Understand Your Baby's Sleep Cycles

Let’s talk about your baby’s sleep cycles. Sleep cycles are part of every person’s sleep however with newborns and infants, it can impact their sleep for the better or the worse. Before you can help your baby sleep better, you need to understand your how your child’s sleep works.

Newborns

Newborn sleep is different from that of an adult, child or even an older baby. A newborn baby has a 2 phase sleep cycle, active sleep and quiet sleep. The first phase is active sleep (REM sleep). This is crucial to your baby’s brain development, learning, and memory consolidation. During this phase of sleep your baby has rapid eye movement, irregular breathing, twitching movements, and makes noises. The second phase we call quiet sleep (NREM sleep) which has slow, rhythmic breathing and is essential for physical growth and strengthening their immune system.

During REM sleep your baby may be loud and sound like they are asleep. During this phase parents often wake up their baby by offering too much assistance. If your baby is sleeping but loud, try not to interfere with this phase of sleep because it may wake your baby and make getting them back to struggle.

Infants

As your baby approaches 10-16 weeks, your baby’s sleep cycles will change. Around this age, the sleep cycle is probably 30-45 mins. Sleep cycles involve 4 phases: drowsiness, light sleep, deep sleep, and REM sleep. Babies often end their sleep cycles after REM sleep and then need to continue sleep by connecting sleep cycles.

Sometimes babies can seamless connect cycles, other times they need assistance with rocking, soothing, etc. Also if a baby has associations (rocking, feeding, contact), when sleep cycles end, your baby may need that same association again to go back to sleep.

Self-Soothing

We often hear parents concerned about their baby’s sleep because they are taking 30ish minutes naps and then the parents have to continue to rock or feed them back to sleep. Teaching your baby how to self-soothe will help them with this process. Self-soothing is simply your baby learning to put themselves to sleep without external help from rocking, feeding, patting, etc. Once your baby is able to put themselves to sleep at bedtime, naptime will become much easier. When a baby is just learning to self-soothe, we still expect them to wake up after a short nap, but they will learn to put themselves back to sleep. Practice and patience is key!

If you are looking ways to lay good sleep foundation and have a baby under 12 weeks, check out our New Baby Bootcamp. If your baby is older and you are struggling with the 30 minute short nap or multiple night wakings, we would love to help. Reach out here and one of our trained consultants would love to set up a free discovery call to discuss your child.