Sleep offers us the space to rejuvenate the body and it is obviously vital to our health and well-being.
We all know that when we don’t get enough sleep, we can get short-tempered and irritable. A study from the University of Pennsylvania showed that subjects who experienced even partial sleep deprivation reported feelings of stress, anger, sadness and mental exhaustion.
Apart from water and breathing, you would be hard pressed to find anything with more health benefits than getting enough sleep. “Sleep services all aspects of our body in one way or another: molecular, energy balance, as well as intellectual function, alertness and mood,” says Dr. Merrill Mitler, a sleep expert and neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health. “Sleep affects almost every tissue in our bodies,”
People who regularly get between 7-9 hours of sleep see significantly lower rates of obesity, high blood pressure, stroke, infections, depression, diabetes, inflammation, hypertension, heart disease, heart attacks, and heart failure. They also report higher satisfaction with their sex lives, better performance at work, and take fewer sick days than people who typically sleep less than 7 hours a night.
But that all changes when you have a baby, right? I mean, you’ve brought a new life into this world, and you’re expected to sacrifice your sleep for a few years, maybe six or seven at the most, in order to respond to your baby’s needs, which, for some reason, they seem to have in spades in the middle of the night.
This is, I see as, a common myth about parenthood. Because essentially; your baby needs sleep even more than you do. Those little bodies may look like they’re idle when they sleep, but there’s an absolute frenzy of work going on behind the scenes. Growth hormones are being secreted to help baby gain weight and sprout up, cytokines are being produced to fight off infections and produce antibodies, all kinds of miraculous, intricate systems are at work laying the foundation for your baby’s growth and development, and they’ll continue to do so through adolescence, provided they’re given the opportunity to do so.
Nature does the heavy lifting. All that’s required of your little one is to close their eyes and sleep.
This being my field of expertise, I see lots of people telling new parents that babies just ‘don’t sleep well’, and that they should expect their little ones to be waking seven or eight times a night. Accepting that your baby’s sleep issues are part of the parenting experience is preventing you from addressing the problem, and that’s a serious concern for everybody in the family. It’s because you, and even more so, your children, need adequate sleep for all of the reasons I’ve listed above.
And if your baby is waking up 7 or 8 times a night and crying until you come into the room and rock her back to sleep, that’s not motherood-as-usual. That’s a baby who has trouble sleeping, and it’s interfering with their body’s natural development. It’s no different than an ear infection or jaundice. It’s a health issue and it has a remedy, so if anyone is telling you to grin and bear it for the next six years, I would stop to consider if this is actually true.
Accepting inadequate sleep in infancy leads to accepting it in adolescence, and eventually you end up with grown adults who don’t give sleep the priority it requires, and all of those serious health issues follow along with it.
So to every new mother out there, I implore you, don’t accept the idea of sleep as a luxury that you’re going to have to learn to live without for a few years.If your baby’s not sleeping, address it. It’s not selfish, it’s not unrealistic, it’s necessary, and the benefits are prolific.
Endnotes
1 Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School, retrieved from healthysleep.med.harvard.edu/ healthy/matters/benefits-of-sleep/learning-memory, December 18, 2007
2 Sleep. 1997 Apr;20(4):267-77. Cumulative sleepiness, mood disturbance, and psychomotor vigilance performance decrements during a week of sleep restricted to 4-5 hours per night. Dinges DF1, Pack F, Williams K, Gillen KA, Powell JW, Ott GE, Aptowicz C, Pack AI.
3 National Sleep Foundation, 2008 Sleep in America Poll, Summary of Findings retrieved from sleepfoundation.org/sites/default/files/2008%20POLL%20SOF.PDF
