Every year in the United States, approximately four million women give birth. According to America’s Health Rankings, almost a million of them experience complications during at least one stage of the birth process, including the postpartum period. Unfortunately, the focus is often on pregnancy, labor, and delivery, while postpartum care is frequently overlooked and under-supported.
The postpartum period is a critical time for a mother’s recovery due to the significant physical, emotional, and mental changes after childbirth. Inadequate care during this time can lead to missed opportunities to address health issues, including mental health concerns.
Holistic postpartum care that encompasses physical, mental, and social well-being can ensure a healthy and positive recovery for new mothers. It is an approach that recognizes the interconnectedness and importance of embracing body, mind, and support systems to improve a woman’s overall health as she adjusts to motherhood.
This article provides an overview of the postpartum period and how a holistic care approach can support you during this challenging time.
The postpartum period is the time after delivery during which a mother’s body undergoes physiological changes, as it returns to its pre-pregnancy state. It is also referred to as the fourth trimester and typically lasts for six to eight weeks; however, some changes can extend for up to six months. The Cleveland Clinic identifies three distinct stages of natural postpartum recovery:
The first six to twelve hours are critical due to the physical adjustments that occur as the body recovers from labor and birth. During this time, healthcare providers monitor for potential complications that could lead to medical emergencies.
Occurs approximately 24 hours after delivery and lasts for roughly two to six weeks. Although mothers are less likely to experience a medical emergency during this time, it involves ongoing physical recovery, hormonal shifts, and emotional adjustments. Changes in mood, appetite, and sleep patterns may be significant and should be monitored by healthcare professionals.
This phase lasts about six weeks to six months after childbirth and involves ongoing physical and emotional healing. There may be lingering physical effects, but many women often feel more like themselves again. However, some may face more significant emotional challenges.
New mothers commonly face a range of physical and emotional challenges after childbirth. Common physical challenges may include:
Emotional challenges may involve:
Many of these challenges can significantly impact a mother’s well-being and her ability to care for her newborn.
Postpartum recovery encompasses both physical and emotional healing after childbirth. Both are essential for your well-being and ability to care for your newborn. The physical aspect of postpartum care helps:
It also helps address issues like pelvic floor weakness and nutritional needs. Proper monitoring can help prevent postpartum complications and often includes:
Rest and the gradual return to movement after childbirth are also crucial for recovery. Prioritizing rest in the initial weeks allows your body to heal from the physical trauma of labor and delivery. Gentle movement incorporated into a phased return to activity, guided by a healthcare professional, helps improve circulation, mood, and overall well-being.
Mental and emotional wellness are essential for you and your baby’s well-being. Emotional and mental recovery can help you:
Seeking support while prioritizing personal well-being early on during postpartum recovery can significantly improve your transition into motherhood. Mindfulness, relaxation, and self-care techniques such as meditation or journaling can help:
However, this aspect of emotional and mental recovery should be in addition to professional support, including counseling, therapy, and peer support. Professional assistance offers a safe space to process emotions, addresses challenges, and builds coping mechanisms.
Social and practical support systems can significantly impact a new mother’s wellness. They allow them to heal and adjust to their new roles by providing essential assistance with childcare and household tasks, while ensuring emotional comfort and care. Achieving this requires a support network including family, partners, community, and healthcare professionals, all playing crucial roles.
Family can assist with meal preparation and errands, freeing up time and energy for rest and bonding with your baby. Their assistance can include scheduling appointments and arranging transportation to ensure you attend doctor’s visits, therapy, or support group meetings. Family members can also provide a listening ear, offer encouragement, and help you feel less isolated and more connected.
Partners are involved in many family support functions, including prioritizing your self-care and sharing nighttime caregiving responsibilities. They should also provide nonverbal emotional support, such as physical touch and affection, while maintaining open communication about relationship dynamics. It is also important for partners to be proactive in seeking professional help for both themselves and you if needed.
Communities often provide practical assistance to new mothers, but are crucial for social connection, especially groups that offer a safe space to share experiences, reducing isolation. Community initiatives can help promote a better understanding of postpartum health and reduce the stigma of seeking help.
Professional support is particularly crucial for first-time mothers. It often encompasses a unique network that can include:
In addition to these support systems, time off from work and parental leave allow you to recover physically, adjust to new family dynamics, and bond with your newborn.
