Preventing Overtiredness
If there is one thing that could be considered the arch-enemy of sleep training that can send your child’s sleep off the rails, it is, without a doubt, the dreaded condition of overtiredness.
Kids, as with all people, have a natural rhythm when it comes to sleep. Our bodies secrete hormones to keep us up and running during the day, and different ones to help us rest at night. They are dependent on a variety of factors, but timing is the most prevalent.
So what happens when your little one stays awake past the time when these natural hormonal cues to sleep are activated? Well, the body assumes there is a reason that it has not been allowed to go to sleep, decides there is a need to stay awake, and fires up those daytime hormones again.
And that is when the trouble starts.
Because once those signals to stay awake get fired up, they are tough to shut down, even when baby is already tired. So less or delayed sleep leads to more daytime hormones, which leads to staying up longer, which leads to a vicious repeating cycle.
The best way to prevent this situation of overtiredness is to get baby to sleep before they get past that window of opportunity. But babies, especially newborns, are not always the best when it comes to signaling they are ready for bed. However, if you know what to look for, it can work wonders in assessing the right time to put baby down.
Some good signs to watch for include staring off into space, tugging at their ears, or rubbing their eyes and nose, arching their back, or turning their face into your chest.
Now, those are all strong signs that your baby is ready for bed, but they are also easily mistaken for signs that your baby is hungry, so it is best to combine your keen eye for signals with a keen eye on the clock.
Newborns can usually only handle about an hour of awake time in a stretch, so make a note of the time when they wake up and set a reminder or make a mental note that they need to be headed down for a nap around 60 minutes after that.
They will be able to stay awake for longer stretches as they get older, but even toddlers should be awake for only an hour and a half to two hours at a time, so stay aware of the schedule and error on the side of more sleep, not less.
While we are talking about toddlers, they have their own quirky little habit when they get overtired. The sudden influx of those daytime hormones can actually make them quite manic, so they might seem to be super happy and giggly for a while; just the opposite of what you would expect from a child who needs to get to bed. But you will see before long that their mood will take a big shift into crankiness, and then you probably have a bedtime battle on your hands.
I know that this schedule can sound a little rigid for parents who are not used to it. After all, an hour at a time is barely enough time to get a diaper changed, a feed in, and a little bit of playtime before baby has to get back into their crib and down for another nap. But I can assure you, no client I have ever worked with has ever come back to me after implementing it and said, “I have a feeling that baby is getting too much sleep.”
So give it a try for a couple of weeks and see how it works. I can almost guarantee you will be seeing a happier baby with better sleeping.
