![]() The sleep situation can get even worse if you recently gave birth. You might think, ‘This is my time, this is the 3 hours I have, I have to sleep now.’ That doesn’t work for anybody,” explains Catherine Monk, PhD, professor of medical psychology in the departments of Psychiatry and Obstetrics and Gynecology at Columbia University.Īnd even if your mind isn’t revved up over trying to fall asleep, when you actually have that quiet time when you’re not tending to your tiny human, all the things you didn’t have a chance to think about before suddenly start flooding your brain - from big questions like what life will be like after your parental leave ends, to mundane ones like what’s for dinner tomorrow. ![]() “You may end up ruminating over whether you’re going to be able to fall asleep. Even if you’re exhausted, the intense pressure to sneak in sleep whenever possible can actually make it harder to doze off. They don’t like being put down to sleep alone and would rather be snuggled or bounced or rocked or walked around the block in their stroller a hundred times.īut it’s not just the baby that’s keeping you up. They need to eat every few hours, round the clock. In the very early days, they have no sense of day versus night. And it’s time we started talking about it.Įveryone knows that you accrue far fewer hours in the snooze department with a baby.įrom the second people find out you have a little one coming along, many feel the need to say things like, “Rest while you can!” or “You won’t be sleeping in once the baby comes along!”īabies are sleep stealers for obvious reasons. In fact, people with insomnia are significantly more likely to have depression compared to those who get enough sleep.Ĭonsidering that only 10 percent of new parents report logging the recommended 7 or more hours of shuteye, it seems like most of us baby-having folks are at risk of having a big problem on our hands. There are plenty of bleary-eyed moms and dads who are still perfectly happy, right?īut here’s what I didn’t know: Sleep and mood are very closely related, and mounting evidence suggests that the fewer Zzz’s you get, the more likely you are to have a mood disorder. After all, intense sleep deprivation is something that every single new parent deals with. ![]() I cried every day, but could rarely explain why.Īt the time, no one suggested that the state of my mental health could have been caused by a lack of sleep. I was distraught because I felt like my life had been taken away from me and that I’d never, ever get it back. I was constantly anxious and had trouble bonding with my boy. It was physically exhausting, but the emotional fallout was worse. In those dark, quiet moments, I remember thinking about how we’d soon be up for much of the night, every night - and would get filled with a sense of dread.ĭespite the fact that Eli was (by newborn standards) a good sleeper right from the start, my husband and I never got more than a few hours of sleep at a time early on. ![]()
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