Holistic postpartum care focuses on nurturing a new mother’s physical, emotional, social, and spiritual care after childbirth. It emphasizes gentle healing, emotional support, and self-care practices. This approach incorporates:
Prioritizing nutrient-dense whole foods to support healing and energy levels, while staying hydrated. In some cases, it may incorporate the use of herbal remedies for digestion and lactation.
Involves listening to your body, starting slowly with moderate exercises and gradually increasing intensity as your body strengthens. It also focuses on pelvic floor exercises, as strengthening these muscles is crucial for recovery. However, pushing yourself too hard is discouraged. Instead, prioritize rests and breaks, allowing for ample rest to aid in healing.
Starts with building a support network by connecting with loved ones, joining support groups, or seeking professional counseling. Many of these groups can also provide resources or access to special services, including lactation consulting and physical therapy.
You should also engage in self-care activities that relieve stress and promote relaxation, such as meditation, deep breathing, and warm baths. Be mindful of your mental health, learning to recognize and address signs of postpartum depression or anxiety promptly.
These can include holistic healing practices that encompass a range of therapies, addressing the interconnectedness of mind, body, and spirit to improve overall well-being, rather than focusing on specific symptoms. These can include:
These not only help with pain management, but can reduce stress and anxiety, improve mood, and emotional well-being.
Holistic postpartum care should be based on personalized plans, tailored to individual needs.
Long-term postpartum wellness should extend beyond the initial weeks after childbirth, with a focus on maintaining healthy habits and self-care. It should include:
By prioritizing long-term wellness beyond the initial postpartum period, you can ensure a healthier, more fulfilling experience of motherhood.
Having a baby is often seen as a time of great joy and anticipation. However, it can also be physically challenging and emotionally complex, especially as you transition into your new role as a mother. Holistic postpartum care offers numerous benefits by addressing the physical, emotional, and mental well-being of new mothers.
Modern Holistic Health focuses on functional health, offering a holistic care approach through a personalized healing program that addresses the root cause of your health issue rather than simply treating symptoms. We will provide the support you need to align your mind, body, and spirit after birth for a healthier transition into motherhood. Schedule your virtual appointment today and allow us to help you along your postpartum wellness journey.
(For established clients)
This appointment type should only be made for an established client. (After you have had your initial/first visit completed).
Not sure WHO to book with? No Problem! Here at MHH we have an AMAZING team of coaches and EVERY ONE OF OUR COACHES can help you with ANY of your conditions, so just pick the one that has availability on the day and time that works best for you.
This package contains 12 Biological Coaching Visits at 30 minutes each. Purchasing this package can save you 10% vs. if you purchased 12 sessions individually.
Using the combined modalities of EFT tapping, Resonance Repatterning, Color, Light, and Sound, this visit type addresses:
• Anxiety • Depression • Fear • Mind racing • Feelings of anger • Feelings of hopelessness • and more…
This unique approach can address and resolve emotional trauma, present or past, that has been locked into the physical body’s memory, often below the realm of conscious thought. Our bodies replay these memories at different times, and they can adversely affect our health especially in times of great stress and uncertainty.
These packages contain 12 Brain & Emotional Repatterning visits of 60 minutes or 90 minutes each. Purchasing either of these packages will save you 15% as compared to purchasing individual sessions
Not feeling well and looking for help with your condition, diagnosis, or symptoms that won’t go away no matter what you have tried? Our holistic biological health coaches can help you! Our coaches teach you how your body works, what the underlying cause of your condition or symptoms are, and how to fix and address them using long-term solutions that are data-driven and that work!
Our holistic biological health coaches have a deep understanding of advanced functional testing and genetics testing, along with much experience in complex cases.
Our biological coaching team works with you to empower and teach you how to understand and interpret your lab results, what your results mean, how they are connected to your health conditions or symptoms, and most importantly, what to do with the information, how to put protocols together based on your lab results, and when to reorder your various labs to track progress.
You will become your own healing master learning how to navigate the healing process, how to modify your protocols, when and how to detoxify your organs and cells from the toxins discovered on your lab results. You will learn the importance of tracking your assessment forms and symptom sheets and how to troubleshoot your healing process.
In addition, you have the opportunity to learn how to understand YOUR genetic blueprint – Our coaches are trained in the field of epigenetics and understand implicitly that YOU are in control of your own gene expression and how your genes either work for or against you. If you choose to add genetic testing into your program, your genetic blueprint information can be used not only to help drive your plan of action for healing, but also it can be used to understand your body’s unique nutrition, lifestyle, sleeping, eating, and physical activity needs are so that you can optimize once you are healed.
