It was not so long ago that I remember missing out on a huge amount of sleep due to my newborn baby keeping me up at night. And then night after night after night. No matter what we keep telling ourselves its all worth it, which f course it is.
But there is no overlooking the fact that a lack of sleep is really causing your emotions to fly all over the place. And to be frank there is no real gauge of how long this will go on for. Well if this sounds like you, then you may be experiencing sleep deprivation.
Contents
New mom sleep deprivation symptoms
These symptoms include feeling fatigued, becoming more forgetful than usual, anxiety, depression or anything else that may be causing you to feel under the weather.
The potential of not dealing with a problem like this can then later lead to health problems that may cause you to become incapable of taking full care of your baby.
This is not something to be messed with. The way to go about fixing this issue would be to get your baby into a good sleeping routine so that you can once again get a reasonable amount of sleep.
Don’t worry, as I know that you are already on the hunt for this information as that would be the only reason you are reading this post.
In the following section, I’ll be sharing the best sleep training book that I have recently had the privilege of reading, that will finally help you get your baby to sleep through the night. Now by no means is this a magic pill, but if that were real I would say its the closest thing to it.
The book is called baby sleep miracle which was written by a baby sleep professional Mary-Ann Schuler. You can go directly to the book and get it via the button below or if you would like to know more details, then continue reading and we will go through what it exactly covers first.
I also have a review post on this blog covering my whole buying experience and results with this guide. Click here to read it.
So the first thing you need to be aware of is exactly how long your newborn should be sleeping in the first place.
How much should a newborn sleep
For each age group, there are different amounts of sleep that a baby will need. Instead of boring you with a whole bunch of text, I instead compiled everything into a chart that will be easier to digest.
Sleep surviving (16 – 18 hours per day)
At this specific time, the most important thing is for your baby to get as much sleep as possible.
Sleep Learning (14 to 16 hours per day)
Although this is still very early for any type of formal training. It is still a good time to start implementing some basic sleep routines and healthy sleeping habits for your baby.
Sleep Training (11 to 14 hours per day)
Here you can start to introduce some formal training techniques and start to get some sleep back.
As you can see there are different amounts of sleep that a baby should be getting within different stages of their lives. If you find that your baby is not meeting this criterion, then you may want to look at a baby sleep training guide in order to help your baby to sleep.
The baby sleep guide that I recommend in this article has over 100 pages of content helping you with training your baby to sleep. As you can understand I couldn’t share it all here, so I decided to give you a few snippets that you can use right now in the following section of this post.
How to get your newborn to sleep
A few steps that you can take right now in helping your baby to sleep through the night include:
Pick up, Put down method: if your baby is over 3 months old, then you can introduce sleep training to your baby’s nighttime routine. A good method to get started with would be the pickup, put down method for babies in the 3 to the 6-month range.
This method involves allowing your baby to fall asleep and soothe themselves on their own. So you would need to place your baby inside of their crib from as soon as they become sleepy. Next, you would need to wait just outside of their immediate line of sight and then only intervene if your baby begins to cry (for a short while).
For more details on how to prepare your baby for sleep training then click here to see the guided book on nighttime routines for babies.
Another technique is the chair method for babies that are over 6 months of age.
Chair Method: This method involves taking a chair and placing near your babies crib each night. Just like the first method, you would need to put your baby down when they are sleepy but still awake.
The next part would be to take a chair and place it a meter or so away from your babies crib. You would then wait for them to soothe themselves to sleep and only intervening when your baby is crying for 3 minutes or more.
Each day you would then take the chair and place it a little further away until the point you are able to leave your baby to sleep without any need of being in the room.
For more details on the chair method, click here to see more details.
Sleep training methods are not for everyone, so it is important to look thoroughly at what options are available to you based on your circumstance. I recommend that you make any decisions as a couple (if possible) and then make sure to stick it through for at least 1 week if you decide on a method.
Sem babies will tend to fight their sleep during the night so if you are experiencing this I have a few tips to share that may be helpful to you.
Baby fighting sleep
There are 2 common scenarios of where you find your baby is not sleeping due to fighting their sleep.
- You have put your baby down to sleep and they just won’t go to sleep
- Baby keeps waking after falling asleep
Whilst there are many other situations that a baby will not go off to sleep, I have found these 2 to be the most common of them all.
The good news is that there is a fix. But it involves identifying why your baby will not go to sleep in the first place. Some of the most common reasons to a baby fighting their sleep involve:
- Overtiredness
- Baby not tired enough for sleep
- anxiety
All 3 of these problems can cause your baby not to sleep. And whilst your baby ‘not tired enough’ is the least common of the 3. It is definitely one of the hardest problems to identify, so its always a good idea to look consider this as a reason.
Another reason may be due to you recently changing your babies bedding or location, which can cause your bay to become anxious. If you find that this is the problem then the fi would be to simply put things back the way they were.
If it is not possible to do so then you could potentially look at gradually making the change opposed to anything sudden.
For moms who are breastfeeding, there are a few more options to look at as a reason why your baby may not be falling asleep.
Baby waking up hungry
In some cases, breastfed babies get into the habit of getting up for a feed several times during the night. A quick and easy fix for this would be to give your baby a big feed at around the same time each night before sleep.
This should help your baby to get the longest possible sleep on 1 feed through the first half of this night. Which in turn will help you to get a good nights sleep for the best part of the night too.
You will need to be strict with this routine and need to give it time to work (at least a week). So that means even if your baby is tired before the set time then you should still try your best to keep feeding time at around the same time in order for them to adopt the new routine.
For more details on maintaining your babies sleep schedule, check out the baby sleep miracle guide for more tips and strategies from the experts.
If you are just for a quick fix then you may have already considered getting in contact with a baby sleep consultant.
Do you need a baby sleep consultant?
In most cases, you will not need a consultant to help you with a baby that will not sleep. Whilst this may sound cliche, you will naturally start to learn what works and what doesn’t with your baby. And the same will go for your baby too, naturally, they will get used to the rules of your household.
With all the information available on the internet now it is easy to find most of the information that the experts give out for free. But to save your time and all the digging I recommend that you get a guided book on how to solve this problem.
It’s easy to navigate and reusable, there are tips for each age that your baby progresses through & it has been written by an expert. Baby sleep miracle has been the best book I have recently come across for sleep training and schedules. And with over 100 pages of useful tips, you are never short of information.
If you would like to see a little more information about this product then be sure to check out my review, where I take you through my own experience with testing this product.
For now, I would say that I wish you the best of luck with getting your baby to sleep at night and to end this post I have listed a few recommended alternative books on baby sleeping below.
Recommended Books on sleeping…
Conclusion
If you are looking for the best sleep training book for breastfed babies then you are in the right place. This post will take you through a few tips that you can use right now to solve this problem.
Here I provide you the best resource for baby sleep schedules, sleep cycles and training online. If you have any questions that have not been answered in this article, then feel free to leave a comment below and Ill ai to get back to you as soon as possible.
Leave a Reply