Is your newborn having trouble sleeping because of gut pain?
These newborn sleep pages are intended to get you started in the first challenging few weeks of life. But this sleep work will be most useful in your family's life if you quickly move on to the comprehensive Possums Baby Sleep Program, starting with The essentials, here!
It’s common for parents to find that they are lying awake a lot of the night listening to their newborn groan and grunt. This might become particularly apparent in the hours before dawn. Parents describe how their little one squirms and back-arches, often with his eyes closed. Is this gut pain, they wonder?
Next thing, the newborn pukes, or burps, or breaks wind. Surely air-swallowing or gut dysbiosis must be the cause of all this squirming? Or is it reflux pain in the oesophagus? Every time they finish the feed, and carefully place baby down on his back, he starts to back arch and cry. This might happen during the day, too.
It’s very unusual for a newborn who shows these signs to have true gut pain or discomfort. (If you have worries about this, please have baby checked over by your doctor so that a true medical condition isn't missed.) These baby behaviours are, however, a sign that something is going on!
Occasionally, in the first weeks of life, a breastfed baby has a true lactose overload which really does cause gut pain and discomfort, and might disrupt night-time sleep. You can find out about lactose overload here. In this case, there is nothing wrong with either your milk or your baby's gut and enzymes, but your baby will usually settle down quickly once you experiment with some changes in the way you manage breastfeeds.
Babies groan, grunt, writhe, and arch their backs because their sympathetic nervous system is dialling up, not because of pain. The gut is like a second brain, highly innervated including by the sympathetic nervous system. As the sympathetic nervous system dials up, your baby’s gut activates. This is why you might hear her swallowing back reflux, or burping, or passing flatulence or wind as she stirs.
Your newborn will have trouble settling into deep or quiet sleep when the sleep pressure is no longer very high. He may still slip in and out of light sleep, but there is not enough sleep pressure for the little one to go back into a block of deep sleep. Typically, each time a baby surfaces into waking, he starts to dial up. He is waking, not as a result of gut pain, but because his body clock is not well aligned with yours and his sleep pressure not high enough. And then his gut activates.
It can be reassuring to know that your newborn will be taking the amount of sleep that she needs overall anyway, because we can trust her sleep regulators to do their job over a 24-hour period. The problem right now is that her sleep pattern is fragmented and not aligned with your own sleep needs.
Our task is to work together on getting your newborn's body clock in sync with your own body clock, just as quickly as possible, by working through the steps of The Possums Baby Sleep Program.
Recommended resources
What is meant by the dial on your baby's sympathetic nervous system?
The body clock: baby sleep regulator #1
Sleep pressure: baby sleep regulator #2
How to change #1 cause of newborn sleep problems: hunger
How to change #2 cause of newborn sleep problems: body clock not in sync with yours yet