Breastfed Baby sleep regression

[AllaboutR]

Hi there,

My baby has just turned 5 months old, up until 4 months she’s always been a really good sleeper. So much so that we used to have to wake her to feed and when she did wake it was always around the same two times of a night. At 4 months, this all stopped and went the opposite way! We at first put it down to the 4 month sleep regression, as all the signs were pointing to that, but it has gone on for 7 weeks now. She will sleep for a couple of hours at night when first put down, but she is then awake pretty much all night on & off and the only thing that seems to get her to sleep is being on the boob. As soon as I pull away (when she’s drifted off) she wakes immediately and starts rooting and fussing. Feels like we’ve tried everything to help her get back to a regular sleep pattern but to no avail. It is pretty exhausting as I’m awake for most of the night & can’t see it going back to how it was any time soon.
Is this just a phase?
Any advice would be appreciated.

I was where you are for 10 weeks. This possibly won't be a popular opinion but swapping to bottles for all feeds except the morning one (mix of expressed milk and formula) improved things dramatically for us. 2 weeks after the improvement started she's now night weaned herself and is sleeping through 7 til 6 ish. Could be total coincidence but we're sticking with it!

Hi OP, this is the age where there’s a big change in baby’s sleep cycles.

Different people have different approaches to how they deal with it.

You could carry on doing exactly what you’re doing and your little one will eventually learn to link their sleep cycles by themselves. This could take a few months or a year. People that go this route are probably more likely to cosleep as it means you don’t have to keep getting up in the night an baby can feed on demand.

You could gently get your baby used to not falling asleep whilst feeding. The idea is that then when they wake up they’re more likely to put themselves to sleep again on their own without needing the help of something to suck. Some people do it by changing when in the bedtime routine they feed baby eg, before everything else! My friend who did this then rocked baby to sleep instead. We did a much slower approach where I would unlatch the baby just before he fell asleep. To start with I was probably unlatching him when he was already asleep and slowly I was able to unlatch him earlier and earlier to the point that at around 6.5 months I could feed him and then he can have a cuddle and then he can fall asleep in his cot or during the cuddle.

This did help him wake up less often and it meant that if he did wake up my husband had a chance of settling him too. But I did still feed him in the night if he woke up and a cuddle didn’t calm him down.

Another approach would be more formal sleep training, though your baby is so young! I’ve also heard people say that as part of sleep training they night weaned but I always thought baby was to young for that aswel!

Ah ok, we have tried a bottle before bed but not enough to notice any real difference I don’t think. She does fall asleep at first but just for the first 2/2.5 hours and then it all begins. Think we tried it and though well that’s not worked, but we could give it another go. She used to be fine with a bottle but now she very much picks and chooses when she’s going to take it or not!

We have tried the rocking to sleep, which again, does work for the first couple of hours but after the first initial wake up it’s like nothing will settle her again at all. She can be rocked to sleep but will only go down for 20 mins, my partner walks her and she falls fast asleep but the moment he goes to put her in her cot she wakes up immediately. We’ve tried with a few different methods and nothing seems to be making a difference. Currently she’ll wake up as soon as I try to unlatch, even if she’s asleep but I will definitely keep trying.
Thank you

Sorry if you've tried these things and/or they're not your cup of tea, but have you considered white noise and/or a dummy? My boy is 16 weeks and used to wake twice a night for feeds but the last week or two is similar in that he does a few hours in his bed first thing and then tends to wake every 1-2 hours (sometimes more) the rest of the night. However if we stick his dummy in if it's been less than about 3hrs since he had a feed he almost always just goes straight back off to sleep again. It's still a bit faffy having to sit up and put the dummy in loads of times a night but I prefer that to feeding him loads of times personally. We use the dummy for a lot of his daytime naps too as he very rarely falls asleep at the breast in the daytime, he usually prefers the dummy for sleep.

We swapped all feeds to bottle feeds and just swapping the night one didn't work for us either. I think she gets more volume in each feed when bottle fed compared to BF, and as a result is more full. In hindsight I think some of the sleep issues we had were related to frequent waking due to hunger. Could be worth a go for a few days - nothing lost really!

Hey @SecondhandTable
Yeah we have tried a dummy but she just won’t take to it. Maybe because we have left it till now to introduce one who knows, but she just will not have it. Pretty much the same with white noise. I think it used to work when she was younger but then again, she never had issues sleeping then anyway.

@MGee123
Hey, did you swap to formula from a bottle or just expressed? Definitely worth a go yeah, as you say, we’ve nothing to lose at this point.

I did some expressed milk and some formula as wanted to keep my supply going. We're now on 3 formula and 2 expressed bottles a day. At this point I think your supply is fairly flexible so a few days of pumping shouldn't interfere with supply too much. It could have been total coincidence but there has been a remarkable improvement since we changed it!

We had already tried introducing one bottle of formula in the evening which hadn't really had any effect.