The Four Month Sleep Regression
If there’s one word I hear often as a sleep consultant, it would have to be the term “regression.” Parents (people?) tend to throw it around as a way to explain why their baby is suddenly not sleeping well (or sleeping worse than they did before).
If your baby is 8 months, 10 months, 12 months, 18 months (or anywhere close to that age) and poor sleep comes up – it must be a regression! And while there very well may be a regression (the definition after all is “a return to a former or less developed state” which is technically what’s going on) in baby’s sleep, I’m not a fan of this labeling.
There really is ALWAYS a reason for why baby is suddenly having a hard time with sleep – some of these include developmental milestones, traveling, sickness, and nap transition time. I just don’t like the idea of dismissing away baby’s poor sleep with the rationale that it’s a “__ month regression,” suggesting no rationale or reasoning.
HOWEVER, the 4 month regression is different. And everyone agrees on it. So what’s the explanation for this one? Baby’s sleep biologically changes permanently.
Let’s get into the science-y background of it all so that you can really understand what’s going on. (Feel free to skip ahead if this is just not for you!)
When you think of sleep, you may just see it like an ‘on-off’ light switch. Either you’re awake, or you’re sleeping. The reality is, sleep occurs on more of a continuum. Sleep actually has several different stages that make up the sleep cycle, which we then go through a number of times each night.
Stage 1: This is the point where you feel yourself drifting off, but you don’t actually feel like you’ve fallen asleep. You start to get comfortable and drowsy, and you may be fading in/out of sleep. If someone were to wake you, you wouldn’t admit to even having been asleep.
Stage 2: This is often thought of as the first true stage of sleep. At this point, you would definitely realize that you had been sleeping. (For anyone taking a “power nap,” you may not want to go any deeper than this stage or else you’ll wake up groggy.)
Stage 3: You’ve finally hit deep sleep. During this time, there's a lot of immune system building, cell repair, and restorative work going on. This is also when the majority of growth hormone is secreted!
Stage 4: This is the stage everyone knows about – REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. REM sleep is commonly associated with dreaming, and it’s likely because this is when a lot of learning and memory consolidation occurs.
Once you’ve gone through all these stages, you either wake up or come just under the point of being awake. This cycle repeats itself throughout the night until it’s time to wake up in the morning.
So what does this have to do with the 4 month regression?
Well, newborn babies actually only have 2 of these stages: Stage 3 deep sleep and REM. The time they spend sleeping is usually divided 50-50 between these 2 stages. However, around the 4th month, their sleep needs to reorganize itself to fit in the additional 2 light stages of sleep.
Essentially, 2 BIG changes are occurring.
Baby’s total sleep time now has to be reorganized to include all 4 stages of sleep.
Baby now has to get used to sleeping in lighter stages of sleep.
This is a lot of work for baby (though clearly some babies handle this period of time much more easily than others). It’s not easy on baby’s brain by any means.
*What do these changes practically mean for your baby?*
With more time spent in lighter sleep, there is more of a chance that baby is going to wake up during their sleep. This isn’t to say that we want to prevent or avoid baby waking up. Waking up is natural and sometimes necessary. We as adults still do wake up 2-5 times a night!
The difference is that we are able to identify certain comforting truths that baby may not be privy to. We can recognize that “I’m in my bed, it’s still night time, I have 3 more hours to sleep, and that everything around me appears safe.” And then we’re able to go right back into sleeping. This usually occurs very briefly that come morning – we don’t even remember/realize that we had woken up. (Unless the awakening was much longer or significant: maybe it got too cold and we had to get up to close the window, or we felt the need to use the bathroom.
A 4 month old baby lacks the skills necessary to do this higher level thinking. To a 4 month old who fell asleep while nursing, the reasoning goes more along the lines of, “the last thing I remember is a familiar face, I was having a snack while snuggled in moms arms, and she was singing a song to me. Now I’m alone, it’s dark, I’m on a hard surface, and there is no food.”
This is obviously an exaggeration, but just an idea so that you can understand the picture!
So baby goes through one sleep cycle, wakes up and realizes mom is gone – the natural response is to freak out a little. The fight or flight response is stimulated, and next thing you know – baby hasn’t drifted right back into sleep because they need the reassurance that everything is okay.
Another major factor that contributes to making this 4 month time period a bit difficult is that often times, parents have either been putting their baby to sleep with a pacifier, or by rocking them, or breastfeeding them, or some other similar technique where baby is being helped along the road of falling asleep.
Now that baby spends more time in light sleep and therefore has a higher chance of waking up, these props become a much bigger issue. The sleep associations are sneaky like that! Although they are helping your baby to fall asleep, the lack of them upon waking means that baby is not able to get back into sleep again without that same (or maybe different) assist.
Cue the fight or flight response, the adrenaline rush, and the crying. And when this is happening every 30-60 minutes EVERY NIGHT… it’s a bit like living in a nightmare.
At this point, you’re probably wondering – “MARGARET, WHAT DO I DO??”
Well, here are some things you can do to help your little one adjust?
Get light out of baby’s room! This is a non-negotiable. You might think baby’s room is dark enough, that baby might not like the dark, or that it’s comforting to have a little light coming in through the window/doorway. NOPE. Newborns and infants are not afraid of the dark. What they are is responsive to light. Light tells the brain that it’s time for activity and alertness, and the brain secretes hormones accordingly. So keep baby’s space as absolutely pitch dark as possible for naps and bedtime.
With baby spending more time in lighter sleep, noises have a greater likelihood of startling them and waking them up. A white noise machine is a great addition to your nursery. (affordable option linked here) It will help to drown out many common noises – dog barking, cars honking, siblings yelling, or a dinner party going on. Maybe you’re wondering – “isn’t that a prop?” In a way it is, but it doesn’t require any winding, resetting, or parental presence. It’s there throughout the entire duration of sleep, so it isn’t a prop we need to avoid.
Bedtime routines are an essential component to get your baby sleeping well. Try to keep it to about 5 steps, and DO NOT end it with a feed (or else you risk baby nodding off at the breast/bottle, creating that sleep association we were talking about earlier). The whole routine should take about 20-30 minutes and baby should go into their crib while still AWAKE.
The good news is that the 4 month sleep regression is not actually a regression. Remember our earlier definition of a regression - a return to a former or less developed state --- this is actually the opposite of what is going on with baby. Baby’s reality should actually be labeled as “the 4 month sleep PROGRESSION.”
Baby is becoming more like you and this change is here to stay! The only way to get past it is for baby to learn independent sleep skills.
By taking this opportunity to teach them the skills they need to connect those sleep cycles together, independently and prop-free, without any need for nursing, rocking, or pacifiers – you are giving them a gift they (and you!!) will enjoy for the rest of their young lives.
Of course some kids will adjust to this whole process very easily, while others will be a lot more resistant. If your child falls into the former category – count yourself lucky! Take delight in your success and go ahead and brag about it ;)
For those of you in the latter camp, I’m happy to help in any way I can. Book a free 15 minute call with me here so that I can hear more about your specific situation and we can come up with a plan to get your child sleeping independently, as soon as possible.