During our first consultation she spoke to me about the 5 different methods of sleep training she specialised in and asked me which one I wanted to do.
I chose controlled crying because I needed quick results whereas the other methods although more gentle could take weeks/months to actually see an improvement.
With controlled crying we did intervals of 2, 4, 6 and 8 minutes with 8 minutes being the longest he was left for.
She warned me that emotionally it would be very hard so she advised that before we started doing the training we write a list of all the reasons why we were taking that approach. She said that anytime I felt myself wavering during the crying then I should read back the list to myself to keep me on track and remind me why we had got to this point:
I was exhausted from having so little sleep. I was having maybe 3-4 hours broken sleep every night and after 9 months of it I was just broken.
My son was exhausted from how little sleep he was getting and I could see how it was affecting his temperament.
I have a chronic health condition that is triggered by sleep deprivation, and triggering my condition could lead to serious consequences.
I was due to return to work as a nurse and there was no way I could do 13.5 hour shifts on 3-4 hours of broken sleep a night. Including driving up and down the motorway to get to work and back.
My life felt very bleak because it all felt so endless. I was starting to get frustrated with my son, I would dread the days and dread the nights. I would spend some days crying because I was so tired and because I didn’t know what to do. I was worried it was affecting my feelings towards my son.
I was worried that my marriage was in jeopardy because the lack of sleep was affecting us as individuals as well as impacting our relationship. It felt like we argued all the time and it was because we were just so tired and every day and night was like Ground Hog Day for us.
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I’m glad she told me to write the list as it was much needed….and I would just read it over and over again during the minutes that I was away from him whilst he was upset.
When we went into him we wouldn’t make eye contact and would just lie him back down in his cot and say, “It’s okay sweetheart, it’s bedtime now,” (or words to that effect) and then leave the room.
It was hard but I knew it was just habit and a habit we had to break before I completely burnt out or before my marriage fell apart.
The first night it took him about 50 minutes before he fell asleep, the second night was about 30 minutes, the third night was about 15-20 minutes and then from night 4 onwards he just lay down and went straight to sleep within 5-10 minutes with no upset at all.
If he woke in the night we would treat it in the same manner as we did when we put him to bed: minimal interaction, lie him back down and go in at intervals of 2/4/6/8 minutes as required. The first three nights he did have wake-ups but they only lasted maybe 10 minutes, whereas before I would have got him up and breast feed him and then go through the rigmarole of trying to re-settle him only for him to wake up again an hour later. So the wake-ups went from being 1+ hours long to about ten minutes.
The daytime naps were what took a little longer to address as he was so used to falling asleep in my arms at the breast and me then just sitting there for however many hours it took for him to wake up, so being placed in a cot when awake and without a nipple in his mouth was not something he was happy about. But within a week he was self-settling and napping in his cot quite happily.
So yes, it was a challenging week but the outcome was exactly what was needed.
As well as sleep being important for adults, it’s is also very important for babies in terms of their development so it helped me to think about that aspect too. It’s not just the adults who benefit from getting more sleep.
Like I said, my son was getting long blocks of uninterrupted sleep which is so important, and it meant he was having an extra 6 hours sleep per 24 hour period compared to what he was getting prior to the training which is a significant amount of added sleep for an infant of that age.
I used to think I would never do any sleep training but things just couldn’t go on and with the guidance and reassurance of the sleep consultant it was all done with such accuracy (due to the fixed changes in his routines and her fixed rules about managing bedtimes) which is what made the whole process so much easier.