A West Cork business woman and mum-to-be has created a pioneering website designed to help other pregnant women and new mothers navigate the overwhelming overload of information that is part of the maternity journey in Ireland. Built by Sinéad O’Donovan from Timoleague, maternityjourneyireland.ie provides a free, simple checklist that covers every appointment, form and entitlement, week by week, drawn from HSE
and Citizens Information guidance. She chats
to Mary O’Brien.
Sinéad’s own maternity journey began this year after she walked away from a demanding position as a senior executive to pursue her ambition of starting up her own business.
Facing into new territory on both accounts, the expectant mother set herself the task of reducing overwhelm and stress-load by creating a checklist to help make sense of the information and preparations involved at each stage of the maternity experience. “I wanted to bring useful guidance together in one place rather than requiring a search across multiple sources,” she explains.
The easy-to-follow phase-based approach of the website designed by Sinéad covers from early pregnancy and antenatal care to preparing for labour and birth, followed by the postnatal period with checklists providing a practical way to organise key tasks along the way.
Sinéad’s consultancy practice is also founded on the premise that reducing stress improves health, lifestyle and productivity. She experienced burnout firsthand while working for over ten years in a top leadership position. Despite holding a PhD in nutrition and inflammation, the executive found that she couldn’t apply what she knew to herself. “When I was under pressure everything I had learned about nutrition and inflammation during my PhD went out the window,” says Sinéad.
Recognising the toll that her career was taking on her health and personal life – working 60-hour weeks left little time for her marriage or anything else – Sinead made the decision to change course in life.
In the wake of addressing her own health concerns, she combined her business acumen with her academic background in nutritional science to set up The Leadership Biome, positioning herself as Ireland’s first leadership physiology expert.
Her business model bridges the gap between physiology and productivity in the workplace bringing focus and clarity to leaders who are burning the candle at both ends and struggling to understand the effect that prolonged unmanaged chronic stress has on their nervous system and working capacity.
“If you’re under stress you automatically tend to pull back,” she shares. “You pull back from your friends, your family and the things you enjoy doing in life. There is very little joy left after that.”
She says that cortisol has a bad reputation as the ‘stress hormone’. “It’s painted as the baddie of the hormones but it’s actually vital for our survival,” explains Sinéad. “Cortisol is what wakes you up in the morning and what drives you through crises and deadlines.”
Hormones like oxytocin, which are released in response to physical touch and emotional connection, are needed to buffer cortisol’s response to stress.
“Oxytocin decreases as we pull back from society,” explains Sinéad. “Physiologically our biochemistry changes when we’re constantly under stress; our beneficial gut bacteria also deteriorate, which creates low grade inflammation, the precursor to chronic diseases that come knocking on the door later in life. Every system is affected because once inflammation crosses into the circulatory or cardiovascular system it travels systemically.”
Sinéad suffered from constant chest infections, musculoskeletal, cardiac and nervous system issues throughout her corporate career. “Inflammation hits your weakest point first, where you’re most vulnerable. That was my lungs.”
She was prescribed beta blockers for three years to help lower her heart rate. “I was so stressed that my heart was racing constantly.”
Sinéad’s approach is based on her own lived experience. Many of her clients are women juggling family and work pressure, though she also works with corporate teams.
“Changing the language we use, just swapping the word “challenging” for “interesting” in a situation can help keep the nervous system open and curious rather than triggering a threat response,” she says.
She helps clients to reframe their narrative using practical strategies. “Introducing self-regulation breathing techniques and making time for small intentional moments, asking yourself questions like ‘did you have impact or did you do things today?’” and nourishing your microbiome can all make a difference,” she shares.
maternityjourneyireland.ie
www.theleadershipbiome.com
