14 sleep tips for new moms

Source: Sleep to be Sexy, Smart and Slim, Reader’s Digest

Recognize the importance of sleep

Sometimes it seems as though our culture has begun to view sleep as a sign of weakness. It’s the new macho and women are buying into it big-time.

"I can stay awake through anything."
"I can stay awake longer than you can."
"I can run on dead brain cells, sheer guts and sheep entrails."

That’s the kind of talk you often hear in the latte line at Starbucks. But your body was programmed to spend one-third of its life asleep, and to sleep in specific cycles of light sleep, deep sleep and active-brain sleep. Each cycle takes 90 minutes, and each has a specific assignment that affects thinking, memory, growth, your immune system, and even your weight. Trying to tuck anything that important into an hour here and an hour there just won’t get the job done. Especially not when you’re also trying to nurture a new life.

Schedule a dress rehearsal

“Starting during the last trimester, have your partner get out of work an hour early and pick up dinner on the way home," says Kathryn Lee, Ph.D., a sleep researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. "It sounds simple, but in our culture most guys haven’t had the responsibility of thinking about what’s for dinner, shopping for the ingredients, and delivering it to the table.” The practice not only smoothes things out, she adds, it also gives you a break toward the end of pregnancy, when you’re most likely to be exhausted and in need of a nap.

Investigate work options

"Most women today are getting the message that they can do it all," says Dr. Lee. "And they can. They can be a mother really well, and do their job really well, and juggle everything."
"In fact," she says, chuckling, “I think there’s some gene in there that allows women to multitask.” That’s not to say that women shouldn’t try to strike some kind of reasonable balance between work and family, adds Dr. Lee. Especially if they want some sleep. A poll for the National Sleep Foundation found that women who work full-time and have kids got the least sleep of all moms surveyed. Some 54 percent said they frequently woke during the night, and 56 percent said they often woke up feeling unrefreshed. Most kept going by downing caffeinated beverages and by giving up sleep (60 percent), exercise (60 percent), time with family and friends (52 percent), leisure activities (49 percent), and sex (44 percent).Their partners must be thrilled.

But women who stay at home with their kids also don’t sleep too well, according to the survey. A whopping 74 percent said they frequently had insomnia. Researchers suspect that it’s because they don’t set their body’s internal clock by getting up at the same time every morning as would someone who had to be at her desk at a particular time. Only mothers who work part-time seem to have it all together. A relatively small, 16 percent reported a sleep problem. The other 84 percent seemed to be doing just fine.

Follow your body’s natural rhythms

When deciding who’s going to get up with the baby at night, keep in mind your natural programming, says Dr. Lee. "Your body is hormonally programmed to wake up at the least little gurgle, and the hormone prolactin causes your breasts to fill up and get uncomfortable just about the time the baby gets hungry." That doesn’t mean you have to be on call 24/7, she adds, but it’s something you need to factor into your decision.

Let dad pinch-hit

One option is to put the baby to bed at night after the 8 o’clock feeding and go to bed yourself. Your partner can use a bottle of expressed milk to feed the baby around 10. Afterward your partner can go to bed and you can get up for the 2 to 4 feeding. That way, each of you will have the opportunity to have an uninterrupted six-plus hours of sleep.

Mend family feuds

You’re going to need every hand on board if you plan on getting any sleep. In other cultures, grandparents are much more involved with new babies than they are in the United States, says Dr. Lee. But there’s no reason why it has to be that way. Especially if you have other children, why not ask one set of grandparents to come and help for a couple of weeks after the baby’s born? Ask the other set to come for the following two weeks. Heck, invite any unencumbered aunts and uncles to come lend a hand as well for a short time. Just make it clear to everyone that they’re coming to make dinner, wash dishes, change diapers, give baths, and clean the house. An hour cuddling your baby is their reward. Plus, of course, a happy, well-rested new mom.

Sleep when baby sleeps

A new baby will sleep 16 to 17 hours a day for a maximum of 4 to 5 hours at a time, pediatricians say. Once awake, a newborn will stay awake for only 1 to 2 hours max. Sleep while you can. Put your head down when your baby goes down. You might actually get a full cycle of sleep a couple of times a day.

Unplug the phone

Aside from food, the most important thing to your health and the health of your baby may well be sleep. It affects your ability to function to think, remember, heal, and take action while it affects your baby’s ability to grow physically and mentally. Sleep is sacred. Naps both the baby’s naps every couple of hours or yours, also hopefully every couple of hours should not be disrupted just because someone outside the house has decided he or she needs to talk with you.

