“Why is it always in the middle of the night?” I asked my husband as our smoke detector battery alert starts beeping around midnight last night. Somehow our batteries ALWAYS run low in the dark hours of the night, forcing someone (usually my husband, unless he is traveling) to get out of bed, find a battery, possibly get a ladder, and climb up to change it out.
I swear the creator of those things had a slightly evil side to them.
They must be designed that way.
Speaking of things designed to go off at night, what’s with labor always getting a good start in the middle of the night? (I’m channeling a little Seinfield here. “What’s the deal with labor?”)
In the simplest terms, it’s all about the hormones, baby.
Oxytocin is released when things are calm and we feel safe and protected. The reality of most of our lives is that we are busy during the day. Whether that’s at work or home or both. When we’re asleep, or prepping for sleep, we turn down the lights, maybe talk in hushed tones, and crawl into a sleeping space that feels safe and comforting, thus encouraging oxytocin production.
Not only do we encourage the release of oxytocin while sleeping/relaxing, melatonin, a hormone released during sleep, also encourages more production of oxytocin, in addition to other hormones. (There’s some neat information on the interwebs about how using light exposure with pregnant people with a high risk of preterm delivery could potentially delay the onset of labor.)
Given this information, it really isn’t surprising that, in a study from 2018, that the majority of spontaneous births (meaning no medical assistance with the starting of labor) were between the hours of 1 am and 7 am.
Like with our smoke detectors, our RCD doulas are here to hop out of bed in the middle of the night to head towards those inevitable middle of the night births. Unlike with our smoke detectors, we’re happy to do it and completely expect those 1 am wakeups.
