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In this episode, Jess and Scott dive deep into the challenges of infant and toddler sleep and parenting through sleep deprivation. Jess opens up about her struggles as a new mom trying to follow rigid sleep training rules and how she eventually found a more attuned, connection-based approach.
In the episode, Jess and Scott discuss:
* The pitfalls of strictly following sleep training methods without considering your child's unique needs.
* How postpartum anxiety can fuel obsession over sleep schedules.
* Mindset shifts that can help parents cope better with nighttime wakings.
* Why attunement and trusting your parental instincts is so important.
Listeners will gain valuable insights on finding a balance between sleep strategies and responding to their child's needs, as well as practical tips for staying calm during those long nights. This raw and honest conversation is a must-listen for any parent struggling with sleep issues.
Get 10% OFF parenting courses and kids' printable activities at Nurtured First [https://nurturedfirst.com/courses/] using the code ROBOTUNICORN.
Learn more about the Solving Bedtime Battles course here [https://nurturedfirst.com/courses/solving-bedtime-battles/].
Credits:
Editing by The Pod Cabin [https://thepodcabin.com/]
Artwork by Wallflower Studio [https://www.wallflowerstudio.co/]
Production by Nurtured First [https://nurturedfirst.com/]
Join me, Jess VanderWier, a registered psychotherapist, mom of three, and founder of Nurtured First, along with my husband Scott, as we dive deep into the stories of our friends, favourite celebrities, and influential figures.
In each episode, we skip the small talk and dive into vulnerable and honest conversations about topics like cycle breaking, trauma, race, mental health, parenting, sex, religion, postpartum, healing, and loss.
We are glad you are here.
PS: The name Robot Unicorn comes from our daughter. When we asked her what we should name the podcast, she confidently came up with this name because she loves robots, and she loves unicorns, so why not? There was something about the playfulness of the name, the confidence in her voice, and the fact that it represents that you can love two things at once that just felt right.
Welcome to Robot Unicorn.
We are so glad that you are here.
As always, let's start the show with a question from Scott.
Are you ready for my question?
Mm-hmm.
Alright.
So I was on a bike ride with my buddy on the weekend.
Okay.
And we were talking about
Sleep struggles and how challenging the first little bit of when you first have a baby and sometimes for a couple of years, it's like that.
And I was explaining to him that I felt like you have a bit of a superpower when it comes to sleep.
Because for whatever reason, you can
survive like it seems as though easily, I'm sure that it's not, but it seems like you can survive very easily on next to no sleep for days on end.
Versus for me that's impossible.
Yeah.
So my question is how do you do it?
Yeah.
Good question.
It's a bit bit facetious, but it's No, it's a good question.
It's uh legitimately you are weirdly
good with almost no sleep.
But was I always like that?
I think so.
Like even through university you were working all the time and like you would work until after midnight, come home, and then get up.
And be ready for work at like six or seven in the morning again.
Yeah.
Whereas I feel like I can do that, but for a maximum of let's say three days, and then after that I am just like You're ill
Yeah, I get sick or I am just incredibly irritable.
So like legitimately I feel as though people would be interested in knowing how do you do it.
Cause they may not even know that you are that good at that.
Yeah, I feel like if I talk to my personal friends, it's the question that always comes up.
It's like how
Yeah, you're honestly weirdly good at having no sleep.
So Yeah, that so like I asked you, do you feel like I was always like that?
I don't feel like I was always like that, especially in parenthood
Like I feel like yeah, okay, in university I got by on not that much sleep.
But I remember when we first had a baby, that was the biggest struggle that I had
was not sleeping.
And the other thing was my postpartum anxiety was completely fixated on how we were gonna get our daughter to sleep.
And she did not sleep well.
And I remember feeling like not sleeping through the night was going to be the end of the world
Right, but don't see too much of a difference between our first daughter and our second daughter in terms of like the sleep that you had.
But I feel like the second one I was fine.
Yeah, you kind of dealt with it, no problem.
So yeah, the first yeah, true.
The first one was definitely a struggle.
Mm-hmm.
That's why I wanted to bring that up because between the three kids
They all were not good sleepers.
Yeah, not at first.
Not at first.
Now they are, for the most part.
Yeah.
Except for last night.
Except for last night
Scott and I are coming on to this episode about sleep deprivation and how to cope with it.
Literally, we both had terrible, terrible nights of sleep.
last night.
That's pretty like honestly relatively rare at this point.
It was just a weird fluke of a night where two of the kids were awake.
Yeah.
So to go back to what we were saying, when we had our first daughter, my postpartum anxiety was completely fixated around sleep, sleep schedules
how long she would sleep for, how much sleep I would get that night, getting a certain amount of sleep.
Like I just remember all I could think about was sleep.
And I definitely did not have the mindset that I have now.
And it was incredibly difficult
So I just feel like off the top we have to say that sometimes your mental health and sleep are just so tied together.
