What on earth did you do to deserve this?
By: First Time Mama
Tags: Childcare, Balance, Baby, Motherhood, Sleep

You carried the baby for 9 months and now you’re so tired that you’re afraid to open your mouth in case you’re sick. This is not normal. This is not healthy. This is motherhood.

WELCOME…

I’ll give you the good news first. This feeling won’t last forever. By the time your youngest child is three, your chances of sleeping though the night greatly increase. This only works on a night by night basis though.

Now, you’ll suddenly appreciate all countless, endless hours of shut-eye you had. A doze on the sofa on a rainy Saturday afternoon? Waking at 7am on a Sunday and going back to sleep until 9? Distant memories.

One good night of a 7-hour sleep? No chance.

Sleep deprivation is hideous. It’s cruel and inhumane. It hits at a time when you need to be fighting fit to manage the waking hours but there’s not a thing you can do to stop it.

There might be a couple of things, however, that might make things more manageable. You may have read many of these types of things before with a ‘Pah, never gonna work’, but give it a go. It might not make a Sleeping Beauty of you, but you might claw back half an hour of deep, blissful sleep and that could make all the difference.

UNDERSTANDING THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP

There are two types of sleep: rapid eye movement (REM), known as dream sleep, and non-REM, which is made up of four stages.

Stage one — drowsy, relaxed state with a semi-awareness of your surroundings

Stage two — body and eye movements stop and brain waves slow down, or ‘falling asleep’

Stages three and four — deep sleep, you are unresponsive and are enjoying the most restorative stages of sleep.

You move through these four stages in about 90 minutes before pinging across to REM for a dream or two. You should complete four to six cycles plus REM, with the most restorative sleep found in the first half of the night and the dreaming closer to morning.

AND…

Broken sleep can wreck your system. It impacts your thinking and meddles with your coping mechanisms. A lack of dreaming can also make a huge dent in your wellbeing. Dreams help us to file our feelings and allow us to think more clearly when awake. This is where the foggy feeling comes from and might explain why the cornflakes are in the fridge and the milk is in the cupboard.

You may have been told that getting a 4-hour stretch in one go every night could make a lot of difference to how you feel. That’s because it means that you could get the best part of two sleep cycles under your belt.

REDRESSING THE BALANCE

Get an extra snooze at the weekend. Just a couple of hours can make the difference. Two to three hours could top up your tanks for the week ahead, but be careful not to over do it. You do want to be tired at bedtime or you could go completely out of sync.

Sleep when baby sleeps. You know this one but still you prefer to tidy, clean or cook. The house will still look upside down after you spend 20 minutes folding up babygros, so you might as well spend them sleeping. If you could do this every other day, you’d be on to a winner. Make sure it’s not too late in the day.

Share night feeds. Who is that laughing at the back? It is possible. Don’t fall for that ‘I have to work nonsense’. You’re also doing a job. Not getting paid for it mind… Have one night on and one night off each. Pump if you have to but try it for a week.

Get into a good pattern before bedtime — If you’re telling baby that it’s time for bed with a bath and a story, then it should work just as well for you too.

Who would have thought that we could turn to the great Take That for a soundbite on sleep for new mothers, but the opening line from ‘Never Forget’ pretty much sums it all up…

“We’ve come a long way, but we’re not too sure where we’ve been.”

Totally get you Howard, totally get you.

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