Our 7-month-old baby used to be a great sleeper, but when daylight saving time ended, she started waking up at 5 a.m. We thought we’d wait it out — let her adjust to the new time and she’d go back to 6 a.m. (much more reasonable …), but no such luck. We tried keeping her up later at night but, other than a miserable time from 8 to 9 p.m., we have seen no results. How can we explain to her that we are not farmers? Can we retrain her to wake up at a more suitable hour for modern urban living? I have never been so tired in my life, even when I was getting up three times a night to nurse. Sleepless in S.F.
5 a.m. We thought we’d wait it out — let her adjust to the new time and she’d go back to 6 a.m. (much more reasonable …), but no such luck. We tried keeping her up later at night but, other than a miserable time from 8 to 9 p.m., we have seen no results. How can we explain to her that we are not farmers? Can we retrain her to wake up at a more suitable hour for modern urban living? I have never been so tired in my life, even when I was getting up three times a night to nurse. Sleepless in S.F.
This is a common problem with infants; perhaps it’s the hunter-gatherer genetic code. Sometimes it’s triggered by a time change, or jetlag, but often it just emerges as a baby transitions from nights punctuated by several wakings to feed to being able to sleep through the night. Delaying bedtime may help, but it takes five to seven days before that “takes” and, as in your case, often increases misery at night for no rewards in the morning.
Here is how you might train your daughter to sleep in before she is a teenager (when it will be no problem at all).
For five days in a row, record the time she awakens. Pick the earliest time as your starting point. If she wakes at 5:15, 5:00, 5:05, 5:20 and 5:10, then 5 a.m. is it (sorry).
Put a clock radio in her room set to play music at 5 a.m. Within a minute after the radio turns on, come into her room, pick her up and proceed as if this is a perfectly reasonable time to start the day. Turn on lights, feed and change her, and play with her in your usual daytime room. She’ll probably want a morning nap earlier than usual — don’t worry about that.
Repeat the clock radio routine for four or five days. You are working to create a conditioned response, whereby as soon as the music comes on, she wakes up and expects you.
After about five days she will be trained to wake up with the clock radio.
Now comes the crucial (albeit a bit sneaky) part: Start moving the clock forward by five-minute increments each morning (5:05, 5:10, 5:15). Remember, once the music is on, come right in and pick her up. Over the course of 10 to 12 days, you should be able to move her waking to 6 a.m., or very close to it.
There is a limit to this method. Most parents I have worked with were able to move their baby’s wake-up time by 45 to 60 minutes. Don’t try to stretch your daughter’s wake-up to 8 a.m., as lovely as that sounds.
Finally, I wonder if part of your intense fatigue is your reaction to the change from daylight saving time. A lot more people than realize it suffer from varying degrees of seasonal affective disorder (SAD) when the amount of sunlight they get each day suddenly drops by an hour: low energy, abnormal fatigue, feeling down, all the way to full-blown depression. The symptoms often get worse as the days gets shorter, but lift in early spring.
The traditional Jewish remedy might seem to be the eight candlelit nights of Chanukah, but it turns out you need a lot more candle units than that (10,000 lux, to be precise) to treat SAD effectively. There are many high-intensity lamps available on the market; do an online search for “SAD lamp.”
Get a simple one for your breakfast table and sit close to it when you eat your cereal. People vary a lot in how much light they need. I discovered about 20 years ago that I need 20 to 25 minutes in the morning so I don’t feel like I am ready for bed at 7:15 p.m. Experiment to see how much you need. You should feel the difference very quickly, in one to three days.
Between the clock radio and a SAD lamp, I hope you soon see your way to more sleep and more pep.
Rachel Biale, MSW, is a Berkeley-based parenting consultant who has been working with parents of very young children for more than 25 years. Send questions through her Facebook page: Parenting Counseling by Rachel Biale or via [email protected].