The development of more sophisticated research techniques has allowed scientists to have a closer look at changes in living human brains. Exploring the brain, especially women’s brains, is a growing field in science, helped by the fact that there are now more women in the scientific research community worldwide. The research is unveiling fascinating and positive side effects of becoming a mother, and it’s about time for us to understand and celebrate the unique brilliance of our feminine design - including ‘baby brain’ !
I will try to explain this in a short and simple way: in the perinatal period there are several changes happening in a woman’s brain. First, the size of our brain decreases when we are pregnant, and goes back to its original size approximately two years after we give birth. This is due to something called “neuroplasticity”, which means that the neurons are making new connections, resulting in the brain processing thoughts and emotions differently. In other words, it means that pregnancy and birth are opportunities for relating and experiencing the world, both internally and externally, in a new way. Imagine your brain as a filing cabinet, where everything is organised and up to date, and you rest reassured that you have total control over it. Unfortunately, that beautifully ordered filing cabinet has no idea how to relate to a newborn child. When you become a mother, it is as if the cabinet is turned upside down in the middle of the night and everything that was in it is now lying around, giving you that sense of mess and chaos, making it hard to see any sign of light. The reality is that mothering (and fathering!) is a learned skill, and to learn a new skill requires time, patience and practice. Over time, your brain will step by step put things back into place, re-filing some skills and values that you’ll use on this next chapter of your life but also making room for new skills and information. This means that you will emerge from this process with a new, enriched brain! (How lucky that Nature isn’t playing a trick on us – it’s actually preparing our brains for a period of intense learning).
One of the biggest obstacles for a woman to experiencing peace and joy in the months after giving birth is that we are trying to learn feminine skills in a masculine way. We spend our lives training our brain for certain tasks and suddenly the job description changes. In our society, information is power and you can figure everything out via google, books or medical professionals. Mothers spend days and nights with a baby on the boob and a phone in the hand seeking external answers to questions that probably wouldn’t distress us if we were more connected with our innate wisdom. New mothers are suffering from information overload and still aren’t finding peace and joy.
Maybe it’s time to try a more feminine way of learning?
That’s when OXYTOCIN comes into play. And that is the second big change happening in the brain of a postpartum woman. Oxytocin is the hormone for feeling calm and connected. It is the “falling in love” feeling, or the feeling of dancing to your favorite song, having a good laugh, looking at something incredibly cute, a long hug. It decreases sensitivity to stress and pain, lowers the blood pressure and strengthen the bond with your baby, making you stick around even when your baby cried a lot in the day and woke up 8 times at night. In other words, it is the hormone that will make you happy and in love with your baby, the REAL nectar of motherhood.
What if your doctor and your job gave you thumbs up to enjoying that mushy, gooey feeling that only oxytocin can give? I am positive that every mother of our western society would experience the transition into motherhood in a totally different way.
Our modern and masculine lifestyle, however, offers us many ways to sabotage our oxytocin levels. Stress is the main oxytocin buster, and us women are putting ourselves under stress by overexerting ourselves and trying hard to return (as quickly as possible) to the masculine ideal of competence based on high performance, results and emotional steadiness. The second big buster is, guess what? Another attribute of the male way of doing things: rationalizing, intellectualizing and trying to fix problems. Stress and Information overload burn away oxytocin; it actually takes us away from accessing our innate wisdom and experiencing motherhood in a feminine way (slowing down and figuring things out by feeling, experimenting and refining our intuition by trial and error).
Fixing baby brain is not the solution – it is actually the problem that perpetuates the pressure that new mothers have deeply ingrained in their belief system (“I should know how to mother”, “I need to cope”, “I can do this alone”, “asking for help will be a public announcement that I am a failure”, etc – the list is so huge, it could be another blog!).
That’s why I prefer to use the term “baby brain” to represent the ways our brains change in order to prepare and protect us during this transition into motherhood.
Still can’t understand what does it have to do with a happy postpartum?
The hint is: EMBRACE BABY BRAIN. Enjoy the uniqueness of the first days and months after birthing your beautiful baby. Cherish this new way of seeing and feeling the world, WELCOME your new self, even if it’s painful. Emotions are gifts that allow us to experience the depths of who we are. A lot of the emotions we feel when experiencing baby brain are neither desirable or comfortable; exploring them gives us clues to how we can resolve behavioral patterns, and we are given the opportunity to face and change them not only for ourselves, but for our children.
Baby Brain is a blessing.
“Because when a baby is born, so is a mother” (Julia Jones)
