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Safe & Rested: Building Your Healthy Sleep Environment

@christine.pelky

Oh the joys of daylight savings! It has been a fu

Oh the joys of daylight savings!

It has been a fun week of designing train tracks in the morning. Gone are the days where November meant a Sunday with an extra hour of sleep. Now, I have a son that begins each day with “the sun is up”. I admire his biological clock, heck I have even embraced this passion to rise… except when the season to change our clocks creeps up on us.

Knowing that we will all too quickly find ourselves at this time of year again, I figured I could share some ideas to navigate the “fall back” to help be better prepared for this annual chapter of the extra early rise. For some, leading up to daylight savings, it can help to adjust bedtime (and if possible the following daytime routine) by 10-15 min every day/couple of days until your child arrives at a schedule that works for your family. Additionally, you can always use lights to your advantage by keeping your home dark in the morning when you want to encourage a couple extra minutes of sleep and brighter at night to influence wakefulness. Lastly, use any routine you have to your advantage. Encourage your rituals to cue when the morning can begin.

While this distribution and planning may hopefully save you from a super early human alarm clock, you should also probably brace yourself and just lean into an early bedtime as you work to get back to your regularly scheduled program.

Understand your parenting triggers (because we all

Understand your parenting triggers (because we all have them!) so you can use more effective strategies tailored to your unique nervous system.

O the noise! I never realized my sensitivity to sound until I became a parent. I knew I had a tendency of playing around with the sound on the TV; “volume 26 was too loud, but 24 was hard to hear.” Then I had a baby, and he was screaming in my ears at any hour of the day. As his volume increased, my entire nervous system would crumble. I became unable to think or function… and honestly my ability to be compassionate was challenged. I felt silly because my husband could tune out the noise without a problem. I tried to ignore my reaction, but it was useless. Eventually I owned up to my reality, which eventually led me the world's greatest advice: noise reducing earplugs!

It is important to identify and accept parenting triggers because we will all be triggered by something our child is doing. Talking about it helps to remind us that it is not a bad thing, it is just reality. The list of what these might be is endless. It could be crying, or tantrums, or saying no. By talking about it, you become better aware of what yours are and how they impact you.

So feel comfortable identifying and sharing your triggers. It can be the best tactic for being prepared when a triggering moment is upon you!

We are taught about the five senses from primary s

We are taught about the five senses from primary school and beyond, however, there are more!

I still cannot hear a bag of chips open without having a panic attack. My baby could be in his deepest sleep, but his eyes would snap open the moment my husband got into those salt and vinegar chips. He didn’t even have to be in the same room. We quickly recognized that, for him, some sounds were calming while others incredibly distracting. And knowing which made it challenging to fall asleep, stay asleep, and be comfortable while sleeping was truly some of my greatest detective work!

We are all familiar with the basic senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing, and vision. However, there are two others that many are less familiar with. These include proprioception (deep pressure sense) and vestibular (movement sense). Our baby is interpreting the world around them from these senses, and each has an impact on the way their bodies experience sensory stimuli. When seeking what could be contributing to sleep patterns, it may help to consider a sensory strategy when trialing what calms and relaxes your unique baby.

One of the best ways to support nighttime changes

One of the best ways to support nighttime changes is to build up the routine with many associations first, rather than taking associations away.

It felt as if there was always a constant to do list that needed to be prioritized in order to ensure my son was set up with the ability to sleep. Included on that list was limiting my time breastfeeding at night, minimizing movement, removing contact, etc. This list was strict, endless, and doing any of the above always resulted in tears (from both of us). Thinking about it now, of course it he was miserable whenever I tried to make a change. Every change usually meant removing something that brought him comfort.

A sleep association is anything that a baby/toddler/child/adult identifies with as they drift off to sleep. Most babies tend to be more open to changes when these have first been built up. As you create what is included in your families nighttime routine, remember that you are absolutely in control of what your baby associates with when going to sleep. You should always feel empowered to make changes around which associations you would like to keep, and which are no longer working for you. So as you try to survive your night, consider the many layers or components of your routine, and hold tight to the ones that instinctively feel right for you and your baby.

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