As the world seems to be changing before our eyes, we are left with the daunting task of coping with it all. How do we rationalize and make sense of such an extreme situation? This is uncharted territory for all of us.
The initial instinct is ‘fight or flight’ or panic, which has led to hoarding food supplies and even toilet paper of all things. Retail stores, banks, concert halls, schools, malls, universities, stadiums and restaurants are all closed; sports teams are on hiatus and once busy roadways are now strangely manageable.
We are all left with the task of learning social distancing, elbow bumps, frequent hand washing and sanitizing anything that is ever touched. There is no where to go and not much to do as we all try to figure out what happened to the world we knew just a few weeks ago?
So now, with all sorts of time on our hands, we can get to the business of gathering important information, but where do you turn and who do you trust? 24-hour news outlets have time to fill, competitors to beat and advertisers to satisfy.
Sure, they want to report what you need to know, but to support their bottom line, they need to keep you tuned in and the best way to do this is to maintain a sense of urgency and fear. If we take the bait, we get sucked into an emotional roller coaster resulting in significant ongoing stress and hopelessness. Overtime this can affect sleep, appetite, mood and overall healthy well-being.
So what do we do? What do we actually have control of? We can certainly control how and when we gather daily news updates. We can control the frequency our physical activities like healthy exercise which stimulates endorphin flow creating a sense of euphoric relaxation.
We can also seek out uplifting stories that have resulted from this tragedy like the Italian residents singing together from their apartment windows as a sign of unity. Or the police officer in Somerville, MA who handed out toilet paper instead of tickets
As a hypnotherapist, I teach my clients to control their pattern of thought, how they think and what they most frequently think about. Hypnosis or meditation is a great way to emotionally disconnect from outer world thoughts and to focus within; to spend more time thinking about and anticipating sustained comfortable relief.
By repeating this process daily the subconscious becomes conditioned to follow this new relaxing path. You will still be doing what you do and going where you go, but you will feel much better about it. We can’t control what comes our way but we most definitely have control over how we see it and more importantly how it makes us feel.
You don’t necessarily need to see a hypnotherapist or attend a meditation class to get the job done. There is no shortage of great meditation apps as well as an endless array of free hypnosis sessions on YouTube. You will be pleasantly surprised how much better you’ll feel in the middle of everything that is going on around you.
By: Paul Gustafson RN CH
What to do about upcoming medical appointments
While coronavirus is a new and immediate threat, it’s not the only one. It is still important to take care of any chronic medical problems to prevent them from getting worse. However, talk to your doctor to see if any upcoming appointments can be postponed, handled by Telehealth, or rescheduled. Many doctors are cancelling non-essential appointments. If you have an upcoming appointment, call your doctor’s office to confirm it is still scheduled.
Taking precautions against coronavirus for older adults
People with chronic medical problems, and those over age 65, are at increased risk of getting serious complications from the coronavirus. There is currently no vaccine to prevent coronavirus disease. Taking preventive actions is the best way to avoid contracting the virus.
Preventive measures include:
- Stay home as much as possible
- Avoid unnecessary contact with other people, don’t shake hands for example
- Avoid crowds, especially in poorly ventilated spaces
- Wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds (use alcohol-based hand sanitizer w/ at least 60% alcohol if soap and water are not available)
- Avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth
- Cover your cough or sneeze with a tissue
The importance of washing your hands
Handwashing is one of the easiest ways you can help prevent illness. It is especially important to wash your hands:
- Before, during and after preparing food
- Before and after caring for someone who is sick
- After using the bathroom
- After blowing your nose, coughing, or sneezing
- After touching an animal, animal feed, or animal waste
Remember that surfaces, including bathroom fixtures such as toilet handles and sink faucets, can also transmit infection.
Are you washing your hands correctly? Follow these 5 steps for the most effective hand washing technique to prevent the spread of germs.
5 steps to washing your hands correctly
- Wet your hands with clean running water, turn off the water and apply soap
- Rub your hands together with the soap including the backs of your hands, between your fingers, and under your nails.
- Scrub your hands for at least 20 seconds
- Rinse your hands well under clean running water
- Dry your hands with a clean towel or air dry them
How is it transmitted?
Coronavirus is primarily transmitted by coughing and sneezing by a person infected by the coronavirus. Surfaces touched by someone with the virus may potentially be infected. This is why it is important to wash your hands, use hand sanitizer, and avoid touching your face. In addition, it’s a good idea to avoid shaking hands and minimize your contact with public use surfaces such as lifting the gas pump handle with a paper towel or using your knuckle instead of your finger to turn of light switches.
