The all-day shushing and patting can stop.
It is all amplified in the dark.
Time seems longer.
Your baby's cries seem louder.
Your shhhhh’s are deafening
The patting drowns out the beat of your heart.
Your anxiety is like a demon at the door
Your misery ten-fold.
The guilt, shame and anger that arise from the almost universal experience of trying to get your babies to sleep at the “correct” time and for the right length of time see’s so many of us spending hour upon hour in those early months with our new baby inside a pitch back room. We shush, pat and persist at all odds to have our baby sleep as and when they “should”.
The sleep suggestions come at us thick and fast thanks to the black hole of google, the power of algorithms and the so called sleep experts marketing to our every fear.
When our child doesn’t follow the prescription we jump immediately into self blame, feeling like a failure, and as though our worth as a parent has walked out the door and shut that door behind itself. It doesn’t have to be this way.
What this is doing to mothers.
In hindsight it can be easy to piece together the pathways that caused or exacerbated postpartum depression (PPD) or anxiety (PPA), but in the thick of it, the forest is dense and the view is cloudy. This persistence and dedication to getting your child to sleep at all costs ranks high on the list of causative or aggravating factors of PPA and PPD for many mothers.
Looking back it's easy to see how rocking, shushing and patting your baby for hours in a darkened room affects your mood and well-being. Given that our need for sunlight is akin to a flower needing it to bloom, so too are we delicate shoots of new mothers reliant upon it for our own mental, physical and emotional well-being.
The spiraling in those dark moments of thought trains following tracks such as guilt, shame and anger feed into themselves leaving you feeling like a failure, as you look to your baby as though they are broken and irreparable. When so much of your time is spent trying to force, encourage or waste mental effort on worrying about infant sleep, you become so lonely. Your own sense of self worth quickly becomes so tied into whether your baby is sleeping or not. This is not your fault, this is a societal issue and it has to change.
When it comes to all things sleep you can quickly begin to resent your baby, your partner, and the life you now find yourself living. There is no frustration like the one felt when your baby pings awake after 20 minutes of sleep which came from 60 minutes of effort. Or when the schedule tells you they should be closing their eyes for 90 minutes and they max out at 30 minutes. This takes our anxiety and stretches it, multiplying it whenever nap time or bedtime comes closer.
What is to blame?
Given the one thing most mum’s long for is more sleep overnight it makes sense you would do almost anything to get more of it in your exhaustion. Enter sleep training culture. Which tells us the nemesis of infant sleep is overtiredness, where we are fed ideas like sleep breeding sleep and restorative sleep only coming after an hour of shut eye and the damaging effect of a catnap. All of which are wholly untrue. It’s no wonder today’s mothers believe that they must, at all costs, ensure that their babies naps and night time sleep match up to the current paradigm. It is no wonder we believe that a strict schedule is the one thing that will give us that sweet rest we desire overnight - but that isn’t how infant sleep works, it’s not even close.
In a lot of cases the opposite is true, the more time you spend in the dark trying to lull your infant to sleep, the harder it is going to be. The stricter you stick to the schedule, the messier sleep becomes for the whole family. What is missing is the knowledge of our innate biology, our babies temperament and the hormones and pathways you can work with that naturally drive sleep.
If you have tried to close your eyes and sleep before you’re tired, you know all too well that it’s almost impossible. The same is true for our babies, they are human too. For sure, if we stay in the dark patting, rocking and shushing for long enough we will find the point in 30 mins, an hour or 3 hours when our baby does become sufficiently tired to find sleep, but what have we and they missed out on in all this trying and how is this making you feel?
In your misdirected obsession with getting your baby to sleep you miss out on so much that could help alleviate the shame, loneliness, sadness and anxiety you are feeling. You cancel social events because you must get your baby to sleep at said time, you distance yourself from the friends you long to see, because of the subliminal messaging planted in your mind by the sleep training industry that you will make the nights soooo much worse if you dare to step even a little outside of their schedules.
“Days are for living, nights are for sleeping”
Renee Keogh, Possums
You are not alone.
The Mama Matters community shared with me how this strict adherence to sleep schedules and the endless pursuit of the right length nap in a darkened room affected them, here’s what they said:
“It made me miserable.”
“It was a factor in my PPD/PPA diagnosis. I feel sad when I think about it.”
“It made me frustrated at my baby for not sleeping, it’s an awful feeling”
“So bad for my mental health.”
