The Better Baby Book (28 page)

Our emotional states are reflected in our heart rhythms. Since the heart is the strongest source of rhythmic physical vibrations in the human body, the rest of the body's systems align with the heartbeat. If your emotional state is one of stress, your entire body feels the effects. The influence goes both ways: the heart profoundly influences the brain's emotional center (the amygdala), too. When the heart and the brain align in purpose instead of fighting for control, this heightens mental clarity, intelligence, and intuition. When the desires of the heart and the brain conflict, the brain and the heart fight for control and create incoherence throughout the body, raising a person's stress level.

Core heart feelings like love and compassion reduce the activity of the sympathetic nervous system (which facilitates stress responses) and increase the activity of the parasympathetic nervous system (which calms us from stress). Positive emotions like appreciation, care, compassion, happiness, and love improve hormonal balance and strengthen the immune system. People used to think that a steady heartbeat was healthy, but now we know that a heart in high coherence—that is, aligned in purpose with the brain—speeds up and slows down in a steady pattern that resembles a sine wave.

Coherence is exactly what we want for a mother during pregnancy to keep her fetus in growth mode. The researchers at HeartMath discovered that we can use our hearts and brains together to activate these positive emotions, purposefully creating a state of head-heart coherence. Now you can buy a simple device based on the HeartMath emWave technology that tells you when you're in coherence and confirms that your stress levels are falling. It's the fastest and easiest way we know to reduce stress and to know that you've reduced your stress.

Practicing coherence with emWave technology takes just a few minutes a day. Research has shown that when you practice coherence over time, your coherence baseline actually increases, meaning that you're naturally in coherence more of the day than you were before. For more information, visit
www.betterbabybook.com/heartmath
. This is the single best stress reducer we know, and Dave is a certified heart math coach and consultant.

Dealing with Travel

Even if you don't feel it much, travel substantially increases your stress level. Jet travel across time zones can disrupt the body's circadian rhythm and routine. When presented with a new time zone, a new light-dark cycle, and a new temperature, your body needs to adapt, but it resists these changes.

The process of adapting to a new environment is stressful for the body. And if it's stressful for a mother, it's stressful for her unborn baby. Hormone excretion cycles and body temperature have to catch up to the new schedule, and most of the time this is accompanied by sleep deprivation because of the travel experience. For a woman to be fertile and experience a regular menstrual cycle, maintaining a regular sleep-wake schedule is essential. Since travel often disrupts this, we suggest minimizing travel before and during pregnancy if you can.

These days, traveling exposes us to lots of toxins, too. Airplane cabins contain more than 80 percent recirculated air. Pilots allegedly get as much as ten times more oxygen than passengers do. This low oxygen environment is bad for fertility and especially harmful for a fetus. General travel stress also leads to elevated adrenaline and cortisol levels. The close proximity to many people, the reduced oxygen level in the body, and the recirculation of air raise the risk of contracting infectious diseases, particularly upper respiratory ones. They are transmitted when an infected person sneezes and coughs or touches surfaces such as door knobs. With the air being 80 percent recirculated, you don't even have to be sitting near someone to be exposed to these pathogens.

Airlines frequently reduce the air circulation level in the cabin to reduce the flight cost. Fainting, nausea, and headaches among passengers happen sometimes because of the lack of oxygen. Getting an asthma oxygen inhaler from your doctor to use on a flight can help. If you fly, wearing a surgical mask can reduce your exposure to contaminated air. Of course, most air travelers don't wear surgical masks, but we've seen plenty of people wear them, so you might not be the only one doing so. You can also drizzle drinking water on a handkerchief or surgical mask to humidify your own air supply and alleviate dizziness, light-headedness, and goofy feelings. We wouldn't worry about this for a short flight.

On international flights, in order to prevent international transmission of crop-ruining insects, highly toxic pesticides may be sprayed directly into the air that passengers breathe, and mists settle on the skin. Planes heading into Australia, the Czech Republic, China, Cuba, Egypt, Grenada, India, Kenya, Kiribati, Madagascar, Nigeria, Senegal, the Seychelles, South Africa, Switzerland, Tahiti, Trinidad, Tobago, the United Kingdom, and Uruguay are sprayed. Planes to Barbados, the Cook Islands, Fiji, Jamaica, New Zealand, and Panama are sometimes treated with residual insecticides, which could easily harm passengers who board the planes later. If you fly to one of these countries during pregnancy, covering yourself with a blanket during the spraying will help.

