Four month old sleep hell

[AmyAW]

It's been two weeks and my four month old baby has not slept longer than one hour, day and night.

I'm coping somehow but know this isn't sustainable. Aware of the four month sleep regression but also that it's a marketing tactic and lack of sleep is more based around developmental skills.

Please tell me babies do snap out of this!? Other babies in our NCT group are going through the same - but waking every 2/3 hours, which frankly sounds like pure luxury to me! Hand hold needed :(

You only need to cope in the short term. You don't need to sustain this because it is, I promise you, temporary! Sleep isn't linear. It changed for better, for worse better and worse again etc throughout infancy with development leaps and growth spurts. So take each one at a time and do what works in the short term to survive. Kathryn Stagg and Sarah Ockwell Smith, Olivia Hinge all have good advice on this.

I wouldn’t say it’s a marketing tactic. Baby’s develop in a way that changes their sleep works in a way that means most wake much more frequently for a time.

I don’t know what your baby’s sleep was like before but it will be different for a while. It won’t be this bad for toooo long but it could be over a month of waking every hour.

My DS started sleeping through consistently at around 21 months.

I posted on here about this not long ago as around 4.5 months baby started taking 45 min naps and then waking every hour or so through the night.
after about six weeks of this (💤💤💤) he had definitely outgrown his next to me cot and we moved him to his own room at 5.5months ish. Once in the bigger cot he flipped onto his tummy at bedtime and fell in to a deeper sleep and pretty much sleeps all night now and has done for a fortnight. So now I’m enjoying this new phase 😂 so yes they will snap out of it eventually, I didn’t do any sleeping training or anything but if it had gone on much longer I might have! Just my experience tho.

I want through this with my second. After a month of it and feeling like I could murder perfect strangers because they slept and I didn't, we coslept one night, she slept through and the following night moved her to her own room and she slept from there on out. I think we'd probably been disturbing her.

We tried all sorts before then. I'd recommend a sling in the day and hopefully it will promote night time sleep. My dd hated the sling at first but I persisted and she then loved it.

Have a Google of Dr Harvey Karp the 5 S's - creating that might also help.

It will pass.

At around 4 months, some babies are only just beginning to get the ability to sleep for longer stretches (4-6+ hours). But it is dependent on not being woken by hunger so they need more milk during daytime feeds.

What is your baby’s nap and feed schedule like?