Did your baby monitor help you sleep, or keep you awake?

[TheCleverLemonZebra]

Imagine this: you don’t have a baby monitor yet. Once your baby falls asleep, you lie down too, but every little sound pulls you back up. Then the room becomes completely quiet, and somehow that feels even harder to ignore.
You walk over to the crib, check that everything is okay, return to bed… and repeat the same thing a little while later.
After enough broken nights, you buy a baby monitor, hoping it will finally help you rest. It has a camera, sound, notifications, maybe even movement tracking. Now you can check the crib without getting out of bed.
But something unexpected happens: you leave the bed less, yet you don’t really sleep more.
Instead, you watch the screen, turn up the volume, check the connection, and wake up for every alert. Your baby may be sleeping,but you’re still on watch.
The monitor brought the crib closer. It didn’t necessarily bring peace of mind.
It made me wonder: do parents really need more information to watch, or a calmer way of knowing when their attention is actually needed?
Did your baby monitor genuinely help you sleep more, or did it simply change the way you stayed awake?

@TheCleverLemonZebra Never used one for a baby but we had one for a while when we had a new puppy, so we'd hear him if he wanted to go out overnight when we were toilet training him. This was a long time ago, so it wasn't a smart monitor, just the intercom type, not reliant on internet/mobile data, so we'd hear if he was moving about or whimpering etc.

There was an element of being tense waiting to hear something, but it's hard to say whether that was just because we were nervous anyway about this new little life that was in our house and dependent on us - which I can imagine must be magnified tenfold if that new life is your baby rather than your pup! We got used to it and soon enough he was sleeping through and we didn't need it any more

I wonder if a simpler radio-type monitor like we had might be your answer, OP, if you can still buy them. At least you wouldn't be 'checking the connection' and other random notifications - sometimes more complicated tech just gives us more to worry about and fret over, and the more tech there is, the more there is to go wrong. With a basic intercom alarm, as long as the battery is working which you can easily see by whether it's lit up or not, you can't go wrong - it will relay every noise to you.

I wonder also if it would help you to look at resources for anxiety generally, to find coping techniques.

Hoping you find a solution to get a better night's sleep while keeping your little one safe and sound