For quite some time, I’ve been interested in the concept of “generational trauma,” or the idea that stress can be passed down from generation to generation. Surely, if you grew up with a mother who was overly self-critical, you’d be more likely to develop negative self-perception, right?
On the other hand, if your father was raised in a strict household and continued to cultivate that dynamic within his own home, you might feel like you’re walking on eggshells in your own environment. Thus, unless an individual is highly aware and willing to break these patterns and regulate their nervous system, the cycle continues.
From family environments to learned behaviors, we often perpetuate what we are familiar with. But did you know that stress itself can physically be passed down from a mother, causing negative health effects in children?
Your Sleep Patterns While You’re Pregnant Can Predict a Lot About Your Baby’s Health
One recent study found that “poor prenatal maternal sleep health may be an environmental signal that informs offspring health.” In other words, your mom’s sleep patterns could impact your sleep health, physical health, developmental outcomes, and even brain structure and function. Such outcomes could range from shorter sleep durations to more hospital admissions, from obesity to ADHD, etc.
These findings clearly indicate that a mother’s sleep patterns affect her baby’s overall health and development post-birth.
“Evidence consistently links poor prenatal sleep health to poorer offspring sleep, higher body mass index, higher prevalence of physical health conditions, poorer global development, and more behavioral problems,” the study reports. “Emerging evidence also links prenatal sleep to differences in offspring brain structure and function.”
Lawson Wulsin, M.D., a professor of psychiatry and family medicine at the University of Cincinnati and author of Toxic Stress: How Stress is Making Us Ill and What We Can Do About It, reframed these findings.
“Does it make sense to you that something as common and tolerable as insomnia should have lasting effects on the child’s physical and mental health?” he questioned in a Psychology Today article. “It makes sense to me only if the insomnia is a sign of the mother’s dysregulated stress response system since regular restful sleep is one of the essentials for keeping our stress response systems healthy.”
“Future studies should consider the possibility that the mother’s dysregulated sleep preceded the pregnancy and continued after the birth, passing her toxic form of stress along to the next generation by genes or by example, or both,” he concluded.
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