I’ve never been a great sleeper, and I’ve always assumed that that would change when I had a kid. Children have their own internal clocks, and I’ll be beholden to their schedules, right?
Relatedly, I wrote two posts in late 2020/early 2021 about sleep hygiene (which, by the way, must have been royally fucked during the pandemic) that I thought would be fun to revisit 4.5 years (!!!) later, with child, to see what has or has not changed.
Are my habits and goals the same? What’s working now that wasn’t working before? And finally… did having a kid actually improve my sleep hygiene?
Cutting Down on Screen Time
I could probably write an entire separate article about cutting down screen time in general, but yes, I continue to wrestle with my phone at night, and my sleep is still better when I am not laying in bed, mindlessly scrolling and switching between apps. I also spend significantly less time on my personal computer these days anyway (besides this daily writing challenge, oddly enough).
Supplements (namely, melatonin and CBD)
Melatonin was actually a big shock to me – I had forgotten that I used to take it on a regular basis to help with sleep. This was likely a product of the pandemic. These days, thankfully (or not), leaving the house is enough to make me exhausted by bedtime.
I do remember taking a lot of CBD via tinctures in my late 20s, not just for sleep, but for pain (post-running) and anxiety (pre-improv) management as well. I wasn’t always convinced that it was actually doing anything, but I believed enough in the placebo effect to continue taking it. Shrug!
I figured that I wouldn’t be able to ingest any cannabis during my pregnancy, but I did not realize that I would also have to abstain while breastfeeding as well. Frankly, I’ve been fine without it, and won’t be clamoring back to it once she starts weaning.
Humidifier
I had actually thrown away my humidifier when we moved last summer because, as my past blog post mentions, they are a pain to maintain! I hadn’t used mine in months at that point, as I didn’t think it was doing anything for my health or my sleep at that point.
Our baby girl was born mid-autumn and spent much of her early days in dry, winter air, which exacerbated her baby eczema, so to treat this, the pediatrician suggested… a humidifier!
(I can be a very cheap person, and silently wept for the money we would have saved if I didn’t throw out our old one. This mindset is very tiring, and I do not recommend it!)
Anyway, this very cute humidifier now lurks in the corner of our room. I don’t know if it’s affecting my sleep quality at all, and I’m not thoroughly convinced that it helped with her skin dryness, but it’s cute, so what’s the harm?
(A fun example of parent brain: I never bought distilled water for my old humidifier, and just took my chances with tap water. On the other hand, when we bought baby girl’s humidifier, we also bought 20 jugs of full-price distilled water from Target.)
Non-Coffee Sources of Caffeine
I don’t have any desire to give up coffee!
I dabbled in matcha during the pandemic and hated it. I recently realized that it was because my ratios of water-to-powder-to-milk-to-sweetener were all off – namely, I was using way too much powder, not enough water, and no milk or sweetener, so it felt like I was drinking a huge mug of grass. I’ve experimented since then and have whipped up much tastier mugs of matcha.
That being said – I am still a coffee girl at heart.
Has having a baby changed my sleep habits?
Yes – but not in the ways that I was expecting, and not to the level that I was expecting.
Let’s forget about the “fourth trimester” in this discussion – she did not start sleeping through the night until about 4 months in, so before that, my husband and I took care of her in “shifts” that, even at their best, did not resemble anything close to healthy, pre-baby sleep.
These days, with few exceptions, she is knocked out for 10-12 hours a night, meaning that I could potentially have the same amount of sleep. Do I? Nope!
While I am better about screen use at bedtime, I still lay in bed on my phone. I had been successful in the past with keeping my phone out of my room while I slept, but this was a lot harder with baby.
(For many reasons, sleep being only one of them, I’ve taken great lengths to make my phone less addictive in general, and this has definitely helped my sleep in the long run.)
The toughest part has been the early wake-ups. She is awake and often making noise well before my husband and I are ready, and our last hour or so of sleep is never as restful as we would like it to be. Her early wake-ups have been prompting me, very slowly but surely, to get up a little bit earlier. A little bit. These days, she doesn’t need us right away after waking, so we definitely pick her up out of her crib later than we should.
I had always assumed that my sleep/wake times would shift with a baby, and this has generally been true, but not dramatically. I go to sleep about an hour earlier than I did before (12AM instead of 1AM) and wake up about an hour earlier than before (7-8AM instead of 9AM). I’m sure this will change when she starts going to daycare and we have a more immediate need to get her up and about for the day, but this transition period has been nice in the meantime.
The Manta Sound Sleep Mask
I didn’t have anywhere to add this in above, but my husband got me the Manta Sound sleep mask for my birthday and it is frankly one of my favorite presents that I’ve ever received.
I had previously written about sleep podcasts and how they were great at quieting my mind for sleep, and I have since moved on to sleep stories on meditation apps like Calm and Headspace. However, I struggled with listening to them comfortably while sharing a bed/bedroom. Earbuds would fall out or press into my ear when sleeping on my side, and headphones weren’t practical for bed. My “shifts” often meant that my turn to sleep overlapped with sunrise, and the sun woke me up well before my daughter would.
Trisha Serquina 