Get help from our functional nutrition coaches who understand that there is no ONE diet that is right for everyone. Our nutrition coaches work hand in hand with our biological coaches so if you need any lab work done or specific protocols that would require supplement protocols, you have a team working on your behalf and your nutrition coach would make recommendations for which other team coaches would be able to help you.
Your coaches will teach and empower you to learn how to determine and navigate your diet modifications which are decided based on your extensive intake forms, history, and your lab data that your coaches may want to order for you. Based on all of this information, they will teach you what foods to eat and not eat according to various conditions and why.
Your functional nutrition coach will help you learn what substitutes you can use when there are certain foods you may need to stop eating for a period of time, how to put your meals together based on your dietary needs per your lab data, how and when to incorporate gut repair protocols, and what lifestyle modifications you want to address based on your labs and your health conditions.
Nutritional coaching can be a great tool by itself or combined with coaching from our biological coaches. You can schedule with either our biological or nutrition coaches and they can help you get started and make recommendations as needed.
Many people who have successfully mentored with our nutrition coaches have had past issues such as:
Mindset, past and present traumas, and limiting belief systems are some of the biggest barriers to healing, so much in fact that gene expression and biological ‘engines’ of the human body can change for the worse because of it.
In the many years, we have been working in the field of holistic medicine, helping people who have tried everything else with no success or little success, we have discovered how great of an impact our thoughts, beliefs, and past and present trauma, and chronic stress can be to the human body, mind, and spirit.
The rate of recovery and healing for those who place emphasis on creating new neurological pathways to imprint new and healthy mindsets and belief systems in how they perceive themselves and the world around them is greatly improved when the psychological aspect of mindset and integration of mind, body, the spirit is addressed through repatterning of the mind and body neurology.
By removing barriers discovered from traumas, mindset, and conscious/unconscious patterns that are not congruent for healing, health, and vitality, you set yourself up for the best outcomes in your healing journey. Healing only occurs when the physical, emotional, and mental barriers to healing are removed.
Therefore we incorporate mind, body, spirit integration work into our programs and in doing so, we see exponential increases in positive outcomes with our clients. We have put together the most comprehensive ‘whole person’ approach in the world, and this is why our results are so successful.
Our Emotional Processing, Stress Release, & Neurological Repatterning coaches work with you to create new neurological connections, anchor new neurology, and habits, and show you how to become aware of any conscious or unconscious belief systems that may be holding you back from healing and total health.
You are welcome to try one or two appointments to see what you think. We typically recommend a minimum of 6 sessions to make an accurate assessment of how this type of modality is working for you.
Here are some of the modalities our Emotional Processing, Stress Release, & Neurological Repatterning coaches use for brain and body repatterning:
Breathwork is more than just a simple exercise of intentional breathing. Specialized breathwork techniques are used to facilitate major transformation and healing by encompassing a wide range of therapeutic practices that are extremely powerful in providing immediate relief for pulling people out of fight or flight (the amygdala hijack we teach about in Part 2 of our Mastering Trauma Masterclass).
This vagus nerve activation through breath work activates the rest/digest (parasympathetic nervous system), stimulates healing, reduces blood pressure, reduces the cortisol stress response, regulates hormone and blood glucose activity, and heart rate variability (the biological stress response). It rewires the body for self-regulation of the nervous system in a manner that optimizes the body and creates resilience in times of stress.
Yoga breath therapy allows you to disconnect from the mind chatter, mind racing, and negative self-talk and reconnect with your body your energy. From this elevated state of awareness, you are able to facilitate healing, growth, and expansion. And if you are looking for some expansion of your body/mind/spirit awareness, then this type of breathwork can be nourishing and can facilitate the next layer of peace, love, gratitude, connection, clarity, and insights.
In the many years, we have been working in the field of holistic medicine, helping people who have tried everything else with no success or little success, we have discovered how great of a damaging impact our thoughts, beliefs, and past and present trauma, and chronic stress (the fight or flight response) can be to the human body, mind, and spirit.
By becoming aware of how to regulate our own nervous system, and resolve traumas, mindset, and conscious/unconscious patterns that are not congruent for healing, health, and vitality, you set yourself up for the best outcomes in your healing journey. Healing only occurs when the physical, emotional, and mental barriers to healing are removed.
The rate of recovery and healing for those who place emphasis on:
….. Find much success and amplification in their healing journey.