Is your baby up partying in the middle of the night for hours?
If this is the case you may be struggling with “split nights”. Split nights are when your baby is up for hours at a time at night (typically between 1-3am or 3-5am).
Why does this happen?
Split nights happen when there is not enough sleep pressure at night to help your baby go back to sleep.
There are two factors that cause split nights:
Schedule- Take a look at your little one’s schedule and wake windows. Split nights are often cause by too much day sleep or not enough sleep pressure before sleep (wake windows being too short). Here are some schedules that can help guide you!
Sleep associations - This means your baby is not able to independently put themselves back to sleep and relies on you to do that for them. This can cause a lot of overstimulation at night and as they get older, they will have a harder time going back to sleep, especially since their bodies are just waking up. Feeds for babies over 6 months can sometimes cause unsettledness as they are forced to digest all night long, it may be time to talk about options to wean feeds if it’s the right fit and timing.
https://www.lilbabysleep.ca/sleep-schedules
While split nights can be tough, they are 100% fixable. There are however, things that you should not do when faced with split nights:
Let your baby oversleep during the day. If your baby is trying to make up the night sleep during the day, you are going to get yourself stuck in a vicious under-tired cycle, eliminating sleep pressure for the next night. Make sure you have an age appropriate schedules and consistently follow that, even when night sleep was off.
Change your approach and introduce new associations, ie. feeding, rocking, bed-sharing. This will keep you stuck in a new way of falling asleep and will increase wake-ups and increase the need for assistance to sleep every-time you hit a stage of light sleep.
Get up for the day! We don’t want to shift their internal clock by signalling their bodies that the day has started if it’s before 6am. This will then cause a habitual wake up, as their bodies are used to waking up at this time.
Ignore it and hope that it passes without making any changes. The easiest thing for THAT NIGHT is to get back to sleep in anyway possible (I get it) but is that going to help long term? You are just setting yourself up for more and more long nights and sacrificing the long term sleep and health of your family.
It’s better to make changes right away when you see this start to happen (before you hit rock bottom). Get yourself a well thought out, customised sleep plan and get the support to make tweaks, adjustments and help you get to the finish line fast without the struggle or stress.