Is it necessary to wear a facemask?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) does not recommend people who are well wear a facemask to protect themselves against coronavirus. The use of facemasks is recommended for health workers taking care of people in close settings or people who show symptoms of coronavirus to help prevent the spread of disease.
Is it ok to travel?
The CDC recommends avoiding nonessential travel. If you need to travel take basic prevention precautions listed above.
If I feel sick, how do I tell if it’s coronavirus or a different infection?
Coronavirus is related to common cold viruses. Symptoms are sore throat, cough, and fever. Some patients can have vomiting. You cannot tell the difference between coronavirus19 and other, more common viruses based on symptoms. This strain of coronavirus may be more virulent (causes a more severe illness) than most cold viruses.
Coronavirus symptoms may appear 2-14 days after exposure. Call your doctor if you develop symptoms and have been in close contact with a person known to have coronavirus or if you recently traveled from an area with widespread cases of coronavirus. Please don’t just walk in to your doctor’s office; they need to prepare for your arrival.
Prolonged vomiting, diarrhea, muscle aches, and joint pains are not prominent features of coronavirus infection. If you have those symptoms in addition to cold symptoms, it’s more likely that you have influenza, or “the flu”. While it is recommended that you stay home if you have cold symptoms during this pandemic, you should call your doctor if you get symptoms that suggest the flu. Adults over age 65 or with other medical problems are at increased risk of complications from the flu. There are medications that reduce the severity of the flu if taken early enough. So you should call your doctor within a day of flu symptoms to see if it would be appropriate for you to get a prescription for antiviral medications.
How to prepare
It’s important to take precautions in advance in case you are required to stay in your home for an extended period of time. General emergency preparedness includes:
- Have a supply of food staples, bottled water, and household supplies like laundry detergent and bathroom items
- Make sure you have at least a 30-day supply of your prescription medications and other health supplies on hand, such as pain relievers, stomach remedies, cough and cold medicines, fluids with electrolytes and vitamins
For More Information
We take the safety and well-being of our community, members, and employees very seriously. Given the coronavirus situation is changing daily, we request that you do not visit our office in person.
For the latest up-to-date information on the coronavirus, please visit the CDC website at cdc.gov/covid19.
Kate Middleton confirmed the long-rumored this past weekend, that she practiced a form of self-hypnosis when she delivered her royal babies George, Charlotte and Louis.
“I saw the power of it,” the Duchess of Cambridge said of hypnobirthing during a podcast for Happy Mum, Happy Baby.
The growing “mommy trend” was first described by Marie “Mickey” Mongan in her 1989 book, HypnoBirthing: A Celebration of Life, and is based on the tenet women birth instinctively and that labor need not be painful if the woman is properly prepared, relaxed and supported.
“I help them become aware of how magical that body is,” Mongan, who was inspired by Grantly Dick-Read, an 1890-born British obstetrician and leading advocate of natural birthing, said in an interview before her death last year at 86.
“People have not been letting women feel magical and so that’s why they think they need drugs and they need all these other things.” Instead, all women need “is to relax and go inside and let their body do whatever it wants to do,” Mongan maintained.
It was hugely powerful
For her part, the Duchess said she discovered hypnobirthing while struggling with hyperemesis gravidarum, a brutal form of morning sickness.
While stressing hypnobirthing isn’t for everyone, “it was through the hyperemesis that I really realized the power of the mind over the body,” Kate said.
“I’m not going to say that (Prince) William was standing there sort of, chanting sweet nothings at me. He definitely wasn’t. I didn’t even ask him about it, but it was just something I wanted to do for myself.”
“It was hugely powerful,” Kate said, adding she “quite liked labor,” primarily because she knew it was going to end.
The birthing method uses visualization, deep abdominal breathing (rather than the short, shallow breaths favored by other childbirth methods), guided imagery and deep relaxation techniques (self-hypnosis) to encourage a calm and natural birth.
“When women understand that pain is caused by constrictor hormones created by fear,” reads the HypnoBirthing Canada website, “they learn, instead, to release fear, thus creating endorphins, the feel-good hormones.”
For $500 or so, the Mongan method is taught in group, or one-on-one private sessions, and is particularly appealing to women with tokophobia — a pathological terror of giving birth.
Proponents say hypnobirthing increases the chances for a drug-free and shorter labor , women are less likely to have a caesarean section or suffer post-natal depression and that hypnobirthed infants have higher Apgar scores, a test used to assess a newborn’s color, heart rate, reflex, muscle tone and breathing.
Studies suggest most pregnant women would prefer birth not be interfered with unless medically necessary.
However, one 2013 study of 2,400 American women’s childbirth experiences found 67 per cent received an epidural, 62 per cent an intravenous catheter, 47 per cent bladder catheters and 31 per cent the drug oxytocin to start or hurry up labor.
