Some babies, however; spend more time in the light sleep stage before slipping into deeper sleep, while others go from light sleep to deep sleep in almost no time at all. But the ultimate truth is that everyone goes through these cycles every time they shut their eyes.

Truly restorative sleep- the stage that does us the most good is the NREM (non-REM) sleep or also known as deep sleep which we get in the middle of the cycle. That’s why some people can get by on less sleep than others, because they get more NREM sleep than those of us who spend more time in light sleep stages.

So, when someone claims that their baby is a light sleeper, this means that their baby spends more time in the light sleep stage, which is the easiest stage to wake up from. It’s at this stage where dreams occur and the baby is more aware of his/her surrounding, so external noises tend to wake them up much easier.

Although very similar to adults, babies sleep cycles are shorter, and thus spend twice as much time in light sleep than adults.

So what can you do about it? How can you teach a baby to spend more time in deep sleep?

Truth be told you can’t! But what you can do is teach them to fall back to sleep on their own when they wake up. It’s a wonderful gift to give them, and has benefits for years to come.

When we talk about teaching a baby to sleep independently there is a lot of elements involved, but the single most important one is elimination sleep props. Which means anything that the baby uses to fall asleep and can’t provide on their own. This could be a pacifier, rocking motion, a bottle of milk etc…

Why to eliminate props? Simply because whatever it is that makes the baby sleep, they will need it again when they wake up at the end of the next sleep cycle to help them go back to sleep… If they get rocked to sleep, they learn to rely on that motion as part of the process, so once they wake up at night, they can’t go back to sleep until you come in, rock them and help them get back to sleep.

This is often accompanied by crying and fussing in order to get your attention, which wakes them up even further and requires more soothing to get them settled.

Good sleepers; however, have the same sleep cycles and brief wake ups, the only difference is that they’ve gotten the hang of falling asleep on their own, so they wake up, squirm around a little, maybe babble to themselves for a bit, then go happily back to sleep.

So although you can’t stop your little one from waking up during the night, you can simply teach them how to get back to sleep independently, and once you do, you and your baby can both look forward to full nights of uninterrupted, rejuvenating deep sleep

Layal Fayad