I think for me Sometimes.
I feel like all the time
Well all the time they're tied together.
But I think for me as a new mom, if there's a new mom listening to it and you feel like you're just completely stuck on sleep
I just want to identify.
Like I've been there.
I know how that feels.
And I'm so far removed from that now.
And I'll share some of the tools and some of the tips that have really helped me get into a better space with sleep
Because you say like you're so good at being up in the middle of the night, you're so good at coping with it.
I feel like I just have so many tools in my toolbox now that I pl
pull from when I'm awake in the middle of the night or when the kids wake up.
Plus I have the temperament that allows me to do that.
Yeah, I think that's a big thing.
It's a big thing.
Because for me like it's still not something that I can handle at all.
Right.
Yeah, you do very poorly with no sleep.
Mm-hmm.
But maybe you can take some of the That's always been how I am.
Maybe you can take some of the tools away from me today.
Yeah, maybe okay.
This might be a good learning
lesson for me as well.
Yeah, exactly.
Because I do feel like there's also a piece that because you've never really been able to tolerate waking up at night, like you just can't function.
on no sleep very well at all.
I always kind of have taken the brunt of like the night wakings for the most part because I can handle it better.
But I feel like you also haven't had a chance to really implement some of the tools that I use for myself
Yeah.
So maybe maybe there's something that you'll learn today to take away.
Okay.
Yep.
And then tonight you can take all the night wakings in.
This kidding.
Scott actually is pretty good at waking up in the night with the kids if they need you.
Yeah.
Like last night our middle daughter was in bed kicking you
Yeah.
Stroking your stroking your face.
Um yeah.
It was the most loving.
Yeah.
And the most annoying.
Yeah.
So
We both handle night wakings, but anyway, how did I get from, I think, being a really, really anxious first-time mom around sleep to
Being able to tolerate waking up in the night.
There's a couple things that really helped me.
First, I think just adjusting to it was big
Right.
So y when I was pregnant, I would sleep for ten hours a night, twelve hours a night sometimes.
Like I was very tired in pregnancy.
So we were used to getting a certain amount of sleep.
Well there was that
And you were also on bed rest, like for four months of that pregnancy too.
So for sure that made you more l lethargic.
Yeah, I was used to just having a lot of rest during the day.
And then you have a baby and the baby naturally doesn't sleep very well.
I think part of the anxiety and the anger, the rage that I would
feel at bedtime was because everything I was reading was telling me your baby is capable of sleeping six hours at a time or your baby can go to bed drowsy but not awake
And so I think in my head then I had these rules, right?
I'm not gonna rock her to sleep because babies should go to bed drowsy and awake.
That will help them sleep better
But then our daughter would never go to bed, drowsy but awake.
So I was following every sleep rule.
And then of course babies don't follow sleep rules.
Toddlers don't follow sleep rules.
So I got hyper-fixated on these rules and then our child wasn't doing the rule and I was so afraid to rock her to sleep because I didn't want to make a bad habit or breastfeed her to sleep.
All the things that felt like they would be most natural to me
So I think part of the anxiety that I felt and that many parents feel around sleep was following these rigid rules, these rigid schedules, hoping that she would sleep better and then she didn't, and then it was the baby that was the problem in my mind at the time, right?
She's a bad sleeper.
And the first question everybody always asks you is, how does the baby sleep?
You know, is it a good baby?
And being a good baby is defined by how they sleep at night.
Mm-hmm.
And so what am I supposed to say?
Yeah, she's a bad baby.
She's up every 45 minutes.
So I I think that that's where a lot of parents struggled.
That piece of it is a mindset thing.
So one of the things that has really helped me be able to cope better at night is changing my mindset towards night wakings.
And this is not gonna solve all your problems.
But one of the things that I would spiral on was when I would wake up in the middle of the night, I would tell myself, You're never gonna sleep again.
You're not gonna be able to function tomorrow.
No matter what happens tomorrow.
Like you have to go to work and you're not gonna be able to keep your eyes open
and you're gonna be grumpy.
And I would start spiraling on all these messages and then I would get so angry like I can't cope because tomorrow's gonna suck and then the next day's gonna suck and I'm not gonna be able to tolerate it
So I started really changing my mindset towards the night wakings.
So I would tell myself things like, if you can't sleep right now, you can just rest.
And so even last night in the middle of the night, I had the worst night of sleep I've had in months last night.
Like really, really bad.
And I was sitting in the rocking chair with our toddler.
She was awake for whatever reason, not sure still.
Yep.
And she's babbling in my ear and I just
felt that rage boiling up in my body.
Like I have a full day at work tomorrow.
I'm supposed to record a podcast tomorrow.
How am I gonna do all this on no sleep?
And I just
try calming my brain and say, it's okay, Jess, even if you can't sleep, you can rest.
Rest is important too.
And I try and tell myself those messages.
Another message I'll tell myself is we don't need to make a change in the middle of the night
It's 2 a.
m.
