Is Your Baby a Light Sleeper?

I remember when I was still battling with my first baby’s sleep problems, it seemed like he would wake up if he heard a butterfly passing by his crib.

“He must be a light sleeper,” my friends told me.

I assumed that was the fact, and went to great lengths to keep all noise out of his nursery. I wouldn’t watch TV, I wouldn’t do any laundry, I tiptoed around the house, I parked myself in a chair and tried to turn the pages of my book as quietly as possible.

But there was always something. An ambulance passing by the house, the neighborhood kids shouting, the furnace kicking in, whatever. The quieter I was, the louder those noises seemed, and all of them woke him up.

I cursed the powers that be for making my boy a light sleeper. It kept me from getting anything done while Charlie slept, which he rarely did, and the anxiety I felt every time I heard a peep was driving me out of my skin. What was worse, there was no way to fix the problem. A light sleeper is a light sleeper, right? How do you change that?

The fact is, we’re all light sleepers, and we’re all heavy sleepers too. Some of us take longer to get into a deep sleep, and spend less time there once we’ve achieved it, but we all go from light sleep to deep sleep and back again numerous times a night.

This is part of the reason why some people can get 6 hours of sleep and wake up fresh as a daisy, while some of us can get eight or nine hours and still feel fatigued in the morning. It’s all about how much of that rich, delicious stage four NREM sleep we can achieve.

Babies have an additional challenge because their sleep cycle, the time it takes them to go from light sleep to deep sleep and back, is shorter than a toddler’s. In fact, they typically only take about 45 minutes to run through a cycle, whereas adults take nearly double that.

That means that your baby is in a light state of sleep around twice as often as a grown-up, and of course, they’re sleeping for three quarters of the day, so there are ample opportunities for them to wake up.

The babies that everyone marvels at, the ones who seem to sleep through everything, they typically wake up as often as the “light sleepers,” but they’ve got one superpower that the frequent waker-uppers don’t.

They know how to fall back to sleep on their own.Think of it this way; if you wake up in the middle of the night because of an itch on your leg, you reach down, scratch it, and fall back to sleep, because it wasn’t much of an issue. If you wake up to the fire alarm, it’s a different story. Your heart rate goes up, your adrenaline kicks in, and you might not get back to sleep for half an hour.

When a baby wakes up and doesn’t know how to get back to sleep independently, they get upset and usually start to cry, which gets them agitated and makes it hard for them to fall back to sleep. And when that’s happening every 45 minutes or so, it gives the perception that your baby is a light sleeper.

The good news, of course, is that it’s a solvable problem. Teaching your baby to fall asleep independently will make a world of difference when it comes to those periodic wake-ups.

So how do you do it? Well, 90% of the time, it’s just as simple as this…

Examine your baby’s sleep routine. Is there something that she needs in order to fall asleep? A pacifier, a breast in her mouth, a rocking session in Mommy’s arms? These are all examples of what I call “sleep props,” and they’re the mortal enemy of the happily sleeping baby. They become an essential part of the process, so whenever Baby wakes up, she needs her prop to fall asleep again.

If she’s taught to fall asleep without a prop, if she can wake up and get back to sleep without any assistance, then those nighttime wake-ups are going to pass by without anybody even realizing they occurred, and you’ll be the happy mommy of one of those so-called “deep sleepers.”

So as tough as it may be for a few nights, get rid of those props. Teach Baby to fall asleep on her own, from alert to sleeping, without any outside help. She’s still going to wake up just as often as she did before, but instead of causing a fuss until Mommy comes into the room, she’ll blink her eyes, squirm a little, and fall right back to sleep.

She’ll get more sleep, you’ll get more done, and no more blisters on your tiptoes.

If you need a little help teaching your little one to give up her sleep props, the Sleep Sense Program is just the ticket. It’s a full, comprehensive system that will teach your child to fall asleep independently, and fixes all kinds of other sleep-related issues. It also comes with a one year, no questions asked, money back guarantee, so you’ve got literally nothing to lose!