What do you do when your baby won’t stop crying?

[FranticallyPeaceful]

Hi everyone,
I have a 4 week old and sometimes he just doesn’t stop crying no matter what I do. I’m constantly worried about how the cortisol he’s releasing will do his brain permanent damage or changes and I fall into an anxiety loop I can’t escape.

What do you do when your baby won’t stop crying? I change it and constantly run around like a headless chicken but should I be trying the same thing and just hugging him/rocking etc until he stops, or should I be trying different things to get him to stop? Usually he tires himself out as I’m doing the headless chicken dance trying various things but I’m worried he’s crying so much it will cause him damage.

This is stupid probably,and this is my third child, I always slip into an ocean of anxiety with a newborn I just don’t know how to deal with a baby that I can’t figure out what’s wrong (there doesn’t seem to be anything other than being over stimulated/over tired)

I put into a sling and go for a walk, or if it's late, pace round the kitchen or watch TV while bouncing on an exercise ball. (Babies love exercise balls.)

When my son used to have full-on overtired meltdowns, I would swaddle him tightly then just hold him against my shoulder in a darkened room, shh-ing loudly and rhythmically. He would fight the swaddle for about 60 seconds and be asleep in 5 minutes. Once he got very distressed and thrash-y as an older baby and nothing else had worked and I laid him beside me in bed, pinned him in place with my arm and then just talked and talked to him in a whisper. I narrated what we had done that day in painstaking detail and talked any old bollocks just to keep the soothing noise going. It worked.

Try all of the above. Walking up and down stairs sometimes helped dd but often nothing did.
It isn't you, it won't last and (most of time) nothing is seriously wrong.

One time dd just wouldn't stop crying and we were convinced she was seriously ill. We drove to A&E and as we pulled into the car park she stopped crying and fell asleep. For several hours.
She wasn't ill, she just fancied a trip out in the car.

She's now 6 and (despite us doing controlled crying as a baby) shows no signs of being anything other than a normal, happy child.
She still likes to wind us up though.

We used to take it in turns to take him out for a walk in the pram as he just wouldn’t stop crying in the evenings due to overtiredness/colic & nothing else worked but the pram.
Nightmare. My first child wasn’t like that so it was a shock!
Didn’t last too long though thankfully

My 12 week old is prone to bouts of extreme distress due to reflux, when everything else has failed stripping us both, and tying him on in the wrap sling skin to skin and pottering about until he sleeps has worked wonders.

Nothing stopped my colicky 2nd. We’d take it in turns to hold him while he wore himself out screaming once we’d done the ‘fed, clean nappy, wind, feed again’ routine to work out if it was something wrong. Very very stressful time. If my non colicky baby cries, walking outside or in a different room tends to help once I’ve eliminated the usual causes.

Headache? Cranial osteopath (what was the birth like?)
Colic? Infacol.
Take out in pushchair? Can be very tricky with older kids around.
Sling?
Erm...... tiger in a tree pose, see if he’s mesmerised by tv, lie down with him and fall asleep yourself (I always found that really helped, I guess as I fell asleep and relaxed the reduced stress probably helped them!). Also tricky with older ones around!
Maybe that’s all stupid but I’m just wracking my brains for you.

Do you swaddle? Swaddling and reduction of stimulation can really help if the issue is overtiredness. When they are so small they get freaked out by their own flailing limbs. It needs to be a firm swaddle though (they genuinely like this, they're used to being quite constructed in the womb).

Great tips above but I want to pick up on this:

I’m constantly worried about how the cortisol he’s releasing will do his brain permanent damage or changes and I fall into an anxiety loop I can’t escape.

I just want to reassure you on this. There is NO quality research showing that this harms the baby. None at all. Cortisol levels in the infant don’t even relate that well to behaviour like crying and they certainly don’t relate well at all to things like maternal stress when the baby is in utero. If you’re responding to your baby then even if he’s howling like a banshee he is NOT being harmed by cortisol. I say that absolutely and categorically.

Friends recommended if it was ongoing relentless crying, using foam ear plugs, so you could still hear baby crying but to take the edge off it, and then doing all the cuddling and things recommended. We never got to that stage, but found that sudden dips helped, i.e. holding baby securely and suddenly dropping at the y knees. We also used to hug and spin him, also sit on a pregnancy ball and bounce. Also slinging him, and doing all of the above. I think the sudden changes in motion distracted him.

Turning on the TV also worked! We reserved it for the worst times!

My eldest was like this. Turned it a couple of things were going on. Firstly we had reflux. We had the full puke type so tbwas obvious but even when we got the piling under control with baby gaviscon the screaming kept going until we got the ranaditine which is the antacid meds and it calmed her down a great deal. We also had a cows milk protein allergy going on and swapping milk to a hypo allergenic formula pretty much solved the problem. Had to fight for it but me having a milk intolerance helped with the argument. We tried soya formula first time but was worse so stayed with hypoallergenic. Second child displayed the same symptoms and they insisted on a lactose free formula which didn’t help. After several trips to A&E and being told it was colic the health visitor agreed that we also needed the hypoallergenic milk. Within 24 hours she was settling and a different child by 48 hours. She also had eczema which totally cleared on the new formula too.