And I think this is where a lot of parents will start sleep training their kids.
And I know that you've felt this way too in the middle of the night before.
Where your kids
woken up and they're not sleeping very well, it's two A.
M.
and you're like, fine, you could just cry then, right?
Like you just become so enraged that you're like
Fine, I'll just leave you.
If you're not gonna listen to me, then just deal with it.
And what I tell myself is when I have those thoughts come up, it's a very conscious thinking process.
It's like I'm having the thought that I just want to slam the door and leave this child because I'm so angry that they're not gonna sleep.
I don't make changes for how I deal with sleep at 2 a.
m.
My job is just to provide comfort and be there for her.
If I need to take a break at Ken.
But we don't make a change for our sleep schedules at 2 a.
m.
And that has also really helped me.
And any time that we have, like we've had to make changes for their sleep before.
And we've had to make plans and readjust what we do for sleep.
But I do that in the morning, not at 2 a.
m.
So to your question, I mean there's so many different things I do, but the one the biggest thing, and it sounds maybe floofy, but once you really start trying to change those thought processes around night waking
the mindset shift has been the single biggest thing for me in the middle of the night.
To be honest, I didn't know that second one.
No?
No.
Do it in the morning?
That is my role for myself.
Yeah.
Like I will never I wish I would have known that one.
See, I told you you might learn something new.
I did learn something new today.
So I have that mindset.
I also tell myself consistently when I'm up in the middle of the night, sun will come back out and you will feel better in the morning.
Like you feel in the middle of the night the world is ending.
You feel heat in your body, you feel like I have to yell, I have to scream, like rage, rage comes out and
I know people may or may not believe it, but I do feel ragey in the middle of the night.
Even last night I felt it.
I felt it in my body, like I felt so frustrated.
because I was up for hours and I knew I had a big day today.
But I just kept telling myself, the sun is going to come out tomorrow morning.
Even if you've only had three hours of sleep, you will feel better.
This night is not going to last forever.
You just have to get through it
We don't make a change.
And if tonight goes terrible again, which I don't think it will, I think it was a one-off thing.
Yeah.
Then tomorrow morning, I'll be like, okay, Scott, we need to make
a change.
We need to figure out, get curious about what's going on, because this is not gonna work long term for me.
But I don't make that change at 2 a.
m.
Okay, so can we go back to you're talking about like sleep training and babies don't follow the rules and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah
But doesn't like the research that's out there kind of suggest that on average they do?
Like if you follow what sleep trainers will tell you, don't they kind of follow those rules at some point?
So like I guess my question to you is
Why shouldn't we use the fervor method or cry it out or whatever, all those those different methods to get your baby to sleep, if maybe they will sleep six hours a night then
So, I mean, you wanna get into sleep training?
Sure.
Yeah.
I think that we can get into that discussion
There's just so I think it's related.
It's related, yeah.
There's so many things.
We're at a point now where we were up last night, but it was kind of a one-off thing that we haven't had in a long time, right?
But
when we had each of the kids when they were infants, they were definitely up a lot.
Yeah.
Right.
So And absolutely we made changes to help them sleep better.
Yeah.
I think the issue with the rules comes into place when we expect a baby to do something because we created this rule that this is how they fall asleep.
So for example, the one that I was so stuck on as a new mom was drowsy but awake.
Putting them down drowsy awake.
And
To me as a new mom, I read it all over Pinterest and I was like, Pinterest is where I would search things because Instagram wasn't really a thing back then for baby sleep help.
And I was like, this one rule is going to fix my sleep shortles.
And I didn't look at the big picture.
And I think that's where we get it
It's black and white, and we've talked about that before on lots of different episodes.
We get really stuck on like this black and white rule that if I put my child down drowsy but awake, that's gonna solve all my issues.
And it didn't because I wasn't looking at the whole picture
Right.
But I feel like isn't that sort of a limited view of what I say this quote unquote sleep training experts say about sleep training your your baby?
Because it's like, yeah, okay, drowsy but awake.
Wake windows.
I'm sure there's other things too, like f well fed or something before.
Like there's a bunch of different things altogether too.
I thought I was saying I was hyperfixated on this one rule and I wasn't looking at the whole picture
There's just so many pieces to bring in to this discussion.
Like, first off, we have to look at the mental health of parents and we have to look at the well-being of a child
You have to look at both.
The relationship.
How is the relationship doing with the sleep that's happening right now?
Why?
Because we want to always be taking care of
parents.
So let's say we have a mom who is solo parenting all the time, who has another child at home who's so exhausted she can barely function.
She's depressed.
She's not getting any sleep her babies up every 45 minutes.
Right?
Like this mom's gonna need to make a change in order to sleep well.
But we also want to look at the well-being of the baby.
And I think a lot of times we look at some of these
sleep training methods.
For example, the one that we used when our daughter was young, which I would never recommend, which is extinction.