“Was literally the lowest point of my newborn PPA phase. I remember being obsessed with darkness.”
“One day (i spent) from 9.30am - 2.30pm (trying) because I thought i needed to persist.”
“Both naps and night sleep, it consumed me. I spent days of my life battling sleep.”
“Even now the thought of putting them to bed makes me feel nervous”
“Some of the worst and most triggering mental health times of my life.”
“Made me feel like we were both (bub and I) SUCH failures.
“Drove me bonkers to the point of raging outbursts.”
“I used to sit in the dark, with my baby on me, crying by myself, so tough at the time.”
IT IS NOT JUST YOU MAMA. It’s heartbreaking. So many of us around the world are feeling the same thing, this is not your fault. This is a society telling mothers all the wrong things about infant sleep. It is a society failing us on a global level. It needs to change, early motherhood does not need to feel like this.
How to break free from the napxiety.
When we understand that our babies feed off of our energy, that they know our hearts are sad as we sit in the darkened room trying to get them to sleep, you can start to see how the cycle begins to self perpetuate itself. So how can you begin to break out of these cycles, how can you enjoy your baby and lose the anxiety and worry around sleep. Here are are seven ideas of how to approach infant sleep differently:
Firstly, know that the idea that sleep breeds sleep, that set schedules working for every single baby is BS. This is not at all how our biology works, it is not how our infants biology works… you can read more about what is normal HERE. So drop this idea and your shoulder straight away mama, just let that shit go.
Allow your baby to sleep wherever you are. Take the pressure off naps, go out and see friends, take a carrier or pram with you. Sleep will come when your baby feels tired, let them experience the world too. In filling their sensory worlds their brains will eventually become tired enough as their sleep pressure rises.
Naps are there to take the edge of rising sleep pressure. Let your baby get only the sleep they need, be it 20 minutes or 2 hours, neither is right and neither is better or worse than the other, there is only what your baby needs at this moment.
Let there be light. Spending so much time in a darkened room confuses our brains and the beautifully designed, over many years of evolution, circadian system that controls our wakefulness and sleepiness. We are creatures that are meant to bask in the rhythm of the sun. By taking your babies out from the darkened room, and allowing them to set their rhythm to the sun, their innate biology will come to know the difference between night and day and help them to eventually consolidate their sleep more at night.
“But.. if you really want to help to align your baby’s circadian clock with yours, it’s best to sleep baby out in the living area, or on the run with you as you traipse around the neighbourhood and do errands in a carrier or pram. I don’t personally recommend blackout blinds for daytime sleep – it is more helpful that babies know it is a day nap, and they don’t sleep for longer than their body needs to. This allows for nighttime sleep pressure to remain high. This is especially important if your baby is young – you really want to spend the first couple of months setting their circadian clock, so you want to try and make it really clear what is day vs. night.”
Let it go after 15 minutes, if your baby hasn’t fallen asleep in this time, give yourself a hall pass, it is likely they are not tired enough, so go forth find something that fills you up with your baby instead. Bail and come back later, or perhaps you will find your baby will naturally fall asleep herself as you're out enjoying life.
Unfollow any accounts telling you there is only one way for infants to sleep. Delete, block, and get rid of the voices that tell you catnaps are not restorative, that day sleep must be in a darkened room, none of this is evidence based, none of this is biologically true. These accounts and experts only feed into your anxiety, in fact they market themselves on your anxiety. Divert your attention and you divert their power.
Delete any tracking apps and find flow again. Allow things to be rhythmic but flexible. No baby is alike, every baby is unique, especially when it comes to sleep. If you track anything then track the nuance of your own child and their language, it will tell you so much more than any app.
Come out of the dark
Your future self will thank you for it. Trust in your baby, and know when they are tired they will sleep, and trust they will sleep for as long as they need to. Don’t spend your time behind closed curtains, remember what it is you love to do and show your baby this, their future selves will thank you for it.
If all of this sounds achingly familiar, like the many mamas I have spoken to who find sleep anxiety inducing, and you are looking for another way, a more flexible approach then check out my sleep guide, Sleep Matters, which is packed full of science and sensible information on what biologically normal infant sleep looks like. Sleep Matters tells you how to work with your baby’s brains and development to help find more rest without the crippling anxiety, frustration or feelings of failure without the crying or schedules of sleep training.
Life is out there mama, show your baby it in all its glory.
