I’ve always struggled with my mental health, but by my late 20s, I really felt like I’d got the hang of it. I had a really good rhythm going with a job I mostly enjoyed, regular meditation, yoga and running, and even in the midst of the pandemic, my mental health was better than it had ever been.

In my first trimester, I had acute pregnancy sickness. I lost confidence in my body and I found it really difficult to exercise – I just didn’t know when I would need to throw up. I ate too much because I was so frightened of being hungry, and for me hungry meant being sick. 

So by my second trimester I’d gained weight, I’d left my job because they’d not been supportive, and I was too anxious to run – a lot of my carefully constructed healthy lifestyle came crashing down in a few short months. Then my bump started growing and I felt so out of control regarding these changes. In short, things were tough!

In my third trimester I started pregnancy yoga, and it made such a huge difference. Yoga as an exercise can cover so many bases in your mental and physical health, and particularly in the big perinatal change, it can act like a lifeline in turbulent times. This is how it helped me:

A safe and comfortable form of exercise

As my running had stopped when the sickness started, I was finding it hard to keep my strength up for my growing body. Pregnancy yoga gave me a form of exercise which was gentle enough to feel safe, but had strong elements to keep me mobile and give me a sense of achievement after each session.

Deep breathing

Breathwork in yoga predates the postures, and in fact most breathing exercises we do today originate in yoga so if you’ve done any form of breathwork like counting breaths or box breathing, you’ve done a form of yogic breathing. Breathwork has a ton of benefits: it helps relax the nervous system, helping you find calm and safety, and it also protects against diastasis recti and pelvic floor dysfunction, so it’s something simple that provides holistic good health throughout the perinatal journey.

Mindfulness in the here and now

Mindfulness is about being truly present and ‘in-the-moment’. It is a really strong defence against anxiety as it allows you to drop all those worrying ‘what-if’ thoughts, where you’re either worrying about something which has happened, or something which might happen. Being present stops you ‘time-traveling’ and can allow you to feel peace, calm and safety in the present moment.

Mind-body connection

There are decades of research supporting the theory that our physical state and mental health are intrinsically interconnected, so when we move into postures in yoga, the focus needed to know where your foot is and how it’s gripping the floor is a simple and easy way of building up healthy connections between the body and mind. Like breathwork, there are a ton of benefits that you get from this, such as calming the nervous system and getting to know your body better, allowing you to build emotional resilience and tap into your intuition more easily.

Somatic healing

Trauma and stress are often held in the body through tense muscles, so sometimes when we release and stretch in yoga, it can help to gently ease trauma and stress. The beauty of using yoga as a wellbeing tool is that you can incorporate some of this work as a part of your practice. It doesn’t take the place of therapy, but it can really help to support a therapeutic approach and protect against trauma bedding into the system.

Building your village

Going to an in-person group gives you the chance to meet other women going through a similar journey. It can really help take the edge off stressors – everyone is in a similar boat, with their own challenges. It helped me feel a lot less alone and a lot more supported.

Preparing for birth

Yoga gave me breathing techniques so I could choose the ones which worked for me and practice them. There are also numerous birthing positions which pregnancy yoga is based around, so you can go into birth with a lot of tools at your disposal, helping to build confidence for the big day.

Everyone’s perinatal journey is different; for some it’s (fairly) smooth going and for others it’s incredibly tough. Pregnancy yoga won’t erase the challenges, but it can provide the tools to build resilience and a sense of safety, so you can move through this period and come out the other side stronger, wiser and ready to take on the next chapter.

Eleanor Stowe is founder of POMPOM Perinatal – Pregnancy and Postnatal Yoga. You can find more of her writing and recordings at pompomperinatal.co.uk , Youtube: @pompomperinatal , Facebook @pompomperinatal , Instagram @pompomperinatal