Is your baby making you tired?
28-06-2012
For anyone who has already had a baby, this question will be a no brainer. In fact, for pretty much anyone, it seems fairly obvious that having a baby will result in less sleep and more tired. The well worn clichéd of the exhausted dad at work with baby vomit down his shoulder exists for a reason.
While babies actually sleep more than adults, the main problem lies with their timing. They sleep in short bursts of several hours (though this can and often is totally different depending on the child) and will wake numerous times during the night. It is estimated that the average new parent loses around 350-400 hours of sleep in the first year. That is like missing a night’s sleep every week, and over a long period of time that can have fairly serious consequences.
So what can you do? While losing sleep is an inescapable part of having a baby, you can minimise the damage by trying to take power naps. Power naps, between 15-25 minutes, are really beneficial and rejuvenate more than an hour or two of sleep.
There are also training methods which can help minimise the number of times your baby wakes in the night.
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