And so the extinction method is basically you make sure that they're well fed, you look at their weight
time you do a little routine and then you put them in their crib and you walk away and wait till they fall asleep.
And we did that and I have big regrets about doing that.
Yep.
I have compassion on myself
because I understand that I was so anxious and sleep and sleep deprived and didn't have a great mindset around sleep that that's what I felt I had to do in order to become mentally well.
And I wish that I had other options that were provided to me
The extinction method, like you talk about research.
Sure, like we can look at research on the extinction method or the Ferber method, and it will show that it's effective in getting your child to sleep.
Because if we just specifically look at behavior, like the behavior change that happens, it will happen.
Like the behavior change will happen.
You're not attending to your child's needs.
You're leaving them in their crib and they're crying.
they're gonna eventually learn that their caregiver is not coming back and they're gonna stop crying.
That doesn't mean they're gonna stop waking up.
That doesn't mean that it's the best thing for the child.
And that's where I'm trying to say like we need to hold both in mind
So when we were doing the extinction training for our oldest daughter, there was times and she would be crying in there for what 30, 40 minutes and screaming.
And I look back on that and I am so sad for us that that is the only option we felt that we had.
And I remember I did the research and the research showed me at the time this is the best approach because it's the quickest way to get them to sleep through the night
And that's why we did it, because we believe that research said it.
Now looking back, I'm like, yeah, but I was looking at research specifically on this one behavioral change.
I wasn't looking at how that might impact our child
And it's really hard to say whether or not that had an impact on her long term, but I know it had an impact on us.
And the impact it had on us was it was incredibly stressful and difficult to hear your baby crying.
And it led to like a mismatch in our attunement with our baby.
Because you had me like a breastfeeding mom of a very little baby.
Like she was young at the time.
Because also people were like, Oh, it's fine, you can do this, that
twelve weeks old or whatever it was.
And we're sitting outside the door, like crying.
And there's this feeling in my body of like all I want to do is is go in and nurse her to sleep.
But because I had that rule of she has to go down awake, I never allowed myself to nurse her to sleep.
So it was going against like this feeling in my body that told me just pick up your baby, rock her, nurse her to sleep
And I never even gave myself the chance to see if maybe she would fall asleep and sleep well if I was nursing her.
So that's where I'm saying like the rules come up and the research gets a little murky
Right?
Because like what research are we looking at?
Are we specifically looking at behavior?
And are we looking at the impact that this has in the level of attunement towards the parent and the child?
What does attunement mean?
Attunement is
the way that we can basically tune in with the needs of our child, right?
So there's this feeling in your body as a parent and I had it, you had it too.
when your child's crying of like, I want to help meet their needs.
I want to figure out what's going on for them, right?
So I want to change their diaper.
I want to rock them.
I want to do what I can to help them.
And in that that moment
For us specifically, we sat outside the door and both of us in our bodies the only thing we wanted to do is go in and pick her up.
Yeah.
And hold her and kiss her and sing to her and snuggle her.
And all I wanted to do was breastfeed her
But because I read this book that told me that this is the only way I'm gonna get sleep quick, I just totally shut that down.
And then what that does in your body is like you create a bit of a rupture between you and your infant.
because you're working to go against those instincts that you had.
Like I remember in that time of our lives, there was one day where I did fall asleep.
nursing her and she was beside me.
She was totally safe in the bed.
And you took a picture of me and I was laying there beside her and sleeping and you're like, oh my goodness, this is so cute.
Like and you would always encourage me, like Jess, it's okay if you breastfeed her to sleep.
Like look, look at her.
She loves it.
Like look, she's so cozy with you.
Yep
And maybe that's why she's not sleeping, Jess, because you you always wake her up at the end of breastfeeding and try and get her to sleep by herself.
And I remember I was so mad at you for taking that picture of me.
And I was like, Scott, why wouldn't you wake me up?
Like I can't believe I let her fall asleep like that beside me
And you were like, just look, like you're trying to show me the picture, like look how beautiful.
I remember that.
So like those times were hard, and I feel like it's important to talk about that because
I think so many parents end up sleep training in that way, the extinction method, or cry it out, because they feel there's no other option to get their child to sleep.
And I don't believe that that's true.
Yeah
And I think in that season, like that time of our lives, we were just flooded out of our home.
Mm-hmm.
We didn't have a home for, what, a couple of months
Yeah.
Two months or something like that.
Our apartment at the time it flooded, so we actually were without a home.
Lost most of our possessions and a little over half of our possessions and uh
We didn't have a home for a couple months.
We were like sleeping in different people's houses and Yeah.
So I have a feeling that probably added to the additional pressure to do that.
But I I had already made that decision to do the extinction with her before the flood even happened.
Right.
But that probably amplified the stress that was in our lives.
Because then also we found a place to live for about a month of that
Yeah.
Like one location, but it was further from work for me.
Yeah.
