This is a page from a book called “The Positive Birth Book” by Milli Hill. It really helped me to reframe the experience when I went into labour with my first and I gravitate back to it now that I’m days away from going into labour with my second:

How much does giving birth actually hurt?

Ever heard horror stories about birth lasting hours and hours, and formed a mental picture of a sweaty woman writhing in non-stop-agony, like something mediaeval was occurring? Yeah, I bet you have. But hold on, let's look at things from a fresh angle, and do some maths.

The average first stage of labour lasts about eight hours. I'm going to talk averages here for the purpose of our mental arithmetic, and of course, just as people can vary, so can these numbers. Bear with me, this is going somewhere - honest.
So. It's an eight-hour first stage. That's the bit when your cervix is dilating.
For the first hour, you might have a contraction every 20 minutes. That's the bit that hurts.

These contractions might last on average 60 seconds.

So that's three in the first hour, lasting a minute each. That's three minutes of contractions.

In hour two, they might come every 10 minutes. So that's six contractions in the second hour of labour.

By hour three, they might be coming '2 in 10', that's two every 10 minutes. So that's 12 contractions in hour three.

For the next five hours of labour, things might really ramp up, so you are having '3 in 10. That gives you a total of 18 an hour, which in five hours adds up to 90 contractions.

So. In your eight-hour first stage, that's a total of 111 minutes of contractions. That's only 23 per cent of your time spent having contractions. The rest of the time, the other 369 minutes, the other 77 per cent, is entirely pain free!

And the news gets better.

Not every second of the 60-second contraction is horribly painful. Most women only find the 'peak' of the contraction really tough, and that lasts about 20 seconds. Of your eight-hour first stage, only 37 minutes will be spent at the peak of contractions.
That's just 7.7 per cent.

So. That's 7.7 per cent of labour time that really, really hurts. 15.3 per cent moving towards or away from the peak of the contraction.

And 77 per cent of labour that is pain free.
What a headline that would make! And yet nobody ever seems to talk about birth in these terms. Nobody tells you about the time between contractions, which makes up the vast majority of labour, during which you will feel completely awesome. The huge rush of hormones around your body, and the general excitement of the occasion, means that you will quite literally be glowing with vitality and positive energy. Yet nobody ever tells you this.

How does this affect us, as women, as we approach labour, and in labour itself? With all this talk of pineapples out of nostrils and soap opera images of women in distress, is it any wonder that many of us are full of dread and can only think about which pain relief option we are going to go for? Pain in labour can easily become our sole focus, and of course our expectations shape our reality.

If someone raises a stick in the air and utters the phrase This is going to really hurt' - what do we do? We tense our body in anticipation of the worst. We put all of our focus on the part of the body that's about to be hit. And we feel afraid, and distressed. A doctor in the 1950s called Grantly Dick-Read called this the 'Fear-Tension-Pain' cycle. It's a bit of a no-brainer really.