Newborn Sleep Tips and Habits

Congratulations! You’ve welcomed a precious baby into your family, which means newborn sleep is not only new to you—but to your baby, too! It can be a real struggle for newborns to adjust to the bright lights and big sounds of the outside world and to the jolting silence of their new sleep space. For freshly minted parents with no memory of their itty-bitty days, newborn sleep habits and preferences are often a mystery—so I hope these newborn sleep tips will help.

Newborn Baby Sleep Habits

Fresh-from-the-womb infants sleep differently than grownups and even older babies. Here are a few newborn sleep basics:

• They don’t know day from night. Your newborn’s natural day-night circadian rhythms haven’t developed yet. (To help, expose your little one to natural light in the morning and dim the lights and pull the shades about an hour before bedtime.)
• Newborn bellies are tiny. New babies need to eat a lot, including during the night. Breastfed newborns wake to nurse about every two to three hours and formula-fed babies do so about every three to four hours.
• Newborns sleep in fits and starts. Babies up to 2 months old sleep 14 to 18 hours a day in bits and pieces, waking throughout the day to feed.
• Newborns are noisy sleepers. Newborn babies cycle through REM sleep (aka “active sleep”) and NREM “quiet sleep” every 45 to 50 minutes. That means your baby enters a light sleep about every hour, making them more prone to briefly waking and making short moans or squawks.
• Newborn wake windows are short. A newborn’s daytime wake/sleep cycle is 45 to 60 minutes of awake time, then one to two hours of napping. For 1- to 2-month-olds, the wake window opens a bit wider, landing between one and two hours.
• Newborns crave the 5 S’s. Swaddling and shushing (white noise) are just two of the   that turn on a baby’s calming reflex…aka the “off switch” for fussing and “on switch” for sleep. The gentle hug of a swaddle mimics the security of the womb, decreases startling, and increases sleep. Meanwhile, white noise harkens back to the sounds of the womb, in just five minutes.