage, doing various exercises is beneficial to reduce pain of labor without using medications.
Common activities, including Pilates, Yoga, or deep, slow squats, are great for loosening and stretching your muscles that will work during childbirth.
Besides, these slow exercises allow you to train yourself to deal with pain mentally.
Holding a Yoga position in a period that is respective to childbirth is good for controlling it when the labor pain starts.
This way comes in handy, making you more comfortable and allowing you to concentrate on your breathing exercises.
Doing exercises to reduce labor pains without medications is useful when you don’t know how to make labor easier.
Kegels
Kegel is an exercise that has a positive effect on labor pain relief. It assists in relaxing your muscles on the pelvic floor, like a feeling of holding back your urine.
This is also an effective way to apply if you don’t know how to soothe contractions.
You can start this exercise and practice whenever you want in pregnancy to strengthen your muscles and push harder during labor.
Continuing Kegel exercises after birth can also help restore strength and tone in weakened muscles.
Relaxation
Relaxation is another natural method to help relieve severe pains when you deliver. You can apply multiple ways to feel more comfortable, such as therapy.
These methods often concentrate on proper exercise and nutrition during pregnancy. Also, they give you thorough relaxation and breathing techniques as part of labor management.
While encouraging a drug-free childbirth experience, they also minimize unforeseen complications and situations.
Apart from relaxation therapies, you can rest, listen to relaxing music, or meditate to reduce stress during labor and before delivery.
Take a Warm Bath or Shower
Soaking in warm water is ideal if you don’t know how to have less painful labor.
Taking a shower using warm water during labor and before childbirth gives you several benefits, such as reducing the frequency of epidural applications.
Besides, a shower with warm water may help your body relax and relieve labor pains.
This way also soothes your body if you use a handheld showerhead to directly spray the water on your back or abdomen when sitting on a stool.
In addition, soaking in lukewarm water can help you relax and boost labor faster.
Keep Moving
Keep moving during labor and pre-childbirth will make you feel safe and at ease.
This is because the uterus muscles respond to oxytocin, released in the brain when labor begins. Physical activity will help relieve body pain quickly.
Thus, remember that you should move frequently to feel more comfortable, such as rocking, squatting, lean, or walking.
Also, try several positions that give you comfort and pain relief during labor and childbirth.
FAQs
What Does Labor Pain Feel Like?
The labor pain of each pregnant woman is not the same.
Some women describe their labor pains as severe menstrual cramps, whereas others feel like rough waves resembling diarrhea cramps.
Some moms-to-be even compare labor pain to gas pain. Besides, you can feel pain when labor puts pressure on your bowels and bladder.
Full-blown labor usually begins in the back and spreads to the front of the lower abdomen, causing pain and pressure.
Unlike Braxton-Hicks-like ups and downs, real-life childbirth feels progressively more intense. During real labor, your stomach may contract and feel too tight.
The vagina then expands as the baby moves in and out of the vaginal opening, which can be painful.
The pain level will depend on different factors, including your baby’s position and size, labor intensity, and your overall pain tolerance.
What Makes Labor Most Painful?
Finding the right answer to this question is difficult since you need to consider various factors.
These factors include the baby’s size, the pelvis’s width, previous births, and the required delivery methods.
Thus, you need to determine exactly which factor makes your stages of labor become most painful to find the suitable method or treatment to help you feel better and easier during your labor.
Conclusion
The above are beneficial methods for you when you don’t know how to make labor less painful.
Make good preparation, including writing the birth plan, learning about labor, and knowing how to cope with contractions.
Then, use some medicines that support reducing your labor pains under your doctor’s control and monitoring.
Yet, using medications can cause side effects for your baby and health.
Thus, apply several natural methods such as massage, doing exercises, kegels, taking a warm shower, or keeping moving to feel less pain during the stage of labor.