Addressing Jaw Tension

Jaw tension can raise your stress level. A poor bite, such as an overbite or when the top front four teeth collide with the bottom front teeth, raises the level of a neuropeptide called substance P throughout the body. A high level of substance P is correlated with many health problems, including autoimmune conditions, which can interfere with pregnancy or cause health problems in a baby. Substance P can cause hypercoagulation of the blood, which is already a problem for some pregnant women. Substance P also blocks progesterone from doing its job.

Dr. Dwight Jennings, a dentist in Alameda, California, is one of the world's top experts on the effects of jaw tension. After more than twenty years of practice and clinical experience, Dr. Jennings believes that if there's a bad bite alignment in a mother, it can harm her baby, because it influences inflammation throughout the mother's nervous system. He had one patient who couldn't get pregnant for years. When he corrected her bite with a bite guard and splint, she got pregnant just four months later. Many of his other patients had suffered from spontaneous miscarriages but were able to have successful pregnancies after he corrected their jaw misalignments.

If you have any jaw pain or tension, or if your top front teeth hit your bottom front teeth when you close your mouth, consider seeing a specialist in temporomandibular joint disorder (TMJ). Dentists and orthodontists who specialize in TMJ can provide a splint or do bite realignment work with braces or other methods. This can lower jaw tension and substance P levels, which will boost fertility and the health of mother and baby. If seeing a specialist isn't practical, an inexpensive nighttime bite guard from your local drugstore can help, too. A simple way to deal with substance P directly is to take cayenne pepper capsules with your meals. Capsaicin, the hot part of chili peppers, depletes the body's substance P supply.

Lighting

In our modern society, we're exposed to hours of unnatural light from various kinds of bulbs. Most bulbs emit light that's just fine for our health, but there are a couple of types to avoid. The first is fluorescent bulbs, whether it's daytime or nighttime. The second is blue- or green-spectrum light at night. Blue- or green-spectrum light isn't harmful in itself, but it can disturb sleep patterns at night.

Fluorescent Light

John Ott, a twentieth-century photographer and cinematographer, was one of the first to study the effects of light on humans and animals. His research revealed that fluorescent bulbs damage our health. Perhaps because of fluorescent bulbs' flickering and glare, unnatural light spectrum, and ultraviolet light emission, people exposed to fluorescent lights have complained of blurred vision, dizziness, eyestrain, fatigue, headaches, mood swings, nausea, and other problems.

Fluorescent lights are believed to deplete vitamins A, B, and possibly D in the body, and deficiency in these vitamins corresponds with the symptoms fluorescents cause. Low B levels can result in fatigue, for example. Fluorescent bulbs also emit certain types of radiation, including X-rays and microwaves, which may explain their association with cancer, autism, ADHD, birth defects, and Alzheimer's disease. Fluorescent bulbs include not just the traditional long tubes but also the new compact fluorescent bulbs. In 2012, Stony Brook University researchers published a report on the release of cancer-promoting ultraviolet light from fluorescent bulbs. If you're exposed to fluorescent lights, try keeping the lights off and see if you feel better. You can also try full-spectrum bulbs (which fit in many standard fluorescent fixtures) or NaturaLux filters, which balance colors, eliminate glare, and cut radiation (including ultraviolet radiation) from fluorescents.

Sometimes it's not possible to turn the lights off because you're working in a public area. In this case, wearing sunglasses, polarized lenses, or glasses with built in yoke prisms can filter the light and produce less environmental stress.

It's ideal to depend on sunlight as much as possible during the day. As incandescent bulbs are phased out over the next several years, industry is pushing for the use of compact fluorescents. But for the reasons discussed here, we recommend opting for halogen, LED, or xenon lighting with high-quality dimmer switches. Low-quality dimmer switches result in flickering and EMF emission. Dimmer switches are great, because dimming the lights at night prepares you for going to sleep. The lower-intensity light allows the pineal gland to begin producing melatonin.

White or Blue- or Green-Spectrum Light

Light color and light intensity heavily influence our hormones and sleep cycles, with blue- and green-spectrum lights having particularly strong waking effects. When blue- or green-spectrum light (emitted in sunlight and most white light) is seen by the eyes, the pineal gland reduces melatonin production.

Other light colors, including red and ultraviolet, can suppress melatonin production as well, but they usually have to be very bright. With blue and green light, though, just a little—such as a blue LED in your bedroom—will stimulate wakefulness. This is why the best alarm clocks are manufactured with red displays.