So then I basically was gone before either of you woke up.
and back and we were essentially putting her to bed.
Like 30 minutes, 45 minutes after I got back.
Yeah.
So I was not there to help and I was exhausted.
I remember several times driving to work.
stopping on the side of the rope 'cause I'm like, I think I'm gonna fall asleep if I keep going.
Yeah.
The adjustment to new parenthood plus all the environmental factors that was going on at the time.
Yeah.
And I feel like every new parent
I remember like doing this training for I'm also trained in postpartum mental health and perineedle mental health.
And we were as practitioners we were all laughing.
So like why does every postpartum parent decide to make a big life change
like right after they have a baby.
Because we're noticing in all of our clients, it's like you're moving, your partner's starting a new job.
This and this happens.
Like we're all making these life changes around having a baby.
Which adds to the environmental stress.
There's not maybe some confirmation bias like all these people are making that change after having a baby and therefore they are seeking help.
From the Yeah, that's possible too.
Maybe the ones that didn't make those big life changes are not in requiring uh therapists as much.
Well yeah, making a whole bunch of environmental changes definitely is going to impact your mental health.
We had an unplanned
major change in our life.
Yeah, exactly.
That all that to say that impacted the way we viewed sleep because we felt and I felt within my body that the only way to be better mentally would be to get more sleep.
And
Yes.
Right, which is probably not completely false either.
A piece of that is true.
But now if I look back on the last four years with our
to younger daughters, I think that my mindset towards it is a big reason of what made that sleep deprivation so hard.
I told myself the story
You can't handle it, Jess.
You cannot be up with her.
And if she's up, she's a bad baby, because babies don't there's no reason.
She does not need to be up twice in the night.
She's
Right.
Three months old.
She should be able to sleep twelve hours.
Yeah, this is a few.
Exactly.
This research tells you, Jess, she should be able to sleep for six hours at a time.
She's not doing it
Now, the research, are any of those longitudinal studies, like they're following kids for a long period of time, are they big sample sizes, like
That's the problem with a lot of research too.
Yeah, I don't want to speak for it all because it's been a while since I've been like backing that research, but I will say I think there's one study that they look at kids who are sleep trained and kids who were not sleep trained.
And they were like, yeah, they all sleep the same by age six.
So that was like a longer one.
But it's like it's pretty hard to study the impact that that's gonna have on attachment, right?
Because when you look at attachment, when you look at relationship
Like there's so many factors.
Like I truly don't believe you're gonna ruin your attachment for life if your child cries it out like a couple nights.
And don't cancel me for that.
Um no.
No, but I mean like attachment is is not so fragile that one event like that.
But the thing is, like when we tried to do extinction with our child, it wasn't one event
It wasn't two nights.
It wasn't three nights.
It was many nights because w she's it didn't work.
Like she wasn't following the rules.
Like the rules were like, yeah, by night three she should be only crying for like two minutes.
Like, well, no, she's not listening to that rule.
That didn't happen.
And that again, like a blanket method that says let your child cry for this many minutes at this time, it doesn't take into effect like your child's unique nature
Yeah.
Like our highly sensitive child.
Like if we were to have done that with her, maybe she was really impacted because we had a super busy day or there was a lot of lights that day or it was really loud.
Like
We're not taking into account a child's temperament, their personality, what they uniquely need.
We're just saying, here's a rule, like go in every five minutes, go in every 15 minutes, every 30 minutes.
To me
It's like a lot of things.
It's goes back to that conversation we had on like where are the hashtag parenting experts.
To me, like the three-day potty method.
Yeah.
Sleep training.
Like anything that's black and white is honestly bullshit.
Yeah, like we're we're not taking into account a child's unique needs and temperament.
Like our sensitive child, her sleep was totally different and unique based on like what her day was like
Because of her different sensory needs and things that happened.
And she needed and she still needs sensory input in order to fall asleep
She always did so well at with rocking and now she's four and she still requires belly tickles in order to fall asleep.
Like she just needs and I'm sure we could wean
her off that.
But do we need to?
Like she falls asleep well and She sleeps for like twelve hours, thirteen hours, something crazy.
She has an amazing sleep, but for her, having just that little bit of sensory input at bedtime
Like just the belly tickles is exactly what she needs to fall asleep.
Yeah.
And that's where I push back against any rule that's like, well, she should always go to bed drowsy or awake in order to sleep well.
She's been a good sleeper
But knowing her needs, rocking always helped her fall asleep well.
Yep.
And now belly tickles help her fall asleep well.
She's still a good sleeper and it's a 30-minute total routine.
It's not like it's crazy
Yeah, right.
That's including brushing teeth and reading books and everything.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's where I push back on that being the only way to get a child to sleep through the night because I think of course a parent sometimes needs to make changes to sleep.
We've had to make changes to sleep, but
It's not so simple that it's only cried out.
Like there's other ways to help your kids sleep well.
Yeah, right.
And ones that maybe focus more heavily on that attachment that you have with your child.
