The Strategy I Use to Help Newborns Sleep Longer at Night

No, it’s not cry-it-out. And no, it’s not a dream feed!

One of the biggest challenges with newborn sleep is that newborns can be incredibly sleepy during the day. Having to be woken up with a wash cloth just to feed, sound familar?

Their circadian rhythm is still developing, so they don’t yet have the strong day/night rhythm that we do as adults. Instead, sleep and wakefulness can be spread across the entire 24-hour period:

Sleep. Wake. Feed. Sleep. Wake. Feed. Repeat.

Some newborns will happily sleep for two hours, be woken briefly for a feed, and then go straight back to sleep, day and night.

And this is where nights can become exhausting.

Why is my newborn waking every two hours at night?

There are two major biological processes involved in sleep: circadian rhythm and sleep pressure.

Sleep pressure gradually increases while we are awake, partly due to the accumulation of adenosine in the brain. Generally, the longer we are awake, the greater the drive to sleep becomes.

But newborns have very short awake periods.

If your baby is sleeping for long periods throughout the day and is only awake for 45–60 minutes between sleeps, there may be relatively little opportunity for sleep pressure to build before each sleep. Thus broken nights.

At the same time, their circadian rhythm, the internal clock that eventually helps consolidate more sleep at night; it's still maturing.

So we can end up with a newborn who sleeps beautifully...

for two hours at a time. All. Night. Long.

For a parent, a two-hour sleep cycle doesn't mean two hours of sleep.

Baby wakes. You feed them. Burp them. Change them. Resettle them. You finally get yourself back into bed and fall asleep...

And then they're awake again.

You may actually be getting 60–90 minutes of sleep at a time.

That becomes incredibly difficult to sustain.

So what can we do?

I'm not going to use cry-it-out with a newborn.

They're not waking every two hours because we've created a terrible "sleep association" that needs to be broken. They're newborns. Their sleep biology is immature.

And a dream feed isn't necessarily the answer either.

If your baby isn't currently capable of giving you a decent stretch of sleep, quietly feeding them while they're asleep doesn't address the bigger pattern I'm trying to change.

So sometimes I do something that sounds completely counterintuitive:

I deliberately keep the baby awake for longer at one evening/night feed.

I call this an awake feed.

What does an awake feed look like?

Instead of doing:

Wake → feed → straight back to bed

I aim for a longer period of calm wakefulness, sometimes building towards around 90 minutes, depending on the baby's age, feeding needs, temperament and ability to comfortably tolerate that awake time.

I might start with half of the feed.

Then we have some quiet awake time.

Nappy off. A little kick around on the play mat. A cuddle. A change of position. Enough interaction to keep baby awake, but I'm certainly not throwing a newborn disco at 10 pm.

The lights stay dim rather than bright.

My engagement is low-key.

I'm still giving the baby all the environmental cues that say:

This is nighttime.

Towards the end of the awake period, perhaps it's around 11 pm by now, I'll swaddle baby if appropriate and offer the remainder of the feed.

And I'll let them take a really good feed.

Then we settle for the night.

Why can this work?

I'm trying to bring several pieces of newborn sleep biology together at the same time.

First, we've created a little more homeostatic sleep pressure by extending wakefulness.

Second, the baby's developing circadian system is beginning to provide stronger nighttime signals.

Melatonin secretion and other circadian changes increasingly help distinguish biological night from biological day as the infant matures.

For breastfed babies, there is another fascinating piece of biology here: breast milk itself shows circadian variation, including variation in melatonin concentrations across the 24-hour period.

So rather than relying on one thing to "make" the baby sleep, we're working with several developing biological processes at once.

And in practice, I often see something wonderful happen:

Instead of another two-hour stretch, baby gives us their first longer stretch of the night.

For some babies, that may eventually become five or six hours.

Not every newborn will do this, of course. Age, growth, feeding, milk transfer, temperament and individual sleep needs all matter. A young baby who needs to wake for feeds for medical or growth reasons should always follow the feeding advice given by their midwife, doctor or other health professional.

But the goal isn't to make a newborn "sleep through the night."

The goal is to help their longest stretch of sleep begin to consolidate at night rather than being scattered randomly across the 24 hours.

What happens during the day?

This is the other half of the strategy, and it's really important.

I don't want to keep doing a long awake period at night forever. (I need sleep at that time too!)

Over the following couple of weeks, I'm gradually helping baby tolerate more awake time during the daytime.

As their nervous system matures, their ability to stay comfortably awake increases too.

Rather than rigidly sticking to "one hour awake, two hours asleep" for months, I want awake periods to evolve as the baby develops.

By around 6–8 weeks, where appropriate for the individual baby, I'm often working towards awake periods of around 90 minutes.

That doesn't mean forcing an exhausted baby to stay awake while they're screaming.

It means gradually creating more opportunity for feeding, interaction, movement, tummy time, cuddles and simply looking at the world.

Over time, we're shifting more wakefulness into the day and allowing more sleep to consolidate into the night.

That's exactly the direction we want their developing circadian rhythm to move.

And there is another person whose sleep matters here: Mum.

Sometimes conversations about newborn sleep become so focused on the baby that we forget there is another human being involved.

A mother recovering from pregnancy and birth needs sleep too.

She needs sleep to support her physical recovery.

She needs sleep to have the energy to feed and care for her baby.

She needs sleep to support her own emotional regulation and wellbeing.

And when breastfeeding, adequate rest, nutrition and effective milk removal all form part of supporting lactation.

Nobody is suggesting that a newborn should be expected to sleep 12 hours uninterrupted.

Nobody is suggesting ignoring hunger cues.

And nobody is suggesting sleep training a brand-new baby.

But I also don't believe we should automatically accept two-hourly waking, night after night, for months as something every family simply has to endure.

There is a middle ground.

We can respect newborn biology and gently help their sleep develop in the direction it's naturally heading anyway:

More awake time during the day.

More sleep pressure by bedtime.

A developing day/night circadian rhythm.

And, eventually, a longer first stretch of sleep at night.

Sometimes the answer isn't trying harder to get your newborn back to sleep.

Sometimes it's giving them a little more opportunity to be awake.