Sleep Training Newborns: Should you do it? A sleep consultant answers this and all your other baby sleep questions.

Yeah.

So you've just briefly touched on a few of those elements that you can work on.

Can you expand on some of them? Particularly, you said sleep pressure.

What is that and some of the others as well?

So sleep pressure is about the natural drive to sleep that builds up while we're awake and um if you think about it like a cup and people will have different amounts as well so not every child needs the same amount of sleep in a 24-hour period some children and babies have much higher sleep needs some have much lower just as is the same for adults i think i tend to function a bit better on less sleep whereas my husband needs needs a lot of sleep.

So I think there's natural variations in the amount people need.

But with sleep pressure, you're looking at what is, you need a certain amount in order to fall asleep.

So if you've got, I don't know how to explain this very well, but I saw someone do it very well with water the other day where they had a cup of water and you wake up in the morning and your sleep tank is full because you've had a really good night of sleep.

And then throughout the day, it's kind of depleting.

so that's building the pressure that you'd need to fall asleep again so then if you're looking at um a daytime nap for your child that's going to top up the sleep pressure a bit more and that's when you're looking at some of that weight windows or how long is my child sleeping for um should I be waking them up after 40 minutes whatever it's looking like

because it

then as they sleep that amount increases.

So the sleep pressure is going down, they're refilling that tank.

But what you want is to make sure that the cycle through the day is going towards the nighttime with it being lower and more depleted.

So they've got that sleep pressure that they need to then be able to go to sleep, have the right levels of melatonin and all of those, all of the hormones and all of those things that help sleep so that then they can actually drop off, go to sleep and maintain that and refill their tank ready for the next day.

But sleep pressure is something that you've got to view within that 24 hour period because every nap, every sleep is impacting what that sleep pressure is going to look like.

And if you're not kind of balancing it, or if you're not aware of how much your child needs, or if you're trying to follow somebody else's sleep routine for their child that sleeps really well you're not going to be building the right sleep pressure that your individual child actually needs

so that's that's why it's so individual because it's what you're doing what their needs are naturally and with that do you think um if the pressure builds too high they too depleted that can be a negative thing you know like we talk about the overstimulated child who then can't fall asleep is that does that correlate in some way

Yes.

And I think when parents can think, right, I just need to get them absolutely exhausted and then I might have a chance of them going to sleep.

And actually, I would say that that is one of the myths is that if they're really tired, they'll sleep better.

Unfortunately, keeping a child awake doesn't necessarily produce that better sleep.

Stress hormones can start to build so they can get high levels of cortisol when they're really tired you see them they start to become quite hyper

it's

really hard for parents to help them to settle and you almost need to wait that bit through and you need to go back to the basics of really helping them to co-regulate and get back to that calm state that they're going to be able to fall asleep so that can definitely, if you're trying to just get them really overtired, it can backfire a bit.