How to change #2 cause of newborn sleep problems: body clock not in sync with yours yet
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!
Your baby’s body clock is immature at birth.
This is the most common reason why night-time sleep can be very disrupted in the first weeks of your baby's life, so that caring for a newborn's needs seems particularly exhausting. First of all, though, make sure your little one is getting enough milk. You can find out about this here.
Here, I suggest things you can do to help your newborn's body clock get in sync with yours just as quickly as possible. After just one or two weeks, night-time sleep should feel much more manageable! But if you’ve not had experience with The Possums Sleep Program until now, you might find some of the things I’m going to suggest seem unrealistic or weird or different to what you’ve heard. So please hang in there and keep exploring all the other articles and videos under the baby sleep section!
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Start the day at about the same time. Set your baby's get-up time just as early as you think you can stay with. This means bringing your newborn out from the bedroom into daylight, and the noise and activity of family life, at about the same time each day. Of course, your baby might not immediately wake up. But if you do this persistently, bringing your newborn into the kitchen, or putting them down in the living area or bathroom or wherever you are as you start the day, then over the next one or two weeks your newborn’s body clock will sync with yours.
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Exposure to early morning sunlight also helps set your newborn’s body clock, if that's possible.
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Keep your precious little newborn surrounded by daylight, noise, and activity all day long. Don’t make efforts to put her to sleep during the day, nor make efforts to keep her asleep. Let sleep look after itself. (I know this sounds weird, and there's a lot more about this elsewhere.)
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It’s ok to put your newborn down (always on his back) when he goes to sleep during the day. For safety, this needs to be in the same room as yourself or another loving adult. To help your baby's body clock mature, this needs to be in the midst of noise, light and activity. If baby wakes when you put him down, then he doesn't need more sleep and you can get on with the day (perhaps with a little feed first to dial him down).
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Don’t feel you have to get your baby down to sleep early in the evening, as this might create excessively broken nights.
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Don’t burp your baby or feel you have to hold her upright after feeds, as this can make the nights more disrupted than they need to be – and doesn’t help your newborn's gut or digestion, despite what you might hear.
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Don’t feel you have to wrap your baby at night. Wrapping or swaddling doesn’t actually make sleep better for families with newborns overall and can make the nights more disrupted than they need to be.
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If your newborn is groaning and grunting and keeping you awake for long periods at night, it's unlikely to be caused by gut pain, despite what you might hear.
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Offering a feed in the night when your newborn wakes is the best way to keep your little one dialled down, if you can do it, while you’re working on the other strategies in The Possums Sleep Program to make sleep more manageable. Frequent flexible offers of the breast or bottle make the days and nights easiest for babies and their families, and this is especially true for newborns.
This is just an introduction, to get you underway. Please go on to take a look at the whole Possums Baby Sleep Program, starting with The essentials here, for your family to have the best possible relationship with sleep into the future!
Recommended resources
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
When you're in a sleep emergency and lying awake even though baby is asleep.
Selected references
Yates J. Perspective: the long-term effects of light exposure on establishment of newborn circadian rhythm. Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine. 2018;14(10):1829-1830.