“With such a large gap between the desired and the achieved, are we as providers and childbirth educators doing all that we can to help these women obtain their goal?” California midwife and nurse practitioner Corry Varner wrote in The Journal of Perinatal Education.
The Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada recommends non-drug approaches to help women cope with the intensity of labor due to their “numerous” benefits, including a reduction in the need for C-sections.
Among the approaches the society supports is the “Central Nervous System Control” mechanism, which consists of focusing the woman’s attention using relaxation, visualization and “auto-hypnosis.”
The evidence for hypnobirthing, however, is patchy.
A 2016 Cochrane review that included nine trials in which 2,954 women in total were randomized to hypnosis or control groups found women in the hypnosis group were 27 per cent less like to use pain-relieving drugs during labor.
But there was no difference in the use of epidurals (a procedure that injects a local anesthetic into the space around the spinal nerves in the lower back.) Women using hypnosis were also no more likely to have a normal vaginal birth and there were no clear differences in their sense of how well they coped with labor.
Another 2015 study published in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology involving 680 women randomized to “usual care” or usual care plus brief self-hypnosis training found that attending two 90-minute hypnosis sessions at around 32 and 35 weeks’ gestation didn’t reduce epidural use but did reduce birth fear and anxiety.
It’s entirely possible longer courses of hypnosis training starting earlier in pregnancy might have had an impact, the authors acknowledged. And there was no evidence of extra risk for either mother or baby.
Another review published in 2011 in Clinical Psychology Review involving 13 studies found “hetero-hypnosis” (when one person hypnotizes another) and self-hypnosis “were consistently shown to be more effective than standard medical care, supportive care or childbirth education classes in reducing pain.”
Other researchers have found that women who use hypnotherapy during labor are also more likely to have consulted with an acupuncturist or naturopath, attend yoga or meditation classes during pregnancy and use herbal medicines, aromatherapy oils, homeopathy and other alternative therapies.
According to a 2016 study of 2,445 Australian women, they were also “less commonly identified as feeling safer knowing that an obstetrician is providing their care and were more likely to labor in a birth center or in a community center (i.e. at home).”
Kate safely birthed all three of her babies in the exclusive private Lindo Wing of London’s St. Mary’s Hospital.
Diana, Princess of Wales, was also determined to have given birth without drugs — though some accounts suggest she had an epidural at a late stage of her 16-hour labor with Prince William.
The reason we have pain is because we’re fearful and we tense up
During Prince Harry’s birth, she reportedly read a paperback novel until the last three hours and sucked on ice cubes.
Quebec hypnotherapist Ilona Fritsch, of HypnoBirthing Canada, offers classes in Montreal, Laval and Saint-Sauveur.
The program consists of five, two-and-one-half hour classes over a period of five weeks. Women and couples are also urged to practice hypnobirthing meditations and affirmations daily until the baby’s birth.
“The reason we have pain is because we’re fearful and we tense up,” Fritsch said. “If we get rid of the fears and concerns about birth then there’s a good chance we won’t have any pain, that we’ll be comfortable during labor and have a faster birth.”
Critically, the program teaches the father or birth partner how to help the woman remain calm through the surges and protect her “bubble of positivity,” according to the Mongan method’s teaching.
While the goal is a natural, drug-free birth, “I tell women, ‘if you feel that you need an epidural at one point, it’s not a failure, it’s OK. Don’t think that everything is going to be bad just because you took the epidural,’” Fritsch said.
Women don’t go into a trace. There’s no swinging watch. Rather, according to the official HypnoBirthing Institute website, the experience is similar to daydreaming, or the “focusing that occurs” when one is engrossed in a good book, or a movie.
While women might feel “some discomfort,” it’s not pain, as such, Fritsch said. “If you ask them while they are in labor, they say, ‘I feel sensations. I feel tension in my belly.’ But they never call it pain.”
Still, childbirth is a major physical and physiological event, and critics wrestle with the idea that hypnobirthing is “the secret” behind how Kate “was able to look so fresh” after her royal baby births.
Some see it as just another celebrity-endorsed, hippie birth fad (Gisele Bundchen and Jessica Alba are among the enthusiasts) that subtly chips away at women’s trust in mainstream medicine.
“When women are told they can get through what may be the most traumatic physical experience of their life just by thinking more positively about it, it can prompt those who need extra help — from the 60 per cent taking drugs for pain relief, to the small number who require an emergency caesarean — feel as if they failed in some way, even though the medical help they receive is based on decades of research into making pregnancy and birth safer,” Hannah Fearn wrote in The Independent.
By: Sharon Kirkey
