Early Morning Wakings? What’s the Deal?

Early Morning Wakings? What’s the Deal?

If you’re reading this, chances are that you have experienced a night waking, early morning wake up or a short nap with your child. Perhaps you’ve experienced them all. There’s nothing worse than getting your child to sleep through the night just to have wake up at 5 AM raring to go.

So why do these early morning wakings happen and what can you do to fix them?

Depending on the age of your child and how long they have been sleep trained it could just be a matter of time. Your child’s body clock is a complicated mechanism. If it has only been 2 weeks or so you need to give your child some time to adjust, especially if prior to sleep training they were having a lot of fragmented sleep. As your child starts to sleep better and they wake up after a light sleep cycle they feel well rested because it’s a lot more sleep than they are used to getting.

Your first step is to look at the bedtime routine. Make sure the feeding isn’t the last step of the routine and your child isn’t going down drowsy. This feeding should be a good, full feed with baby not getting too sleepy and not eating. A top off bottle can also be helpful for breastfed babies. Keeping the light on during the bedtime routine can be helpful in preventing your baby from falling asleep.

Next, you want to revisit your child’s sleeping environment. Babies sleep best in a dark, cool room (65°-70° is a good range). When I say dark, I mean pitch black, like a cave. If your child’s room does not have black out curtains there could be light coming through in the early morning causing these wakings.

It would also be helpful to have a sound machine to drown out any noises. Garbage trucks, cars driving by, someone in the house showering and getting dressed could all be causing baby to wake up.

Daytime sleep can also be the cause of early morning wakings. Your baby’s nap schedule should be based on the appropriate wake window for your baby’s age.

What time is your baby’s first nap? Depending on your baby’s age, offering a nap too early in the morning can make the first nap an extension of the night. Your baby wakes at 5 AM, seems exhausted by 6:30/7:00 AM so you put her down for a nap. This shifts her entire day forward and then she’s ready for bed by 6 PM. Try to push your baby as close as you can to their normal nap time. This will help regulate your baby’s body clock.

Short naps are more common than long naps, but if your baby is taking really long naps (2+ hours), try shortening the first nap to one hour or it could be time for your baby to drop one nap altogether. Make sure the last nap is not too late in the evening that it’s interfering with bedtime. The gap between the last nap and bedtime should be based on the wake window.

If your baby is waking at 5 AM you want to stick to a minimum wake up time until things are resolved. 6 AM should be the earliest you go and get your baby to start her day. If you are getting your baby at 5 AM and bringing her out into the light, this exposure to light will set her body clock and she will continue to wake at 5 AM.

So what do you do for an hour? If your baby isn’t full out fussing or crying leave her in her crib until 6 AM. If baby is unhappy try to wait 10-15 minutes before going in. Then go in and try to calm her for a few minutes then leave for 10-15 minutes again. If this isn’t cutting it, go ahead and pick her up, but try your best to stay in her dark room until 6 AM with no feedings. Then bring her out into the living room, offer her a feed and start the day.

So it’s been a few weeks and you’ve tried these things to no avail. Let’s revisit how you handle these wakings. Are you caving and feeding your baby in hopes she’ll go back to sleep? Or bringing her to your bed? If there’s something she looks forward to now, she will continue to wake up early. Delay that first feed, change her diaper, do what you can so you are delaying this gratification.

Overtiredness is the archenemy of sleep. If your baby is waking early consistently there is a good chance she is overtired. Try moving bedtime up by 30 minutes and stick to that for a week or more to see if things improve.

I must urge you that consistency is key with these early mornings. Any type of change you make to your child’s sleep schedule must be carried out for a week before you dismiss that the solution isn’t working.

If an earlier bedtime didn’t work, then try moving bedtime 30 minutes later (than it was before you moved it earlier). Do this gradually, 15 minutes every few days until you are at the right time, again giving this a week to work. I would not make bedtime later than 8:00/8:30 PM.

There is one more last resort technique you can try if your baby is stuck in this early morning cycle. This is primarily for babies waking at approximately the same time every day. This approach is to try and reset your baby’s body clock. For 7 days in a row you would wake your child slightly, 60 minutes before their normal wake time, but not completely. Bring them to the surface and let them fall back asleep. If it doesn’t work, stick to the 6 AM wake time and try the next day.

This may seem like a lot of guessing work, but really you are trying to diagnose why your baby is waking early. Sleep can be a complicated thing and just when you get your baby sleeping the way you want things change. They start cutting teeth or they get a cold or you have a vacation planned.

If you have tried these tips and tricks to no avail, I am here to help you. Sometimes it takes someone from the outside to diagnose what’s going on with your child’s sleep. Schedule a free evaluation call today.