Navigating broken sleep as a mother of a wakeful baby can be one of the most challenging parts of becoming a mother. Night after night, facing fractured blocks of sleep, you quickly learn why sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture. It can take a toll; very quickly too if you’re not supported and armed with the right tools and knowledge to survive this difficult season.

For many mothers that I speak to and work with, the conventional approach to managing baby sleep (aka sleep training) doesn’t align with their mothering values, and they’re left feeling like they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to surviving broken sleep; they often feel that they either have to wait it out (and suffer in silence please, because god forbid you should express your struggle) or relent to the mainstream sleep training paradigm and cry-it-out with their little one. Wait it out or cry it out.

But there’s so much room between these two choices. This space is about supporting your health as a mother, supporting your energy, protecting your sleep, prioritizing your well-being alongside babies so that both of you can get through this season together and prevent you from completely burning out.

Disclaimer:

The information provided in this blog is for your personal or other non-commercial, educational purposes. It should not be considered as medical or professional advice. We recommend you consult with a GP or other healthcare professional before taking or omitting to take any action based on this blog. While the author uses best endeavours to provide accurate and true content, the author makes no guarantees or promises and assumes no liability regarding the accuracy, reliability or completeness of the information presented. The information, opinions, and recommendations presented in this blog are for general information only and any reliance on the information provided in this blog is done at your own risk.

What is sleep quality and why is it so important?

When it comes to sleep, ideally, we would have both optimal sleep quantity (enough hours asleep) and sleep quality, which refers more to what goes on while we’re actually asleep, including our sleep cycles and the stages of sleep we move between (i.e. non-rapid eye movement or NREM, versus REM and the different deep sleep stages).

It is possible to have adequate or even optimal sleep quantity (i.e. getting your 8 hours/night) but have poor sleep quality, meaning that you’re not getting the benefits of rest and repair that occur with optimal sleep cycles and stages, and you’ll likely wake up feeling unrefreshed and tired throughout the day.

In this season, we can’t necessarily control our sleep quantity, especially if you’re choosing not to go down the sleep training path. But we can take steps to protect our sleep quality and, in fact, this is absolutely crucial to surviving any wakeful phase without burning out.

Sleep hygiene

Sleep hygiene is a term used to describe the daily practices and environmental factors that influence sleep. Having good sleep hygiene means that we follow as many sleep-supporting practices as possible to protect and optimise sleep.

Having poor sleep hygiene is likely to result in sleep that is restless and interrupted (more than it need be with children in the equation!), or you might have difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep across the night and wake up more unrefreshed than expected even in the context of responding to your baby during the night.

Some of these important factors include:

• Your bedtime routine and what you do before you go to bed
• Caffeine consumption across the day
• The amount of natural sunlight you are exposed to during the daytime
• The amount of artificial blue light you are exposed to after sunset and before bed
• The regularity of your bedtime and waketime
• Your bedroom environment, like lights, temperature, noise, and bedding
• Alcohol intake, especially in the evening
• Other daily activities, like exercise, food & meal choices, meal timing, and smoking

The 5 most important things to protect the sleep you are getting

1. Be mindful of your caffeine intake during the day

Caffeine can significantly interfere with sleep quality throughout the night by blocking the adenosine receptor and preventing the action of adenosine, which is to facilitate sleepiness, sleep onset, and sleep maintenance.

Many people assume that because they don’t have trouble falling asleep, caffeine must not be impacting their sleep. This may be true, depending on how much caffeine a person is regularly consuming and at what time during the day, but sleep studies have shown that sleep quality can still be impacted across the night by caffeine even when sleep onset (falling asleep) isn’t affected.

We often drink caffeine for an energy boost, and while that does happen in the short term, if we’re not mindful of the big picture it can end up making us more exhausted because of its impact on sleep quality.

Caffeine has a half-life of 5-6 hours in the body, meaning that it takes this long for ½ the amount of caffeine you ingested to be cleared from the bloodstream by the liver. Or, in other words, 10-12 hours later a ¼ of the caffeine would still be circulating.

Think about it, if you had a coffee in the morning at 8 am, there would still be ¼ of the caffeine from this cup circulating around 6-8 pm. If you had a second or third coffee during the day, imagine the amount of coffee still in your system by the time your try to go to sleep.

