How To Sleep Better As A New Mum

How To Sleep Better As A New Mum

New motherhood (and fatherhood) often comes hand in hand with lack of sleep. Some babies sleep well from the beginning but most will wake every few hours through the day and the night for a feed.

My breastfed daughter never slept for any long periods of time and she had small but frequent feeds. (A plus from this is that she never overate and I can count the times she’s thrown up on one hand.) She would feed every 2-3 hours and in the beginning, I used to get up to feed her and wake up properly. We would go downstairs to the living room and watch some telly or I would read on my iPad.

A few months in, I stopped doing that and would just pick her up from her cot and feed her in our bed and doze at the same time. You get to a point as a mother where you can do this safely. When she had finished her feed and was asleep again, I would put her back in her cot and go back to sleep myself.

Because I never really woke up properly when breastfeeding her like this, I felt much more refreshed in the morning than I had before and I could rarely even say how many times she’d woken me up. It became more of an instinct and a very natural way to ensure we were all well throughout the night.

The ‘sleep when your baby sleeps’ advice is still relevant though and when you are a new mum you should try to at least have one nap in the daytime when your baby does to make up for lost sleep. Household chores can wait.

Find lots of sleep tips for all stages of life here: 100 Top Tips For Getting A Great Night’s Sleep by SleepyPeople.com.