Yeah, that attunement.
So
To go back to like the original question of how do you stay calm at night, right?
Yeah, I feel like we uh changed our path here.
What will the title be of this episode?
Sleep training or how to stay calm?
I guess we'll figure that out.
But to go back to the question about how do you stay calm at night, I
think part of it for me is like when they're waking up, I'm no longer seeing them as bad.
I'm like, oh okay, you're waking up, do you have a need?
And I am allowing myself to try and tune in with that need.
I think when they woke up at night and I told myself, there's no reason you should be waking up.
Because you're three and three year olds can sleep twelve hours at night, so why the heck are you waking up twice?
Now when they wake up, I ask myself, huh, I wonder why.
See, I feel like we have two very different lines of thinking then.
Yeah
Because you're more like originally you should follow the rules.
Yeah.
And for me, I'm more like this is very disruptive and I know that my
following day is going to be completely messed up because I just know when I don't have a good sleep, my brain is foggy.
I can't think through things as clearly.
I'm more distracted.
So that's more what I'm thinking.
You have the spiraling thoughts.
And I was talking about I used to experience that too, right?
Like now tomorrow shot.
I won't be able to handle it.
And I feel like your spiraling thoughts then turn into anger towards the kids
Why are you waking me up?
I can't handle this.
Yeah.
So I think for you, some small mindset shifts honestly might be helpful because you're also telling yourself the story that
Tomorrow is not gonna go well and then tomorrow doesn't go well and you're confirmed.
I will say that up until, let's say, last year, middle of the year, around this time, when I had that legal boundary I talked about in the episode with Libby.
I was so incredibly stressed out.
And before that, I was dealing with like I've been dealing with this for my entire life.
So
up until the middle of last year, I feel like I never really had a time where I wasn't incredibly anxious or stressed out.
Yeah.
And now that that's sort of dealt with and now I'm on medication, I'm seeing a therapist and all that kind of stuff.
It's I think honestly become easier.
Like last night didn't really bother me.
Yeah.
I feel like I I don't know when our middle daughter came into bed with us.
It was like
Two A.
M.
Okay, well I didn't sleep from then until I got out of bed at just after six because the amount of uh kicking slapping in my face and kicking and all that in the middle of the night.
It's like a blue that bluey episode we were talking about this morning.
Yeah.
I feel like I'm handling it perfectly fine today.
So I feel like I am getting better at it because I'm in a better mental space now to handle it.
Absolutely.
And that's the same as what I was saying for myself too, right?
When I was in the depths of postpartum anxiety, I couldn't handle it the same way I can handle it now when I'm in a better mental space.
So I think parents should have some grace on themselves too
If you're going through a really hard time mentally and you feel like you can't tolerate your child's sleep, then I would be tuning in with yourself and trying to figure out what you need in order to help your child sleep, right?
So
Maybe that's medication, maybe that's therapy, maybe that's some more supports in place.
I think often too, like we're dealing with sleep issues.
We don't have the village that we used to have, right?
Like we're doing this in isolation.
I think that was a big thing for me too.
Like at the time when I was really struggling with waking up in the night, I didn't have many mom friends
My mom was not nearby.
I didn't have grandparents to be asked to be asked to be asked to be asked to be asked to be asked to be asked to be asked to be asked
We were the first of our friends to have any kids.
We were the first of our friends to have kids.
I didn't have anyone to text and be like, Oh, did you have a bad night of sleep?
Oh yeah, me too.
Like I didn't have anyone to validate.
That's probably a big difference, 'cause now you could probably text any of our friends in the middle of the night at any given point and there's probably gonna be one person that's awake at least.
Exactly.
Like I know so many moms and dads who are awake in the middle of the night.
So that's different too.
I didn't have someone being like, Oh yeah, me too.
And so then I felt like
my baby because I'm comparing them to the internet babies is the only baby who wakes up like internet babies are like the Yeah, the unicorn internet babies, right?
And I I think parents can still do that.
They can compare their baby to like their friend's baby.
Yep.
Or toddler.
toddlers wake up a lot in the night too, right?
We can compare our toddler to our friend's toddler and be like, well, theirs never wakes up, so mine must just be bad.
And that's where, again, like I keep bringing this up, but it comes back to attunement
Like your child's not bad, there's something going on.
So let's get curious.
That's yeah, that's not really where my mind goes though, that they're bad for it.
It's more like this is incredible
For me, it's legitimately the main line of thinking is this is going to be incredibly disruptive to my following day.
Okay.
So let's let's work on that for a minute.
So it's the middle of the night and our daughter wakes up and she's she's crying.
She's having a meltdown.
This is what happened last night to me.
The first thought you have is holy crap, I can't handle this.
I have a big deal.
Like what's the first thing that comes up?
If it takes more like honestly, if it takes more than ten minutes, then yeah, that that's where my mind goes.
And that you you quickly go there, I feel like.
