A great topic at the Woollahra Festival last weekend presented by Dr Evian Gordon – CEO and Chairman of the Brain Resource Company and the founding director of the Brain Dynamics Centre at Westmead Hospital. There is so much more known now to base realistic labour preparation on. We have to remember there are 85 billion nerves between our ears and one of the biggest gaps with human beings is the gap between knowing and doing. If we want to change behaviour we have to remember that there are 5 times as many nerves that deal with threat than nerves that deal with positivity. This is part of our evolved survival system but it also means we have a ‘negative bias’ to many things – eg just think ‘labour pain’. Labour pain is initially seen as a threat by the body, so part of managing labour is managing the percieved ’threat’ and also empowering yourself to work your way through it. In enormous threat, just ‘thinking positive’ is in most cases, useless. In labour you have to take a realistic approach and learn to control things that you can control, not try to change things you have no chance to control.
Dr Evian Gordon during his fascinating session on the brain.
