Is your baby a light sleeper? Do they wake up to even just a quick walk past their door? Do they go from sleeping to quickly wide awake the second you put them into their crib?
This is a common occurrence many parents struggle with. Their child appears sound asleep in their arms but once they transfer them to the crib they immediately wake up. Trying to get them back down becomes an hour long struggle as well.
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All babies are both light and deep sleepers. Also all adults. It is in our biological sleep make-up.
We all shift from light sleep to deep sleep and back again several times a night. There is a percentage of babies that spend more time in light sleep stages before slipping into deeper sleep, and another percentage that go from light sleep to deep sleep in a quick amount of time.
To help you understand this a bit more we are going to break down the different sleep stages. The first phase is NREM. It has 3 tiers in itself that we cycle through.
Stage 1 (N1) takes place shortly after you fall asleep and is short lived. This is also your light sleep stage. You can easily be awoken.
Stage 2 (N2) is the second stage after N1, your brain activity is slowing down and your muscles are starting to relax.
Stage 3 (N3) is the last stage and this is where deep sleep is found. It is also possible to have some body movements but it is very hard to come out of this state.
The most restorative form of sleep, this is where our bodies heal and grow, is N3 or “deep” sleep. This is why some people can get by on less sleep than others, because they get longer time in N3 than those that don’t.
The last phase you cycle through is REM this can cause movement of eyes and eyelids may even flutter. Your breathing becomes labored and your body dreams. Your muscles as well feel paralyzed.
When we sleep we cycle through these 4 stages continuously throughout the night, the whole progression takes about 1-2hrs and is repeated 3-4 times throughout the night.
As a newborn your child only has two of these phases and spends equal amounts in both until about 16wks old when they transition to more mature sleep stages that mimic adults.
Babies are still developing their sleep habits and therefore they are still adjusting and learning how to get into the N3 stage.
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Now that I have given a little more insight into sleep stages I am sure you are wondering what can you do about it and how can you teach a baby to spend more time in deep sleep?
Now we can’t really show a baby how to get into deeper sleep but what we can do is teach the tools needed so they can do it themselves. This is where being an independent sleeper becomes an important necessary life skill.
There are a lot of elements to teaching a baby to fall asleep independently, but the single most important one is the elimination of negative sleep props. By that, I am referring to any materials or objects your child uses to get to sleep that they cannot replicate themself.
A Pacifier, using rocking motion, falling asleep in arms and feeding to sleep are some common negative props. If your child takes a dummy and needs it to sleep, that is fine but if they are awoken every-time it falls out and you need to go in and replace it, then it is no longer a positive prop but now negative. After 6 months old extensive over use of pacifiers can increase your child’s chance of an ear infection so slowly taking away the need before this age is recommended. This helps avoid the dreaded common dummy dance. If the get rocked to sleep, they learn to rely on that motion as part of the process and while in light sleep they can feel the sensory change when transferred to crib and thus wake-up and the vicious loop begins.
You want to avoid your child from becoming accustomed to these props as a means to sleep. It only hinders their ability to learn how to self soothe and it will start to become an easy enforcer to multiple middle of the night wake-ups and short naps.
You can tell a baby that can self soothe apart from one that has not yet accessed these skills because a self soother will still wake-up as any baby will but they can reassess, readjust and resume sleeping all on their own. No parent intervention is needed and no cry it out.
This is the one of the pillars needed to develop healthy sleep patterns.
Your child can achieve this from multiple different sleep training methods based on your comfortability. All things connect in baby sleep from routine, awake windows and props and all 3 are needed in perfect balance in order to teach your child how to self soothe. This is called your foundation.
If you ever have questions or want to learn more about your child’s sleep complexity then reach out and let’s talk! I thoroughly enjoy helping to fill this gap and any additional missing information.
Cheers to Sleep!
Sound Sleep 4 Bubbies