Is your baby wide-awake (but happy) for hours in the middle of the night? Here's how to fix it 🙌
December 19, 2021It’s 2 a.m. and my six-month-old daughter is wide awake. She isn’t crying, and she isn’t hungry—she’s perfectly happy to be hanging out, as long as I don’t leave her alone. But we are on hour two of this wide-awake, ready-to-party mode, and it’s the middle of the night. No matter how much I shush, pat, hum or feed her, her little eyeballs are peeled open.
Perhaps they’re working on a new skill. Underlying issues can cause nighttime wakings for up to two weeks. But if this has been going on for more than two weeks, and it’s happening at least five nights a week, sleep experts agree that it’s probably a split nights issue.Two biological aspects drive sleep: circadian rhythm and sleep pressure . Normally, pressure builds during the day, your baby goes off to dreamland, and when the pressure subsides, circadian rhythm and melatonin take over.
But this can actually result in too much daytime sleep. If you have five hours total of naps during the day, she explains, then you’re basically deducting those five hours off their nighttime sleep. With only nine hours of sleep left, they’re waking up partway through the night feeling refreshed, and it takes time for their sleep pressure to build again.
“Every child has a total amount of sleep in them, and we have to aim for prime sleep pressure all the time. It becomes a mathematical equation.”You’re going to need to adjust daytime sleep totals and your baby’s bedtime. The Canadian Paediatric Society recommends 12 to 16 hours of sleep in a 24-hour period for babies four to 12 months, and 11 to 14 hours of total sleep for toddlers.
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