He had never been a morning person or a light sleeper. In fact, in my family we have a kind of internal joke in which they say that I am a combination of Bella and Aurora, the two Disney princesses. The first, because I love to read, and the second because since I was a child I love to sleep and to wake up to go to school almost a whole orchestra was needed (now I have to live this with my daughter, but that is history for another day).
However, everything changed when I became a mother and went from one extreme to the other. So today I will talk about how our sleep changes as we become mothers .
Rest with a newborn at home
I write this subtitle and I laugh internally thinking ” I rest with a newborn? That does not exist “, because anyone who has had a baby of this age at home knows that rest is something that is conspicuous by its absence .
With the constant nocturnal awakenings, the feeding of the baby and the new rhythm of life to which we are gradually adapting, being able to sleep a full night seems like a distant dream and almost without realizing it, you have become a complete mombie. In fact, it is estimated that in the first year of life, parents lose more than 700 hours of sleep. We work practically automatically.
Our brain changes too
This lack of rest is not only due to the baby waking us up because he needs us. There is something in us that has changed . This actually happens since pregnancy, where we start to wake up frequently during the night, especially during the third trimester.
The explanation is that the body is preparing for breastfeeding, and in some way, our brain is preparing us for the moment when the baby will be born. We went from having a “normal” rest to being in alert mode.
This is a totally natural mechanism, whose function is to guarantee the survival of the baby through the feeding and care that we must provide. We may be sleeping, but our brain is always awake.
Therefore, now even the slightest noise or movement wakes us up easily: we are on constant alert . We have our eyes closed but the rest of our senses, such as hearing when listening to the baby’s cry, are always alert to be able to act as needed.
Will I ever go back to sleep like before?
There are those who joke that mothers are part of a scientific experiment, which seeks to prove that human beings are capable of surviving without sleep. And it is that we sleep so little, that even we ourselves sometimes wonder how it is possible that we manage to function with so little rest .
The good news is that that stage in which we constantly wake up and sleep worse than fatal is usually limited to postpartum, and in a matter of months the baby will begin to sleep more hours at night (although there will continue to be some nocturnal micro-awakenings for a few years , but nothing like those first months).
As for the question about whether we will ever go back to sleep as before: just like that as before we had children, the reality is that we will not . In the same way that we are no longer the same woman we were before we had children, our sleep patterns will not be the same either.
In addition to the mental load, the invisible work and the infinite list of things to do that invade us just before going to sleep, over the years there will be many other things that occasionally take away our sleep, because as mothers we have new fears than before. we did not know. But when it comes to hours of rest, I promise you that the situation will improve eventually and you will think of those sleepless nights as a very, very distant memory.
Photos | Pexels, iStock
In Babies and more | Why do mothers stay up very late? A day in a mother’s brain: the things we do, no one notices and they keep us eternally tired