Yeah, at first I'm just trying to figure out what happened.
Like if it's a
a nightmare or maybe the toddler peeped through her diaper or whatever or whatever it is.
I'm trying to figure out what the issue is so I can rectify the issue, change that and then get them back.
But if after we've resolved whatever needed to be resolved, I don't want it to take like two hours to resolve it or get them back to sleep.
I want to go back to bed, basically.
Of course.
Okay, so then what?
It's been ten minutes and they're still crying.
What's going through your head at that point?
Can I get Jess?
Yeah.
I mean typically yeah that's what happens.
Isn't what happens?
Well, usually I'm already the one up
Yeah.
I feel like of the two of us you are the lighter sleeper for sure.
I'm the lighter sleeper.
Usually the one that wakes up.
And I don't usually wake Scott up.
Usually I'm just like, that's fine, I'll handle it.
I also, going back to mindset, have changed my mindset to be like, this is gonna sound so woo-woo.
I know a lot of people are not gonna resonate with this, but
I'm like, what an honor.
Like I will if I hear them crying and they want me and they want me to like rock them in the chair or whatever it is or sleep with them, I'll be like, oh, what a privilege that I get to sleep with them tonight.
Like that's honestly what I tell myself and I know it's like maybe not.
Why?
Like why is that what's going to your mind?
What a privilege.
Yeah
Because I don't often get to snuggle with them anymore in the middle of the night.
So like our four-year-old, she wants to snuggle me in the guest bed because she had a bad dream.
What a privilege.
Like how many times am I gonna snuggle my four-year-old in the middle of the night
Sure, I'm not gonna sleep the best, but how long is she gonna be for wanting me in the middle of the night?
Like that that's where my head goes.
And again, like I said, it's a conscious stream of thoughts.
Like I have to switch it
Like I'll notice my brain going to like, oh, I was so looking forward to sleeping in my own bed tonight.
Like, oh, I really could use a full night of sleep.
And I'll consciously in my brain be like, yep, that's true.
You wanted a full night of sleep tonight
But that's not gonna happen.
She just had a nightmare or peed through the bed and I know she's gonna be up for a while.
So what if I just am okay with that and think to myself
What an honor that I get to cuddle with her for a little bit.
This is pretty rare.
She really wants the snuggles with me.
It's a memory you can have when it's moved out.
Going to school or something like that or Yeah, and I look at her little hands and they stroke my face.
I think to myself, man, she's still so little.
Yeah
How often am I gonna get this chance?
And I honestly I did kind of think that last night.
I wasn't like again, I w You were pretty good about it last night.
It was slightly annoying 'cause every time I was about to fall asleep I would get kicked or of course slapped or something like that.
But it's not that it's not still annoying to me, but I again my biggest thing is
the mindset and I truly believe that that has a huge impact on the way that you view it.
And it's not a natural mindset that comes to me.
Like I consciously have to notice the thoughts that come up.
This is my therapist's brain.
This is the all the therapy I've done.
Notice the thoughts that come up and be like, yeah, that's true.
You're not gonna have a good night of sleep tonight.
And you're gonna be okay.
You've coped with a little sleep before, and we don't make changes in the middle of the night.
Like that's my rule
So what are we gonna do then?
Well I guess we're just gonna snuggle her till she falls back asleep.
Maybe I'll roll out of the bed at some point and roll on back to my bed
Maybe I'll end up being here all night.
Whatever comes up, I can handle that.
It's one night of bad sleep.
I will be able to be okay tomorrow
Right.
So if you were to help Jess seven years ago, because I feel like that is the most difficult in terms of sleep.
the most difficult time of parenting I think we've had.
So what advice would you give to yourself in that situation with like a newborn baby and worth I guess not newborn but an infant.
It's like three months.
Yeah.
Hey, we had this terrible thing happen.
Our house is destroyed, so we had to move out and find another place to live for several months.
Yeah
What advice would you give?
Well, and I just want to say too in that time when we weren't sleeping when she was a newborn, we did the extinction sleep training for a long time.
Eventually I gave up on it because it didn't work.
And she continued to not sleep well until she was like two and a half years old.
Yeah.
And we use the tools in like the bedtime course now
Based that was like very connection-based.
Yeah.
In order to and that's what finally got her to sleep well.
Yeah, now she sleeps.
She's she's the best sleeper in the house.
She's the best sleeper.
She had a lot of anxiety around bedtime for a long time.
Yep.
I believe had to do with the way that we tried to sleep train her as an infant.
I had to do a lot of work with her around worry at bedtime, nightmares, bad dreams
So I truly do believe that it had an impact on her.
I think that there's healing that can be done.
Yeah.
And the healing has been done.
And now she has a beautiful relationship with the side.
We'll just spend a lot of work on that.
Well we did have to do a lot of work to heal the way that we tried to get her to sleep that never ended up working.
