Pregnancy asks an extraordinary amount of your body.
While your prenatal appointments, ultrasounds and blood tests are tracking important aspects of your health and your baby’s development, there’s another system working incredibly hard throughout pregnancy that we’re particularly interested in at Coast Family Chiropractic:
Your nervous system.
Your baby’s nervous system begins developing remarkably early in pregnancy. At the same time, your own autonomic nervous system is continually adapting to the enormous physical, physiological and emotional demands of growing a baby.
And there’s a fascinating body of research exploring the relationship between maternal stress, autonomic regulation and fetal development.
This doesn’t mean that feeling stressed, anxious or overwhelmed is harming your baby.
Stress is part of being human — and pregnancy certainly doesn’t make us immune to it.
Instead, it gives us another reason to appreciate just how important your own capacity to regulate, adapt and recover is during this remarkable period of change.
Your Baby’s Nervous System Starts Developing Early
The nervous system is one of the earliest systems to begin developing during pregnancy.
In the first few weeks after conception, the structures that will eventually form the brain and spinal cord begin taking shape. From there, neurological development continues throughout pregnancy — and well beyond birth.
It’s an incredibly complex process.
As the brain, spinal cord, peripheral nerves and autonomic nervous system develop, increasingly sophisticated connections begin forming throughout your baby’s body.
The autonomic nervous system will eventually play an important role in functions such as heart rate, digestion, breathing and the body’s responses to its environment.
This is one reason we’re so fascinated by nervous-system development at Coast Family Chiropractic.
The nervous system isn’t simply another body system.
It’s the body’s extraordinary communication and coordination network.
Your Nervous System Is Adapting Too
While your baby’s nervous system is developing, yours is doing a remarkable amount of adapting.
Pregnancy changes almost every system in your body.
Your cardiovascular system adapts to an increasing blood volume. Your posture and biomechanics change as your baby grows. Your sleep may change. Your energy demands increase. Hormonal changes influence multiple physiological processes.
And then there’s everyday life.
Work. Relationships. Other children. Appointments. Preparing for birth. Financial pressures. Interrupted sleep. The mental load of becoming — or becoming again — a parent.
Your autonomic nervous system is continually responding to all of it.
The sympathetic nervous system helps your body respond to activity and challenge — what we commonly call “fight or flight”.
The parasympathetic nervous system, including pathways involving the vagus nerve, is more closely associated with rest, digestion, recovery and regulation.
Neither system is bad.
What we’re interested in is your body’s ability to move appropriately between them and adapt to changing demands.
The Connection Between Maternal Stress and Baby’s Development
You and your baby aren’t two completely separate physiological systems during pregnancy.
Through the placenta and umbilical cord, your baby receives oxygen and nutrients and is exposed to a complex maternal environment involving hormones, immune signals and other physiological factors.
That doesn’t mean your nervous system is electrically connected to your baby’s nervous system.
And it certainly doesn’t mean that every stressful day, anxious thought or difficult moment is being directly “passed on” to your baby.
The relationship is far more complex than that.
Research has, however, explored associations between significant or sustained maternal stress during pregnancy and aspects of fetal and child development.
Researchers are also increasingly interested in how maternal autonomic regulation interacts with pregnancy and fetal physiology.
The important word here is association.
Pregnancy and child development are influenced by an enormous number of genetic, biological, environmental and social factors. Maternal stress is one part of a much bigger picture.
So this information isn’t something to feel guilty about.
It’s an opportunity to become curious about your own nervous system and how it’s adapting during pregnancy.
HRV: A Window Into Autonomic Regulation
One way we can gather information about autonomic nervous-system activity is through Heart Rate Variability, or HRV.
HRV measures the natural variation in time between heartbeats.
Your heart isn’t designed to beat like a metronome. The time between individual beats is continually changing as your nervous system responds to breathing, movement, activity, rest and other physiological demands.
By looking at these patterns, HRV can provide information associated with autonomic regulation.
At Coast Family Chiropractic, HRV may form part of our Neurological INSiGHT Scans.
Importantly, maternal HRV does not measure your baby’s nervous system or tell us whether your baby’s neurological development is “optimal”.
What it can give us is information about your own autonomic nervous-system activity at that point in time.
We then consider that information alongside your history and chiropractic assessment to build a broader picture of how your neurospinal system is functioning.
That’s quite different from guessing based on symptoms alone.
A Neurologically Focused Approach to Pregnancy
Neurologically Focused Prenatal Chiropractic Care focuses on you — your spine, your nervous system and the way your body is adapting throughout pregnancy.
As your baby grows, your body’s centre of gravity changes and your spine, pelvis, muscles and surrounding structures continually adapt.
At Coast Family Chiropractic, we take a detailed history and assess neurospinal function to identify patterns that may be relevant to your chiropractic care.
Where care is appropriate, gentle and specific chiropractic adjustments are tailored to the individual and to the stage of pregnancy.
Our aim isn’t to “optimise” your baby’s neurological development or claim that adjusting your spine changes your baby’s nervous system.
Our focus is much more appropriately on supporting your neurospinal function as your body navigates pregnancy.
We can also use measures such as HRV, where appropriate, to observe aspects of your autonomic activity over time.
Stress Isn’t the Enemy
There’s another important point that often gets lost in conversations about stress and pregnancy:
Your goal isn’t to eliminate stress.
That’s neither possible nor necessary.
Your nervous system is designed to respond to stress.
The interesting question is what happens afterwards.
Can your system adapt?
Can it shift gears?
Can it move from activity into rest and recovery?
How is it responding to the increasing physical and physiological demands of pregnancy?
These are some of the questions we’re interested in exploring through a neurologically focused chiropractic assessment.
And sometimes simply understanding what your nervous system is doing can change the way you think about caring for yourself during pregnancy.
You Are the Boss of Your Pregnancy
You get to ask questions.
You get to understand your options.
You get to make informed decisions about the care you want during pregnancy.
And you get to be curious about your own body rather than waiting until something feels wrong before paying attention to it.
At Coast Family Chiropractic, we think your nervous system deserves a place in that conversation.
Not because we can use it to predict your baby’s future health.
Not because one HRV reading can tell us everything that’s happening inside your body.
But because pregnancy places extraordinary demands on your nervous system, spine and body — and understanding how you’re adapting can give us useful information about your own neurospinal function.
If you’re pregnant and curious about what your nervous system and neurospinal assessment may tell us, contact Coast Family Chiropractic to arrange an initial consultation and Neurological INSiGHT Scans.
Your body is doing something extraordinary. We think it’s worth understanding how it’s adapting along the way.
