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Breastfeeding Is Beneficial For A Mother 's Mental Health Essay

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Mental health Breastfeeding is beneficial not just for a mother’s physical health, but also a mother’s mental health. A pregnancy can cause large amounts of stress for a mother, and breastfeeding seems to sometimes contribute to that stress. When a mother decides to breastfeed, she makes the commitment to wake up in the middle of the night to feed her baby instead of giving her husband half of the responsibility by bottle feeding. This causes the mother to lose significant amounts of sleep and add to the stress of her life. If this lack of sleep continues for prolonged periods, it can cause heart disease, depression, or weight gain. (Pietrangelo, & Krucik, 2014) For most women this should not be the case because a study shows that “Fifty percent of babies slept through [the night] by 8 weeks and 75% by 12 weeks” (Adams, Jones, Esmail, & Mitchell, 2004). This statistic signifies that 75% of mothers should be able to sleep through the night in a short amount of time of approximately 3 months. For the other 25% of mothers who must wake up with her child for a longer period of time, breastfeeding can help reduce some of the mental stress. Breastfeeding can help reduce the severity of one of the most common mental problems, depression. Depression is caused by excessive inflammation due to an imbalance of proinflammatory and anti-inflammatory substances. “In the last trimester of pregnancy, levels of proinflammatory cytokines rise. When these cytokines are
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