Recently I came across a curious term – ‘Momsomnia’ referring to the procrastination mothers do after their babies are asleep. Instead of catching up on much-needed sleep themselves, they watch Netflix, read a book or spend hours scrolling through social media. It is a form of insomnia in which mothers become so accustomed to checking for anomalies that despite their babies sleeping soundly in the next room, mums are wide awake, waiting for their babies to cry.
How does this occur?
It occurs because of behavioural conditioning. Due to countless sleepless nights and sleep deprivation bouts that occur during illness, teething or simply because of the baby struggling to fall asleep. It’s common for parents to talk about how little they have slept the first two years of their baby’s life. As a mother of a 15-month-old, I can attest to this fact. I often tell my friends who are expecting or who’ve recently become parents themselves that the sleep debt I have accumulated since baby A was born will only be met once I’m resting in my grave.
Is this just a clever quip, or is there indeed some truth behind this statement?
A parent of a newborn sleeps an average of four hours each night and has to wake up every two hours or so for at least the first three months of the baby’s life. Some wake up every hour, and other babies give their parents life-altering four-hour stretches. So how do you function in this fragmented sleep-deprived state? You delegate, take shifts and pray to every God in existence that this phase passes soon.
Baby sleep is a topic very close to my heart. Some parents focus on food and eating; others focus on activities to introduce to their kids and language development; my crusade has been sleep. And for the purpose of imparting all that I have learned over the last two years, this will be a series focused on sleep.
The first three months of a baby’s sleep cycle is starkly different from the rest in a way that it hasn’t matured as yet. Newborns are incapable of self-soothing and do not have the necessary brain development to be able to connect sleep cycles. Let us back up a bit and ask ourselves what exactly are sleep cycles?
When we go to sleep, we don’t sleep in the same state through the night. There are phases of active sleep and phases of deep sleep. We are never in a completely comatose state, no matter how deeply you think you are sleeping. This is biologically coded into our DNA and is a part of our survival instinct developed during the pre-historic era to avoid becoming easy pickings for a passing predator.
As adults, we can connect these separate cycles and put ourselves back to sleep even after momentary disturbances and are hence able to sleep through the night. This skill is learnt over time and, unfortunately, isn’t something babies are born with.
So how do we help newborns develop these skills?
We try instilling good sleep habits- Swaddling, laying them down drowsy but awake in the crib, getting them used to a white noise machine, and blackout their room during nighttime. The first three months are about surviving and using every tool in our arsenal to make the baby sleep.
If you’re the parent of a newborn, Dr Karp’s 5 S’s of soothing a baby are great for the frequent night wakings.
• Swaddle.
• Hold them on their stomach or side position.
• Shush.
• Swing.
• Suck on a pacifier.
This is proven not only to calm but lull fussy babies to sleep as well.
The time in the trenches will come to a close, and you will find yourself in the midst of the dreaded fourth-month sleep regression. To all the bleary-eyed moms out there, I promise to help you navigate it and hopefully give you some pointers to help your baby sleep for long and restful stretches. Hate to end on a cliffhanger but stay tuned help is on its way.
