A Woman's Book of Yoga by Machelle M. Seibel & Hari Kaur Khalsa & Ralph Mercer

Author:Machelle M. Seibel & Hari Kaur Khalsa & Ralph Mercer [Seibel, Machelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2002-11-10T16:00:00+00:00

DR.’S NOTES Stress, Science, and Pregnancy

When a woman is pregnant, her metabolism and mental faculty go through tremendous changes. There is a life within the life, and it takes a lot of doing to keep the outer life, the woman, and the inner life, the child, in a balanced state.

—YOGI BHAJAN

Is genetics or the environment the greater shaper of our destiny? Are we the sum of our genes or just some of our genes? With the mapping of the human genome, the cloning of animals, and the ability to identify major diseases by detecting a mistake in the structure or location of just one gene, most people are now aware of the powerful role that genetics plays in all of our lives. But what is the role of the environment? How powerful a role can it play when all the genes seem normal? How can yoga help?

There is no better model than pregnancy to answer these questions. Once a woman becomes pregnant, her life and the life of her developing baby are intricately interwoven. The mother’s environment affects the child in both favorable and unfavorable ways. Many studies have linked stress during pregnancy with prematurity and low birth weight, both of which cause serious risk to the newborn. Pregnant women under significant psychological stress gain less weight than expected for the amount of calories they consume, probably as a result of the effects of stress on metabolism. This helps explain why pregnant women who experience severe stress during pregnancy deliver lower-birth-weight infants.

For example, pregnant women in especially stressful medical jobs produce higher levels of stress hormones than do women in less taxing jobs, although the study conducted was too small to show whether they also had a higher rate of complications. Similarly, pregnant enlisted women on active duty in the military are more likely to develop high blood pressure during pregnancy and to deliver low-birth-weight babies than nonworking wives of active-duty personnel.

Attitudes about work also matter. For instance, pregnant women who want to stop working are far more stressed than those who want to work, and such stress causes a significantly greater risk of preterm and low-birth-weight deliveries. Under whatever circumstances stress occurs, feeling trapped and helpless in a stressful situation is as important a determination for experiencing stress as the stress itself. According to Dr. Esther Sternberg in her book The Balance Within (New York: W. H. Freeman, 2000), less than 50 percent of our stress-responsiveness is in our genes, and more than 50 percent is molded by our environment. For this reason, every pregnant mother should realize that her baby’s exposure to stress during pregnancy might lower the set point of the stress-responsiveness programmed by the baby’s genes after delivery.

Because of these realities, yoga can play an important positive role on both the mother and her baby during pregnancy and beyond. It can decrease the body’s oxygen needs; slow down breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure (among patients with elevated blood pressure); and lower levels of stress—all outcomes that benefit the developing baby.

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