Caffeine is found naturally in coffee, black tea, green tea, guarana, and cacao (cocoa, and foods made with cacao like chocolate). It’s also added to many energy drinks, and coke and cola drinks (including diet versions). Decaf coffee has been decaffeinated to reduce the amount of caffeine, however, there is variability between products, some contain only 1% of the original caffeine, while others still contain 10-30%, so check the product closely.

Caffeine can come from many different sources, however, by far the most common one I see in the mums I work with is coffee. Therefore, my recommendations often center around coffee, but you need to be mindful of all caffeine sources, including chocolate.

For coffee, my recommendation for mothers is: try to limit to one cup per day (two cups on occasion but not regularly) and consume this cup well before midday. For drinks after midday, try a decaf or non-caffeinated option (see a post on that here).

2. Limit blue light exposure in the evening

Light is measured on a spectrum of frequency and wavelength. Blue light is on one end and red light is on the other end. Our brain detects these different types of light to mean different things, based on our biology, environment, and evolution.

Blue light sends a message to our brain that it’s daytime because the sun emits blue light. But the confusing thing for our brains these days is that our modern LED screens also emit blue light, tricking our brains into thinking it’s daytime even when it’s not.

When our brain detects blue light, a cascade of internal biochemical changes occurs based on the interpretation of this meaning ‘daytime’. One of these changes is the suppression of melatonin levels because we don’t want melatonin around if it’s day and we need to be focused and alert – melatonin helps with sleep onset.

When we look at our devices and screens at night, we are directly interfering with our melatonin levels. Good melatonin levels are needed across the night, not just to fall asleep, but to stay asleep and be able to cycle through the sleep stages and through a full sleep cycle.

My recommendation for reducing blue light exposure is:

• Aim for a minimum of 1 hour of screen-free time before you intend to fall asleep
• Dim the house lights as much as possible after sunset, and
• Activate blue light-blocking apps on your phone, tablets, and computer screens to reduce exposure when you are or need to use these devices

3. Go to bed earlier

This one is so simple it’s often overlooked, but often the thing that can make the biggest difference.

Research on sleep repeatedly shows that adults function best on 7-9 hours of sleep. Obviously, for many of us in early motherhood, this sleep is greatly interrupted by night wakings with our baby or child. But we can try to counteract some of this fractured sleep by allowing a large enough window of opportunity in bed to make up for what’s lost overnight. This often means going to bed much earlier than usual, which is easier said than done.

For many mothers, nighttime is the only time of day when they can get some uninterrupted ‘me’ time. Personal time is so important and one of the things that make up the foundation of our health, but when it comes to sleep deprivation, we often have to make compromises or tough decisions about what is most important at that moment in time – and getting extra sleep is a top priority.

To make it easier to prioritise sleep and earlier bedtime, it can be useful to make a plan for personal time elsewhere in your day or week. This usually means working with your partner or other support person to schedule regular blocks of personal time into your routine. This might look like:

• 30 minutes in the morning before partner leaves for work, or
• 30 minutes in the evening when partner gets home for work, before dinner/bath/bed routine begins
• A few hours once a week on the weekend when partner is home, or
• One night a week if someone can babysit/watch your child/ren

 I’m often using practical examples with the mothers I support in clinic to illustrate just how early they need to be going to bed, which usually involves us calculating backward from their typical wake-up time as to how much time they’ll need in bed.

For example, if you or your baby usually wakes at 6 am, then to get the bare minimum of 7 hours of sleep, you’ll need to be asleep by 11 pm. But baby wakes multiple times per night, so let’s add an extra hour or two to account for these overnight wakes, which means, ideally, you’d be asleep by 9-10 pm (remembering this is a bare minimum).

My recommendation for early bedtimes is:

• Aim to be in bed no later than 9:30pm
• Or, calculate the ideal time in bed working backward from your typical wake-up time (see example above)

4. Get morning sunlight asap after waking

Good quality sleep starts from the moment we wake up in the morning, which is related to our circadian rhythm or internal body clock, aka our sleep-wake cycle.

Our sleep-wake cycle is regulated by cortisol and melatonin levels; cortisol is high during the day to keep us alert and focused, and then drops in the afternoon and evening to make way for our melatonin levels to rise and facilitate the onset of sleep.

