Sleep training success stories needed please

[teaandkittehs]

Hi All, my dear little baby hit the 4 month sleep regression at exactly 4 months and is now 6 months and one week old and has not improved at all. We have approximately 8 wake ups a night. I also have insomnia and don't sleep in the tiny gaps between wake ups, so my poor partner covers everything single morning with the baby so I can get some sleep. I stopped breastfeeding at 5 months because I was becoming depressed due to being awake until 6 or 7 am each day and then getting 2 - 3 hours sleep after that (partner works part time, from home, so he can do the mornings. Otherwise i genuinely might have been suicidal by now). Now we do one night of feeds each, but he can sleep in the gaps between wake ups on his night, I can't on my nights, so when it's my night off I sleep like the dead for 8 - 10 hours in the guest room due to only having had 2 hours sleep the night before. I have a sleep tracker app - 3 nights ago i got 34 minutes of sleep, no more. I've been to the doctor but all they can do is offer me zopiclone which is not appropriate to take when i have responsibility to deal with baby wake ups, for obvious reasons. I don't need antidepressants because how awful i feel is all caused by lack of sleep, not depression. I've had insomnia my whole life but it never used to involve dealing with a baby every 20 - 45 minutes so it is so much worse now. There is no way out of this apart from sleep training. She was born 3 weeks early so I'm going to wait another week or two so that she hits the 'true' 6 month mark and then I'm going to tell my partner i cannot live like this anymore and that we have to sleep train. I have to cancel plans because i am not safe to drive on 2 hours sleep. We missed her last swimming lesson for the same reason. My world is becoming smaller and smaller. She is utterly reliant upon us holding her to get her to sleep. I stand hunched over in her room multiple times a night holding her until she goes to sleep, putting her back in the crib often has to be done multiple times as she often wakes when i transfer her. She's a gorgeous little critter and i regret nothing about having her, but i have to find a way out of this, so i would love to hear some sleep training success stories as until very recently i was certain i would not and could not sleep train. I am a worse parent and a tearful partner because i can't survive this. I've not met a single parent who has experienced lack of sleep equal to this, it seems most people can grab snatches of sleep when given even a small window. I'm very alone in this. I'm back at work too which I am doing very badly at because of this situation (work has a bad maternity package so i only took 12 weeks, luckily i work from home and the summer is a slow period in my line of work). I realise this message will yield some judgmental responses but they will be ignored for obvious reasons.

I know how awful sleep deprivation can be and you've got a brief window before you feel like you can sleep train.

In that time there are some things you can do:

Yank her up as much as you can with calories in the day. I don't know how often she's feeding in the day now but if it's every 3 hours, I'd try offering at 2.5 hours.

Get lots of physical contact with her in the day. Babies need a lot of touch it seems! Have you tried a sling?

Sleep with her cot sheets do that they smell of you. Makes the cot more reassuring.

And have you heard of the No Cry Sleep Solution? That has lots of useful tips you could try.

I wouldn't entirely discount the antidepressants either. You won't be the first Mum who had had PND brought on by lack of sleep. I'd suggest calling the Pandas Foundation and talking through the possibility of PND with them, they are very experienced and usually very helpful

Thanks for the response, but we weighed up the potential long term effects of a clinically depressed and medicated mother versus trying sleep training, and decided to try the sleep training. It worked within minutes, and we've all slept well every since. I guess we had just never given her the opportunity to sleep independently! The only thing i would add is that some of the advice at the link you provided promotes unsafe sleep practices, such as soft mattresses which can cause breathing obstruction, and fleece blankets which can cause overheating (it was 25 degrees at night when i posted my original message so very hot spell in the uk). And i fine it terribly sad that women are told to embrace depression and medication instead of taking a few days to find out whether their child could be an easy and successful independent sleeper, like mine was. I realise some cry for hours when sleep training is tried and that is a very different story to ours, luckily, but clearly it can work well and quickly as it did for us. I am so, so glad we did this, its changed our lives and the baby is never a crying exhausted mess anymore either so she's happier too :)

I'm so glad that you have found a solution that worked for you but I very much didn't tell you to "embrace the depression". I linked to a reputable charity that helps many Women recover from PND.