7.
Parent Sleep
“I’m a parent—I’m not supposed to be well rested.”
A mom of two little kids said this to us once. It’s a sentiment we hear from parents all the time. This lovely mom—a working parent with a toddler and preschooler—was fully committed to helping her children sleep well, but her own sleep was a low priority. Her sleep needs were squeezed by work and family; after her kids were asleep, she was at her computer until 11:30 p.m., went to bed at midnight, and was up at 6:30 a.m. to get the day started. She felt drowsy and less productive at work, and it was hard to motivate to exercise or see friends.
This is a widespread problem. Parents are sleep deprived, but they either don’t know it or they don’t think they can change it. There’s a myth out there that poor sleep is an occupational hazard of parenthood and that you just need to tough it out because it comes with the territory. We hear parents joke that they’ll sleep 10 years from now!
THE RISKS OF POOR PARENT SLEEP
Did you know that when you’re sleep-deprived, parts of your brain are still asleep?
Don’t accept poor sleep as a way of life. Of course the first months with your baby will change your sleep drastically (if your baby is under 5 months, read “Parent Sleep”. But in the long term, you absolutely can be a well-rested parent (no, this is not an oxymoron)! Most adults need 7 to 8 hours of sleep every night to function at their best (research indicates fewer than 5 percent of adults are “short sleepers,” who need only 6 hours of sleep or less). Even moderate sleep deprivation mimics the effects of ingesting alcohol beyond the legal driving limits—you don’t want to go about work and family life that way!
The House That Values Sleep
Your sleep habits—good or bad—have a trickle-down effect on the rest of the family. Think beyond just solving immediate sleep issues to how you’re affecting your child’s relationship to sleep. This relationship is created in the moments, big and small, that make up every day. You’ve seen the way your child models your behavior in many arenas? Sleep is no different. If she sees you taking care of yourself and valuing your sleep (along with healthy eating and exercise), it’s a worldview that will rub off on her.
Especially once your child is at least 2 years old, both show and tell her that you value your own self-care and sleep. This can take many forms:
How Parents Can Get the Best Sleep
We meet plenty of parents who don’t sleep well, even after a baby or child is sleeping through the night. For most of these parents, following sleep advice and making behavioral changes in sleep habits and schedules will help.
In this chapter, we’ll troubleshoot the most common sleep issues for parents and give you tangible advice for fixing your sleep with the same care that you dedicate to your children’s sleep needs. If you have a newborn, this section will be helpful, but please also see “Parent Sleep: Help in the First 4 Months,” in Chapter 3.
Note: If you try to make changes to your routines and habits and still find yourself sleeping poorly or feeling tired, it’s important to talk to your doctor because it could be related to a sleep disorder or another health concern.
My Baby Sleeps but I Don’t!
If your baby’s sleep has just started to improve, you might notice that you still wake up when she used to. Your mind is on high alert, still expecting to be needed during the night and ready for action. For most parents this goes away and they start sleeping continuously after their body has adjusted.
On the other hand, a lot of parents (especially moms) tell us that they feel very sensitive to noise at night and ready to jump at all times. This, unfortunately, is a natural part of parenthood for some of us. We’re constantly living with the knowledge that our kids might need us (even long after they’ve started sleeping well), and it makes our brains more activated. It’s a good evolutionary strategy to keep us on our toes, but it makes for some restless nights. If this is the case for you, try to protect your sleep as much as possible and help yourself relax. This might include turning down or off the baby monitor so that you only hear when your baby really needs you, wearing earplugs if your partner can be on duty, using a white noise machine or fan in your room, and practicing relaxation exercises to fall asleep (see Appendix).
Sleep Tips for Parents
These are sleep strategies for parents. Many of these are based on gold standard recommendations for achieving good sleep for all adults, but the advice we give you here is tailored to parents specifically.
1. Adjust your schedule. Especially if you’re a night person or someone who used to occasionally sleep in, aligning your sleep with a child’s can be hard, but it’s really important. Your child’s early wake-up time (whether it’s 6:00 a.m. or 7:30 a.m.) is now a fixed point, around which most parents need to adjust their own sleep. You need 7 to 8 hours of sleep (it helps to know exactly how much is optimal for you), so if you know you’re going to be awake at 6:00 a.m., you’ll need to be in bed by 10:00 or 11:00 p.m.
This may sound like an obvious calculation, but you can’t imagine how many parents we meet who go to bed late every night (or at least a few nights a week), wake up with their child, and then wonder why they’re exhausted! Remember that your sleep needs are actual sleep time, not just the time you’re in bed, so if you need 8 hours of sleep and it takes you 15 minutes to fall asleep, you’ll want to get into bed 8 hours and 15 minutes before your child’s wake-up time. When you don’t do this, you carry small—but growing—amounts of “sleep debt” with you.
Don’t cut this calculation too close! Now that you’re a parent, you never know what’s going to happen in the middle of the night—someone could have a nightmare, or wake up coughing and need you. If you get 8 hours of sleep on a regular basis, you’ll be okay if you have a night of 6 hours because you have to attend to a sick baby. If you’re always cutting it close or skimping on sleep, those tough nights will hit you much harder.
Your downtime is important, but . . . A lot of parents tell us that they stay awake too late because they relish their downtime after the kids go to bed—they want time to spend with each other, or time to work, watch TV, eat dinner, or read. Having time to yourself is really important, but the best way to go about this is to put your child to bed early. If your baby is in bed at 7:30 p.m. and wakes up at 6:30 a.m., this gives you at least 2 hours after her bedtime before you need to think about getting ready for bed yourself.