Leave Dad in bed

Since it’s usually Dad who gets up and goes off to work in the early weeks while Mom is on maternity leave, why not leave Dad in bed when the baby gets up during the night and have him come home an hour early from work to take responsibility for baby and dinner, suggests Dr. Lee. Not having to think about what to make for dinner, or make sure the groceries are in the kitchen, or actually prepare the meal is a nice chunk of time that you can use to shower, nap, or otherwise nurture yourself later in the day.

If Dad doesn’t feel like making dinner, says Dr. Lee, he can pick up an extra quart of soup from the company cafeteria at noon and stick it in the office fridge until he goes home. Or he can bring home a roasted chicken and some veggies and a container of fresh fruit from the neighborhood market. Or he can pick up Chinese. Whatever. The point is that you don’t have to think about it, shop for it, or make it.

Discourage visitors

Everybody wants to see the new baby, of course. And you, you conscientious person, will feel the need to make sure the house is clean and there’s something to offer them when they come your home-baked pound cake, some sandwiches, a little coffee, and maybe some tea, right? Wrong. Unless your family has moved in to take over such chores, ask visitors to hold off for a week or so, then have them come one or two at a time for only an hour a couple of days a week. Anyone who’s had kids will understand, and those who haven’t will learn soon enough.

Ignore fads

Whatever you do, don’t try to be politically correct at the expense of common sense. "I don’t know how this all started, but there’s this trend here in California where a husband and wife do this kind of contract with each other before the baby is born," says Dr. Lee. “The contract is that the father will get up during the night and bring the baby to the mother so that she can breastfeed. Afterward he changes the baby and everyone goes back to sleep.

"I guess it’s one way of thinking that everybody’s participating in child care," says Dr. Lee, “but what it means is that nobody’s sleeping and everybody’s tired.

"It could make sense in some families," she adds, "but to me it means that none of the adults is sleeping. That means that no one is able to make a coherent decision and that sounds really dangerous."

Sleep together

In the past, studies have linked the practice of sleeping with your baby to maternal insomnia. But in many of these studies, a mother’s insomnia was caused mainly by her fear that the baby would be smothered by the sheets, roll out of bed, or be rolled upon by one of the parents.

In a soon-to-be-released study of 140 couples and their babies, Dr. Lee has discovered that moms actually sleep better when the baby sleeps in a bassinette next to the parents’ bed rather than in his or her own room down the hall.

"The idea is that the baby’s within easy reach, the mother doesn’t have to be aroused by the baby’s screaming, and she doesn’t have to get up, turn on the lights, and go down a hallway," says Dr. Lee. That makes it easier to slide back into sleep after the feeding.

The trick is to put a white-noise machine and a night-light at the foot of the bed, says Dr. Lee. The night-light allows the mother to check on her child without rousing both of them with bright lights, and the machine masks the little noises that babies always make, so they don’t disturb the mother particularly in her hormone-influenced hyperalert state. It’s only when the baby starts to fuss that the mother is actually awakened. The baby doesn’t have to work him- or herself into a window-rattling cry to get fed, so mom is less aroused. What’s more, it turns out that babies like this little routine, too. Dr. Lee’s data show that babies seem to slide back into sleep much easier as well. What’s more, the white-noise machine filters out Daddy’s snoring a little extra benefit.

Expect the blues

When all those hormones surging through your body to help maintain your pregnancy are suddenly shut off at birth, your body’s going to react. In fact, in some cases it almost seems akin to drug withdrawal. Possibly as a consequence, some 35 to 80 percent of women get the blues, which start three to five days after birth and last roughly a week.

Unfortunately, somewhere around 10 percent of new moms will actually tumble into a postpartum depression that begins somewhere between the second and fourth week. The difference between the blues and postpartum depression? It seems to be a question of degree and only a doctor should judge the difference.

No one knows what causes postpartum depression. Some researchers think it’s the postpartum drop in hormones, but then why don’t we all get it? Other researchers feel it’s a lack of support at home, and a few think it occurs because society "expects" us to be depressed. And some, perhaps mothers themselves, feel that researchers should try to toss and turn for the last three months of pregnancy as most women do, experience 15 hours of labor, then top it all off by having to wake up three times a night for the next three months and see how happy and even-tempered they are.

In fact, there are now a couple of studies that are beginning to support precisely that notion.

Find your baby’s rhythm

Pediatricians tell us that up until three or four months of age, a baby’s sleep is determined purely and simply by its biological needs, and the best thing for both you and the baby is to simply roll with those needs. Your baby will grow and you’ll get a good night’s sleep. Eventually.