![]() Start implementing a consistent and age-appropriate sleep schedule that you carry through each and every day. The best way to handle early morning waking due to over-tiredness? So there’s truth to the whole sleep begets sleep thing. So your baby is waking up more in the early morning hours and does not have a strong drive to fall back to sleep. On top of that, since they have had a pretty extensive night of sleep preceding the waking, the drive to sleep is significantly depleted. And this confusion just makes it harder for the body and mind to stay in a nice relaxed state of slumber.Īnd if you’re wondering why this so often turns into the dreaded early morning – well, babies experience more micro-awakenings in the last part of the night, which just means more chances for them NOT to fall back asleep. When your baby gets overtired – which could be due to a really stimulating day, or inconsistency in her schedules, or an interrupted nap that she wasn’t able to make up – the body systems get mixed messages over whether they should be sleeping, or digesting, or growing, and WHEN. The reason your OVERtired baby wakes up early or frequently through the night is because the systems in her body that control sleep are competing with each other. ![]() Sleep rhythms have their own agenda and they do not like being messed with. “You’re baby’s not sleeping? Oh she’s just overtired.” This explanation is enough to make you want to pull your hair out. Here are the 3 primary causes of early morning wakings and how you may respond in each case: This would be considered an early morning waking. However, you may notice by the time she is about 10 months old or so, that early morning feeds stops lulling your baby back to sleep and instead she is up and raring to go as soon as she’s topped up. ![]() I am by no means suggesting that you should drop that early morning feed – I actually recommend keeping it as long as you can as it helps to extend breastfeeding AND it can help your baby get the top up she needs to have a couple more hours of zzzzzs. And waking out of hunger doesn’t really count so long as baby is happy to have a feed and settle back down for an hour or two. Just to be clear, when we are speaking of an early morning waking, we are talking about waking up for the day between 4 and 6am. And since the cause can be distinct, so too should our response. Call me a broken record, but not all sleep behaviours are created equal. The first thing you need to recognize is the cause of the waking. So if you’re ready to do away with early morning wakings, read on. In my experience, early wakings can be a LONG phase. You may be thinking, “wait, it’s possible to shift my morning lark to a later wake time? What if 5am is just their natural wake time? Or, maybe it’s just a phase”. ![]() Call it selfish, but this mama needs her sleep and a 9pm bedtime for me is not in the cards. NOPE! Not for us.Īnd so, I resolved myself to doing everything in my power to align my kids natural wake systems to a nice, civilized 7am. I just wasn’t willing to budge on bedtime and knew that if I accepted the early morning wakings, I would have to shift our whole schedule earlier. In all seriousness, it was not only that I couldn’t be a decent and present parent before dawn (even 3 cups of coffee in), I was also very committed to the daily schedule that we had consolidated in our family – one in which my babies were still awake in the evening when their dad got home from work. 5 Tips for Breezing Through DST (and Other Time Shifts).Confessions of a sleep-deprived mom: Part III.Confessions of a sleep deprived mom: Part II.Confessions of a sleep deprived mom – Part I.It’s ok to be just good enough – The truth about attachment.Let’s Talk About Infant and Toddler Sleep.Crib to Bed Transition: Bidding Farewell to Bars.Causes of Short Naps and How to Extend Them.Sleep Associations: Consistent, Challenging, and Hard to Maintain.10 tips for a More Restful 4th Trimester Slumber.
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