For mothers facing ongoing broken sleep, this cortisol-melatonin dance can often get tipped off balance and our usual cortisol awakening response in the morning can become blunted (leaving us feeling sluggish and exhausted in the morning) or it can occur later in the day (disrupting the normal sleep-wake cycle, and impacting sleep quality the following night/s).

Sunlight exposure first thing after waking is crucial for bringing our circadian rhythm and our cortisol awakening response back into tune.

The sunlight sends strong signals to our brain about what time of day it is, supporting cortisol levels first thing in the morning and regulating our rhythm for the next 24 hours ahead.

My recommendation for sunlight exposure is:

• Get direct sunlight exposure as soon as possible after waking up, ideally within 30 minutes
• Aim for ideally 10 minutes, but every minute is beneficial.
• Expose face and eyes to the sun (no sunglasses)

Cloudy? No worries, sunlight behind clouds is still bright enough to send the right signals to our brain, you might just need a little longer, like 15-30 minutes, depending on how much cloud coverage there is.

Need to stay indoors or can’t go outside? Sun exposure through a window is much less effective at signaling to the brain, but still more effective than having no light exposure at all. Try to stay as long as possible next to the window – it may take up to 30 minutes to get the same effect.

5. Relax your nervous system in the evening

The nervous system is the system of importance when it comes to sleep and we want to have a calm, relaxed nervous system in order to fall asleep and get good quality sleep across the night. If our nervous system is active, switched on, or tense, sleep can be impaired.

There are two branches of our autonomic nervous system – the sympathetic branch and the parasympathetic branch. When one branch is switched on, the other is switched off – they can’t both be working at the same time. Sympathetic mode is often called the flight-or-flight mode (or more recently known as the fight, flight, freeze, fawn mode); it’s the branch of our nervous system that keeps us alert and monitoring our environment for danger, then responding to danger if needed. In contrast, our parasympathetic branch is responsible for many of our underlying bodily functions like digestion and reproduction, and is only able to function when we are in a calm, rested state.

For sleep, we want to be in parasympathetic mode. But many of us, especially in motherhood, are chronically in sympathetic or fight-or-flight mode which is not conducive to getting good quality sleep.

To support our nervous system to relax more in the evening in preparation for sleep, we can look to a number of tools for help, including:

• Meditation or other mindfulness practice
• Biofeedback techniques to control heart rate or breathing rate – using a finger sensor or guided by an app on your phone
• Gentle forms of yoga, such as yin yoga or yoga nidra
• Nutrient support with magnesium, glycine, GABA, or L-theanine
• Herbal support with herbs that relax and calm the nervous system, or have a gentle anxiolytic or hypnotic effect, which might include herbs like Passionflower, Skullcap, Kava, Withania, Hops, Lavender, Lemon balm, Chamomile, or Valerian.

Be aware of other underlying causes

Although there are many lifestyle, environment, and diet factors we can modify to get better quality sleep, it’s important to know that there are also other very real underlying drivers for poor sleep, many of which are common in early motherhood. These include:

• Hyperthyroidism
• Food sensitivities or reactions
• Adrenal dysregulation
• Chronic stress
• Mental health conditions
• Sleep apnoea

If you’ve made the changes discussed above and are still exhausted, it’s important to get extra support and a thorough assessment with someone who can help you investigate or screen for some of these things.

Final note

These are the 5 most important things you can do to protect the quality of the sleep you are getting in the current wakeful phase you’re in. Broken sleep is no joke and it will have an impact on your overall vitality and wellbeing, but in order to prevent burnout and complete exhaustion you must protect your sleep in whatever way possible.

Let me know in the comments below which one of these 5 important changes you are going to make to support your sleep.

Disclaimer:

The information provided in this blog is for your personal or other non-commercial, educational purposes. It should not be considered as medical or professional advice. We recommend you consult with a GP or other healthcare professional before taking or omitting to take any action based on this blog. While the author uses best endeavours to provide accurate and true content, the author makes no guarantees or promises and assumes no liability regarding the accuracy, reliability or completeness of the information presented. The information, opinions, and recommendations presented in this blog are for general information only and any reliance on the information provided in this blog is done at your own risk.