The Day Being Good at Meditation Hurt Me
I spent my pregnancy getting very, very good at letting go.
I crocheted my son a blanket, stitch by stitch, in the kind of deliberate, rhythmic calm that I had been practising for months. I meditated. I worked through my fears — and there were fears, buried ones I had been avoiding for longer than I had admitted to myself. I read about hypnobirthing: about how animals give birth with no instruction manual, no fear, just instinct. A ewe in a field doesn’t catastrophise. She just knows. That image gave me more comfort than anything else.
It would just happen. I would just know.
And I did. But somewhere between that peaceful field and an NHS maternity ward at two in the morning, the thing I had worked hardest to build — my calm — became the very thing that got me dismissed.
What the Research Said I Was Doing Right
I want to be clear: hypnobirthing is not woo. The evidence for hypnosis and deep relaxation techniques in labour is genuinely promising. A Cochrane systematic review found that women in the hypnosis group were less likely to use pharmacological pain relief than those in control groups, with an average risk ratio of 0.73 across eight studies and nearly 3,000 women (Madden et al., 2016). An earlier systematic review published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia reached similar conclusions, finding that self-taught hypnosis was associated with less pharmacological analgesia and greater satisfaction with pain management (Cyna, McAuliffe and Andrew, 2004). Mindfulness-based interventions during pregnancy have also been shown to reduce anxiety, depression, and stress across multiple studies (Dhillon, Sparkes and Duarte, 2017).
I was not doing something fringe. I was doing something evidence-based. I had prepared well. That is important context for what comes next.
What Actually Happened
I arrived at hospital in active labour. My contractions were close together. I was breathing through them, clearing my mind, staying in my zone. To anyone watching, I probably looked very peaceful. I was not peaceful. I was working incredibly hard — I just happened to be good at not showing it.
The ward staff assessed me and felt I had a long time to go. They wanted to send me home. Fifty minutes away by car. In a car that, during a contraction, felt like a medieval instrument of torture. I stayed.
That night, I was hooked up to a CTG monitor — partly to show the team how frequent my contractions really were. My plan was simple: let the machine do the talking. I would meditate, the monitor would record, and eventually the data would speak for itself.
Except at some point in the night, a nurse came over. I heard her. I assumed she had silenced the beeping. She had switched the machine off entirely.
When I asked to use the toilet and they told me what had happened, something in me snapped. All that careful, practised calm evaporated in one moment of absolute fury — not just because of the machine, but because that data had been my only way of being believed. I had been lying there, meditating through contractions that were coming fast and hard, and the staff had concluded I was asleep.
This is where the irony of the blog title becomes painfully literal. The better you are at managing pain quietly, the less pain you appear to be in. And the less pain you appear to be in, the less urgently you are treated.
When Women Are Calm, Are They Believed?
There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that women’s pain is more likely than men’s to be dismissed, psychologised, or minimised in clinical settings. Research from University College London found that healthcare staff — both men and women — consistently underestimate women’s pain, and that on the basis of that underestimate they often under-treat it, and are more likely to recommend psychological rather than analgesic treatment (UCL News, 2021). The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) has reviewed evidence showing that compared to men, women are more likely to have their pain judged as unreliable, more likely to be referred to psychological treatment, and less likely to receive effective pain relief (IASP, no date). A review published in the Annual Review of Anthropology found that worldwide, healthcare workers are less likely to believe women experiencing pain than their male counterparts, and that this reflects deeply embedded societal and clinical bias (Strong, 2025).
I was not in some unusual situation. I was a woman in an NHS maternity unit, telling staff she was ready, not being believed — and her only “evidence” had just been switched off.
The Thing About Gas and Air
Here is a detail that still makes me want to laugh and cry in equal measure.
I didn’t want heavy pain relief. I am a mental health clinician. I understand the mind-body connection. I had prepared for this. All I wanted was gas and air — Entonox — to take the edge off while I continued with my breathing. But gas and air was only permitted on the active labour ward. The ward I was on, the assessment ward, did not allow it. So I was offered other drugs — drugs I did not want — while the one simple thing I was asking for was held just one set of double doors away.
After I lost my temper, I was given a sedative injection. What I remember is that it did not reduce the pain. Every contraction came through exactly as before — except now I was too sedated to meditate, too foggy to breathe, too out of it to use a single one of the skills I had spent months building. It was, without question, for me, worse than doing nothing.
Eventually, a different nurse came on shift. I was taken to the active labour ward. I got my gas and air. And then, beautifully, exhaustingly, my son was born.
What Nobody Tells You About Hypnobirthing in an NHS Setting
Hypnobirthing asks you to create a bubble. To close the world out, to go inward, to find a still point inside the noise. What nobody tells you is that an NHS labour ward is not designed for stillness.
There were people coming in and out constantly. Documentation to be written after every intervention. Handovers happening mid-contraction. Different doctors appearing without introduction. The environment that makes good, safe documentation possible is the same environment that makes calm-based birthing profoundly difficult. This tension between the requirements of a medicalised system and the conditions needed for non-pharmacological pain management is well recognised in the literature (Madden et al., 2016), yet it remains largely unaddressed in practice.
I am not writing this to condemn the NHS. I am writing this because I think the gap between what hypnobirthing prepares you for and what a busy maternity ward actually looks like is enormous — and mostly unacknowledged.
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My son is wonderful. He sleeps beautifully. He has no idea any of this happened.
The blanket I crocheted him still sits on his bed.
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Want to talk about birth trauma, mindfulness, or finding calm in difficult circumstances? I work with adults navigating the psychological impact of health experiences. Www.creativementalhealth.org.uk 023 9206 6161
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References
Cyna, A.M., McAuliffe, G.L. and Andrew, M.I. (2004) ‘Hypnosis for pain relief in labour and childbirth: a systematic review’, British Journal of Anaesthesia, 93(4), pp. 505–511.
Dhillon, A., Sparkes, E. and Duarte, R.V. (2017) ‘Mindfulness-based interventions during pregnancy: a systematic review and meta-analysis’, Mindfulness, 8, pp. 1421–1437.
International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) (no date) Sex/gender biases in pain research and clinical practice [Fact sheet]. Available at: https://www.iasp-pain.org/resources/fact-sheets/sex-gender-biases-in-pain-research-and-clinical-practice (Accessed: 23 August 2026).
Madden, K., Middleton, P., Cyna, A.M., Matthewson, M. and Jones, L. (2016) ‘Hypnosis for pain management during labour and childbirth’, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Issue 5, Art. No.: CD009356. doi: 10.1002/14651858.CD009356.pub3.
Strong, A.E. (2025) ‘Pain management’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 54, pp. 97–115. Available at: https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-anthro-091423-054813 (Accessed: 23 August 2026).
UCL News (2021) Analysis: Women’s pain is routinely underestimated, and gender stereotypes are to blame. Available at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/apr/analysis-womens-pain-routinely-underestimated-and-gender-stereotypes-are-blame (Accessed: 23 August 2026).