A consistent schedule is important. Your body is happiest when you go to bed at the same time every night, even on the weekends. Too many parents miss hours of sleep during the week and hope to make it up over the weekend, but it’s very hard for your body to adjust this way and it can make you feel more tired. It’s much better to sleep consistently than to think about paying your sleep debt back at a later date.
2. Avoid alcohol before bedtime. What do you mean, alcohol helps me fall asleep! We hear this a lot, because drinking in the evenings is a common habit for parents, especially after a long day of taking care of babies or juggling work and family responsibilities.
Yes, alcohol is a sedative, but it can disrupt sleep during the night. Consuming alcohol before bed can cause a person to have more light sleep and wake up more in the second half of the night. This is like a “rebound effect” that occurs after the effects of alcohol have worn off. REM sleep and slow-wave sleep change under the effects of alcohol, as do core body temperature and the action of certain neurotransmitters.
Not surprisingly, drinking leads to reduced alertness the next day and more difficult doing things that require dividing your attention (like parenting). This has been shown in many studies; for example, pilots who drank alcohol between 6:00 and 9:00 p.m. were significantly impaired when they were tested on a flight simulator 14 hours later (with no alcohol left in their system). We know that you’re probably not flying an aircraft tomorrow, but you still need your wits about you!
Of course this doesn’t mean that you should avoid drinking altogether. It’s only if you notice that you’re waking up in the night after drinking, or you’re feeling tired the next day even though you thought you got enough sleep. Just take note of how alcohol affects you.
3. Turn off the screens. One of the biggest sleep stealers for parents is working, browsing, or chatting on an electronic device like a laptop or phone close to bedtime. Many of these emit blue light, which affects circadian rhythms and suppresses the release of melatonin, making it harder to fall asleep once you climb in bed (see Chapter 8).
Social media, work, e-mails, and online research can really suck you in. It’s incredibly easy (and very common for many adults and teens) to stay up late because their mind is still engaged and can’t relax. If you read a stressful message or story before bed, or feel compelled to keep researching a topic or working on a project, it can wind you up and really make it harder to sleep.
This is why we recommend shutting down electronics at least an hour before bedtime. If your bedtime is 10:00 p.m., make it a rule that at 9:00 p.m. your close-range electronic gadgets all go off. Don’t check messages, work, or browse on your computer after this time. If you can’t sleep, try not to reach for one of these gadgets—read a print book or use a reader with no backlight.
4. Exercise. Exercising during the day is known to improve sleep quality. If you have a regular workout routine, that’s great. If you’re home with your baby, see if you can take a walk every day—getting some sunlight during the day will help with sleep as well.
5. Your routine. Yes, grown-ups need bedtime routines, too! Having wind-down time that follows the same pattern every night cues your brain to shift gears and get ready for sleep. Eat a light snack. Don’t have a conversation about finances or other sources of stress for at least a couple of hours before sleep. Turn off electronics 1 hour before bed. Protect this time and know that you have to allow your body time to unwind.
SAMPLE BEDTIME ROUTINE
7:30 p.m.—Baby is asleep—yay!
9:00 p.m.—Read a book, have a light snack of toast with honey and sip chamomile tea. Dim the lights in the house.
10:00 p.m.—Get in bed. If you have a hard time falling asleep, practice relaxation breathing or another mindfulness exercise (see the Appendix).
6. Your bedroom. We’ve met a lot of parents who put careful thought into arranging and furnishing their child’s bedroom, only to forget about their own. You need a comfortable sleeping place, too. It helps your sleep to have a bedroom that feels welcoming, visually pleasing, and calm. Make sure you have:
The best practice is to not have a television in your bedroom, although we’ve met well-rested families who do. The issue with television is that it can cause you to stay up too late, or to doze off while watching and wake back up again to turn it off and resettle. Assess whether having a TV in your room is disrupting your sleep and remember it has to work for both partners.
7. Rotate sleep-in mornings. A consistent schedule for weekdays and weekends is best. But if parents have “sleep debt” accumulated from the week, switching off each morning on the weekend, so that one person sleeps in (even if it’s just an hour) on Saturday and one sleeps in on Sunday, is a strategy that works well.
8. Associate your bedroom and sleep. If you can’t fall asleep after 20 minutes or so, get up and move to another place in the house where you can read a book or do something else that is relaxing. If you spend a lot of time awake in your bed, your body will start to associate that place with being awake.
9. Nap smart. Naps have major upsides and downsides, so you have to evaluate how they work for you. A nap can really help if you’re tired during the day, and they’re especially needed when your baby is really young. The best naps are short and early (late afternoon naps can interfere with nighttime sleep). If you sleep only 6 hours at night and you can consistently nap during the day, that might be just fine—it’s the “siesta” mentality. However, if you nap during the day, it will be harder to fall asleep at night because a nap relieves the “sleep drive” (Chapter 8). This causes you to go to bed later and perpetuates the cycle of not getting enough nighttime sleep. Even a 10-minute doze on the couch in the early evening can make it harder to fall asleep at bedtime. If this is the case, try not to nap at all and to go to bed earlier.
We all have a natural low-energy point in the day (usually the mid-afternoon, around 2:00 or 3:00 p.m) because of our circadian rhythms. Around this time, many adults feel drowsy—this is often attributed to post-lunch sleepiness, but it is actually a lull in between two peaks of alertness in the circadian system. After this window of drowsiness has passed (even if you don’t nap during it), you usually become more alert again in the evening.
Maybe it’s not surprising that parents need much of the same sleep advice babies do (well, except for the parts about earplugs and alcohol). After all, babies are just small people! We all need a regular bedtime; a consistent, calming routine; no screen time before bed; and fresh air and exercise during the day. We’re all wired to sleep well, as long as we don’t get in our own way.