It can make the difference between your baby sleeping for less than one sleep cycle, or staying asleep for two.’ ‘Use a black-out blind for day time sleeps as well as at night time. Have a really dark sleep environment: ‘To sleep well, babies need to be in a dark environment,’ says Lucy. But he needs time to digest his feed before he goes to sleep – about 45 minutes before a nap and two hours before bedtime – so his stomach is relaxed.’ Leave some time between waking up and feeding, too: ‘Otherwise you might disrupt his sleep cycles because you’re encouraging him to wake up for food,’ says Lucy. ‘Your baby needs to have a full tummy before he goes to sleep, so he isn’t waking up with hunger pangs. Separate feeds from nap time: ‘A regular feeding schedule supports good sleep,’ says Lucy. But at least one of his naps – the late morning or early afternoon nap – should be over an hour long.’ To help your baby learn to sleep through a full cycle… The first nap of the day might well be a short one: 40 minutes is adequate. ‘So, a 30-minute nap isn’t long enough for your baby to get the rest he needs. ‘At the age of six months, a full sleep cycle is 40–50 minutes,’ says Lucy. If your baby never naps for longer than 30 minutes… Put him into his cot when he’s awake and slowly and gradually reduce what you do to get him snoozing, so he learns to settle himself.’ This might take weeks but, as your tot gains the skills to settle himself, he’ll use them to stitch his sleep cycles together. Help your baby learn to settle himself: ‘The more help you give your baby to get to sleep, the more help he’ll need each time he wakes out of his sleep cycle,’ says Lucy. ‘Have a simple routine that’s no more than 30 minutes long – change nappy, into sleepwear, song, cuddle bed.’ Have a consistent bedtime routine: ‘Bedtime routines help babies to settle into their sleep cycles because they cue them to know that sleep is coming,’ says Lucy. ‘This coincides with your baby’s natural sleep cycle, so he’ll benefit from a wave of body-clock-induced natural tiredness. Set a regular bedtime and wake-up time: ‘If you can, aim for bedtime between 6pm and 7.30pm and wake-up time between 6am and 7.30am,’ says Lucy. So, if you can get the night-time sorted, it becomes easier to resolve the day-time sleep.’ Plus, it’s in the early part of the night – up until midnight – that your baby spends most of his sleep cycle in deep, brain-soothing slumber. ‘Dealing with this starts at bedtime,’ says Lucy, ‘because it’s at night that your baby will get most of his sleep, which sets his sleep cycles up for the next 24 hours. That makes it harder for babies to get to sleep and to stay asleep, which leads to broken nights, tricky nap times and out-of-sync sleep cycles. Their brain thinks there must be a reason why they need to stay awake, so it releases the hormone cortisol, which has a stimulating ‘wake-up’ effect. ‘And your baby’s sleep cycles have probably become erratic because he’s overtired.’ That sounds contradictory, but babies have a stress response to being tired. ‘Whatever age your baby, if his nap length is unpredictable it shows that there’s a sleep issue going on,’ says Lucy. If you can’t predict how long your baby will nap for… Watch your baby snoozing tonight, and you can easily tell which stage of his sleep cycle he’s in:ĭuring REM sleep, you’ll see your baby’s eyes moving under his eyelids.ĭuring light sleep, your baby might move about or twitch when he hears a sound.ĭuring deep sleep, your baby won’t move and will be hard to wake. And it’s during the light-sleep stage that we dream, which is called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep.īaby-sleep-cycle-age.jpg?fm=pjpg&ixlib=php-3.3.0 And then it’s back the other way: from very deep sleep to deep sleep to light sleep. We go from drowsiness to light sleep, then into to deep sleep to very deep sleep. ‘Sleep isn’t one, long deep slumber,’ Lucy adds. ‘We all – babies and adults – sleep in cycles.' ‘Learning to be a sound snoozer takes time, practice, a good sleep environment, and some dedicated help from parents.’ And there’s one fundamental skill your youngster has to master before he becomes a master of sleep: how to stitch his sleep cycles together. Lucy Wolfe is a baby sleep consultant, a mum of four and the author of The Baby Sleep Solution: The stay-and-support method to help your baby sleep through the night. It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? You put your tot to bed, he closes his eyes, soaks up hours of refreshing rest, and wakes with a smile on his face at 7am… But the reality for most of us, even when our babies are well past the stage of needing to feed during the night, is very different.
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