So if I look at the first two and a half years of her life and I look at how hard Jess struggled there, like previous Jess, first thing I would do is give myself a hug
Because you gotta cry.
Oh I could cry.
I could honestly cry.
And at any point when a sleep-deprived mom or dad comes to me and they're at that point that I was at, I just want to give them a hug.
Like I will never judge you if you come to me and be like, yes, I've been sleep training my kid.
I don't feel good about how I've been doing it, but I haven't had another option.
Like you will never find judgment from me.
I will only ever try and give you a hug or a virtual hug if you say this to me online.
So that's the first thing I would do.
And then I would say, yeah, man, sleep is really tricky.
It's so hard.
I wonder like where are these thoughts coming from that she has to go to bed drowsy but awake.
So I'd get curious about all these rules that I've put on myself.
And then what I would do with myself is I would try and help me tune back into my own beliefs and my own thoughts.
Because at that point in my life, rules, what my friend's kids were doing, all of that.
Spreadsheets of spreadsheets of wake windows.
That was the only thing running my mind
I didn't have any attunement.
Like there was no part of me that trusted myself.
So I would love to have gotten curious of myself and be like, Jessica, what is your body telling you to do?
Like what is your mind telling you to do?
So when you say attunement before you move on, do you not think though that it's possible
You learned how to attune better as our oldest got older and then we had our second.
And then you kind of like knew a little better then how to attune.
'Cause I think often parents think you're just gonna naturally just be like be able to understand what your child needs and wants.
Mm-hmm
But I I just feel like that doesn't make any sense.
No, it's it's a skill.
Yeah, it is a skill.
Like you haven't had a child before, so how do you know?
And that's why I would want to help
me if I was my own therapist or friend, I'd want to help me tune in with those instincts and get to know them because I feel like I didn't trust myself at all because I was a new parent.
I'd never done it before
And I was a new parent with a master's degree who's only ever learned to research things.
Yeah.
So I was like, oh, no problem, I'll just research my way out of this one.
Well it didn't work.
Yeah.
Um, so what I would want to do with myself is help me like piece away, okay, so your mom told you this and this person told you that and this person what do you feel?
Because I truly believe that if someone had done that with me, which eventually they did because I went to therapy, and therapy is what really ended up helping me, if someone had done that with me
Like what do you feel in your body that your baby needs when you are standing on the other side of the door and she's been screaming for 30 minutes?
I'd be like, all I want to do is run in, snuggle her, hold her, and breastfeed her.
And if someone had been like, and what if you did that
and just tried it and see what would happen.
I would have been like, well I can't because like I'm not supposed to.
And so if I had someone who kind of helped me with that and helped me get in tune of those like caregiving instincts that were inside of me but I was just like shutting them off with rules.
I think it would have been a totally different experience.
Yeah.
And I think with baby number two, I had done a lot of therapy, a lot of work, and I was
So much more in tune with myself.
And that's when we had used finally like these connection-based tools to help our toddler then sleep
And that's when she finally slept, when I was like pouring connection into her at bedtime and and coming back and checking on her and showing her delight and like
all of these things, tuning in with her nap, like attuning with her, she finally slept well.
Two and a half years of like leaving her, crying, yelling, bribing, threatening, all these things.
Finally connection helped her sleep well.
With our second child, I knew off the bat, I would have those rules pop up in my mind and I would be like, Jess, now's not the time.
That rule does not serve you.
It does not help your relationship with your daughter.
And I did what felt right for me, which was
Feeding her to sleep, rocking her to sleep.
Yeah, she slept much better.
Balancing her to s she slept so much better.
I never once worried about drowsy but awake.
Yep.
Screw it.
I don't care.
And that worked for me.
Now again, some babies that doesn't work for and they're not sleeping well, so then we
would take some of these things that maybe would help a baby sleep well, but maybe the mom is helping the baby learn how to sleep in the crib and they have their hand on their baby while they're crying, right?
So there's still attunement happening there.
There's still ways to help a baby sleep well and
stay attuned with them.
Like I think that's the really important takeaway.
And when we're we're in tune with our own caregiver instincts, it helps you when you wake up in the night.
It helps you when you're putting your baby to sleep because you're aligned and you're you're on the same page.
So that's what I would do with myself after giving myself a big hug and letting me cry it out myself.
Cause I really just needed someone to tell me that I needed to release some tears.
I needed to know that it was okay that it
felt as hard as it did and know that the tools that I actually needed were not found in a course, they were not found in a book on extinction, they were not found in a research article.
They were already there within me and I just had to find them within myself.
I feel like that's a great place to end.
I feel like I didn't get into some of the other things that I do in the middle of the night, but
Let us know if you have any uh other questions or you want us to go deeper into this this topic.
Yeah.
I think this really became a sleep training episode.
Yeah, kind of, a little bit.
slash tools mindset shifts.
Yeah.
I think it's gonna be really powerful and excited for people to listen to it.
So let us know.
Let us know what you think.
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