Women wake up several times a night during pregnancy to use the bathroom, and after birth it's common to awaken in the middle of the night to nurse. If white, blue- or green-spectrum light is seen during these times, it can be very difficult to fall back to sleep. Insomnia may result, and ongoing insomnia and disrupted sleep patterns will lead to exhaustion and poor health for mom and baby.

Fortunately, there are dim LED nightlights on the market that emit no blue- or green-spectrum light at all. After we replaced our incandescent nightlights with LED nightlights, Lana found it very easy to return to sleep after waking in the middle of the night. We also found blackout curtains that completely block light, which is helpful for naps and sleeping during the daytime. We include links to suppliers of nightlights that do not interfere with melatonin production at
www.betterbabybook.com/lighting
. These are extra helpful after your baby arrives too, because they help babies sleep better too.

16

Does Intention Matter?

Much of the content of this book is based on hard science. The concepts are often tangible and easy to measure. Hard science likes it that way, and as a Silicon Valley executive and a medical doctor, we are always delighted when we find hard scientific confirmation for something we think is true.

Yet in the process of becoming advanced yoga students and learning to meditate, we discovered that even things that are hard to measure can matter—an awful lot. There are even hard scientific studies showing that 70 percent of women who “had a feeling” about the sex of their babies were right. What's more, 100 percent of women who dreamed about their baby's sex were right.

We aren't psychics, and we don't have any other special abilities. We're level-headed, normal people with professional degrees and jobs. We mention these types of unquantifiable experiences because when we shared them with our friends, we got more than a few smiles and nods, and other mothers related similar experiences back to us. It's more common than we realize, and it's a normal part of many of our lives. Lana hears these things often in her fertility practice.

An astonishing book,
The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World
by Lynne McTaggart, summarizes a large body of research on how our attitudes and intentions can shape our future reality. Some new breakthroughs in quantum physics are even starting to support the findings. Books like
The Secret
by Rhonda Byrne and movies like
What the Bleep Do We Know?
are commonplace. Bruce Lipton's
The Biology of Belief
is another example of this line of thinking. The jury is still out on whether mainstream science accepts these ideas. But from our personal experience, we're sold. We do believe that intention plays a role in how our lives turn out, including the health of our children and whether we have children at all. We firmly believe that our expectation that we could and would get pregnant played a role in our success.

We certainly don't mean to say that people who are having difficulty conceiving don't want it enough—there are plenty of biochemical and lifestyle reasons that can make things go wrong. Nonetheless, knowing with certainty that you want to get pregnant and having faith that you will can help a lot with getting pregnant and having a healthy pregnancy. We even found some research supporting the notion that children who are wanted while they are in the womb have significantly better psychological profiles later in life.

For a couple to have the healthiest, happiest children possible, it's essential that they
want
children. Wanting your baby can be important for fertility, and after conception it's critical for your baby's health and well-being. Both partners' desire or lack of desire to have a child has a tremendous impact on your baby's entire life. This factor has a strong influence even before conception. Long before your baby's brain forms or she becomes fully conscious, every individual cell in the embryo or fetus maintains an experience-based unconscious memory. When sex is accompanied by feelings of sensuality and love, the egg is more likely to receive the sperm willingly and happily. Egg and sperm and all the cells they produce then carry an unconscious “memory” of peace, love, and well-being instead of indifference, violence, or stress.

Studies of children born to mothers who didn't want them showed low average birth weights, high infant mortality rates, and poor health and development. Unwanted babies are twice as likely to die within a month of being born. In one Czech study, the researchers tracked 2,290 babies born between 1961 and 1963. The babies were born to women who were twice denied abortions during their pregnancy with the studied babies. In case after case, the unwanted children had more physical and emotional handicaps than usual. The handicaps became more significant and more noticeable the older the children got (and they were tracked well into adulthood).

Scientists at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research found in 1999 that unwanted children almost always have lower self-esteem than wanted children. Much of this is probably due to the mother's ongoing release of stress hormones. Since she doesn't want the baby, and the pregnancy itself is stressful for her, every time she looks at her body and is reminded of it, she's stressed instead of filled with joy.

To achieve the best health for their children, parents need to create a sense of calm and love from before conception onward. We think that maintaining this throughout pregnancy and your child's entire life has more benefits than scientists yet understand. And it will benefit you as much as it benefits your children. A child conceived and raised in love will benefit from that forever. Before we had our children, we both knew that we wanted them. If you don't really want children, the scientific evidence says that it's best not to have them, even if you're getting pressure from others.