The Four Month Sleep Regression

The Four Month Sleep Regression

Type “sleep regression” into Google and you will come back with more than 55 million results! Yep, it’s true! When it comes to sleep, so called regressions are blamed for so many imaginable circumstances. Some sources will even have you believe that there is a sleep regression every month for about the first 2 years of your baby’s life. Personally, I prefer to look at all of this as normal, developmental progress. Absolutely there are some key things going on developmentally, which can temporarily disrupt sleep for some children. for example, learning to roll, stand, walk etc but typically any changes to sleep alongside these are temporary and will pass.

However, when it comes to the four-month regression, there is scientific evidence and therefore general consensus that this is the real deal and it is a permanent change.

The good news for anyone experiencing the Four Month Sleep Regression is that it’s not, in fact, a regression at all. A regression is defined as “reversion to an earlier mental or behavioral level,” and that’s actually the opposite of what your baby is experiencing. This would be much more aptly called the “Four Month Sleep Progression”.

In order to explain what I mean and to understand what’s happening to your baby during this stage, first you need to know a few things about sleep in general. So here’s the science-y part, told in plain English.

Many of us just think of sleep as an on-or-off situation. You’re either asleep or you’re not. But sleep actually has a number of different stages, and they make up the “sleep cycle,” which we go through several times a night.

• Stage 1 is that initial stage we’re all familiar with where you can just feel yourself drifting off, but don’t really feel like you’ve fallen asleep. Anyone who has ever seen their partner nodding off in front of the TV, told them to go to bed, and gotten a response of, “I wasn’t sleeping!” knows exactly what this looks like.
• Stage 2, which is considered the first “true sleep” stage. This is where people tend to realize, once woken up, that they actually were sleeping. For anyone taking a “power nap,” this is as deep as you want to go, or else you’re going to wake up groggy.
• Stage 3 is deep and regenerative. Also known as “slow wave” sleep, this is where the body starts repairing and rejuvenating the immune system, muscles tissue, energy stores, and sparks growth and development.
• Stage 4 is REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. This is where the brain starts to kick in and consolidates information and memories from the day before. It’s also the stage where we do most of our dreaming.

Once we’ve gone through all of the stages, we either wake up or come close to waking up, and then start over again until the alarm goes off.

So what does this have to do with the much talked about sleep regression we were talking about originally?

Well, newborn babies only have 2 stages of sleep; stage 3 and REM, and they spend about half their sleep in each stage. But at around the third or fourth month, there is a reorganization of sleep, as they embrace the 4-stage method of sleep that they’ll continue to follow for the rest of their lives.

When this change takes place, baby moves from 50% REM sleep to 25% in order to make room for those first two stages. So although REM sleep is light, it’s not as light as these 2 new stages that they’re getting used to, and with more time spent in lighter sleep, there’s more of a chance that baby’s going to wake up.

That’s not to say that we want to prevent or avoid baby waking up. Waking up is absolutely natural, and we continue to wake up three, four, five times a night into adulthood and even more in old age.

As adults, however, when we wake in the night, we’re able to recognize that, “Hey, I’m here in my bed, it’s still nighttime, my alarm isn’t going to go off for another three hours, and I’m reasonably certain that there are no monsters lurking under my bed. I can go back to sleep”. And we do. Usually so quickly that, the next morning, we don’t even remember the brief encounter with consciousness.

A four month old baby, of course, lacks these critical thinking skills. To a four month old baby who fell asleep whilst feeding, the reasoning could go much more like, “OK, last thing I remember, there was a familiar, beloved face, I was having dinner, and someone was singing me a soothing song about the Teddy Bears’ Picnic. Now I’m alone in this dark room, there’s no food, and there’s probably at least three, possibly four, scary monsters in the immediate vicinity.”

That’s probably an exaggeration, but who knows what goes on in the mind of a four month-old baby?

Anyways, now that baby’s suddenly realized that Mum’s not around, and they’re not entirely sure where they’ve gone, the natural response is a little anxiety. That stimulates the fight-or-flight response and, next thing you know, baby’s not going back to sleep without a significant amount of reassurance that everything is OK.

The other major contributor to this 4 month challenge, I find, is that up until this point, parents have often been giving some sort of help or assistance for baby to fall asleep. There are a million and one different things we do to help; giving a pacifier, rocking,  bottle/breastfeeding are just a few. It’s important to remember that there is nothing wrong with helping your baby to sleep. In fact, newborns often need a lot of help to settle to sleep and it’s perfectly healthy and normal.  My personal view is that provided everyone is getting the sleep they need for normal physical and mental health there is nothing wrong with continuing to help your older child to sleep too. If it works for your family, that’s great!

From around the 4 month or so mark though, because baby is spending more time in light sleep (and therefore has a higher probability of waking up), for many children and families sleep suddenly becomes a much bigger challenge. The things we do to help our children to sleep can be very sneaky indeed, because although they may be helpful in getting your little one to that initial nodding off stage, in their absence when baby wakes up, they may be unable to get back to sleep again without some external help. Cue the crying. In some cases, this can start happening every half an hour and understandably is tough for all the family.

So, onto the big question. What can you do to help your little one adjust?

First off, try and get all the light out of your baby’s room. You might think that baby’s room is dark enough, or that baby might not like the dark, and that it’s comforting to have a little bit of light coming through the windows or seeping in from the hallway.

Nope.

Baby’s room should be dark. I mean super dark. Tape garbage bags over the windows if you have to, or cover them with tinfoil.

Newborns and infants are not afraid of the dark. They are, however, responsive to light. Light tells their brains that it’s time for activity and alertness, and the brain secretes hormones accordingly, so we want to keep the room absolutely pitch black during naps and bedtime.

The other nemesis of daytime sleep, (and nighttime for that matter, although not nearly as often) is noise. Whether it’s ringing doorbells, next door’s dog, or something falling on the floor three rooms away. With baby spending more time in lighter sleep, noises will startle them easily and wake them up, so a white noise machine is a great addition to your nursery.

“Wait, isn’t that a form of assistance?,” you’re asking. Well, in a way, it is, but provided it doesn’t require any resetting, reinserting, or parental presence, it’s just there and it can be on as long as baby’s sleeping, it’s not something we need to be concerned about. Make sure that it is placed far enough away from baby’s bed to comply with safety and sound level standards.

Bedtime routines are also an essential component to getting your baby sleeping well. Aim to keep the routine to about 4 or 5 steps and try to keep the feed near the beginning of the routine, rather than the last step. The whole process should be about 20 – 30 minutes long, and ideally baby can go into their crib while they’re still awake.

If you’re noticing baby getting overly fussy before bedtime, baby might have been awake a little too long. Four month old babies typically manage about two hours of awake time between sleep and a bedtime between about 7 and 8pm usually works well for most children.

Now, there are going to be regressions, actual regressions, later on for your little one. Travelling, illness, cutting teeth, all of these things can cause your little one to have a few bad nights in a row. But when it comes to the four month “progression,” I’m happy to report that this is a one-time thing. Once you’re through this, your baby will have officially moved into the sleep cycle that they’ll essentially be following for the rest of their life. Four glorious stages repeated multiple times a night.

And by taking this opportunity to gradually get them comfortably connecting sleep cycles together, independently, without any need for external help, you’ll have given them a gift that will benefit the rest of their lives.

If you would like to know more about my approach with families and how I can help, contact me via my webpage or insta page. I offer a free 15 minute call so I can get to know the specifics about your little one’s situation and together we can plan next steps.