Sleepless Mums: How to get an extra hour’s sleep

NEW mums are getting as little as three hours sleep a night but a new smartphone baby app says it can help get them an extra hour’s shut-eye.

EXCLUSIVE

MUMS are getting as little as three hours sleep a night and are so sleep deprived they are forgetting their friends’ names and locking themselves out of the house.

Many are getting up to newborn babies as often as five times a night leaving them dazed and irritable and one in four admit falling asleep on their baby’s bedroom floor.

Sleep deprivation has emerged as a bigger problem for new mums than financial strain or disrupted social life according to a Galaxy survey of 1,000 new mums.

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A new smartphone app aims to get them an extra hours sleep a night by helping them settle their baby into a better sleep routine.

More than half of new mums reported lack of sleep meant they forgot or mixed up dates in their diary, more than four in ten lost their keys, one in seven locked themselves out of their home and 14 per cent even forgot their friends names.

Registered nurse and baby sleep consultant Jo Ryan says depriving people of sleep is like a form of torture as it delays reaction times, makes tempers short and “they say it’s like driving after having a few drinks”.

“I’ve seen mothers, by the time they call for our help, they break down in tears, say they can’t cope and they are not getting on with their partner or other children,” she said.

One mother she helped was walking around rocking her 12 month old for hours each night to get him to sleep and when he woke during the night she had to repeat the rocking to get him back to sleep.

“She didn’t have a social life, when people came for dinner she was stuck in another room rocking her child,” she said.

Lauren Strada with her five and a half month old son Nash in Sydney. Picture: Tim Hunter

The solution was to establish a good bedtime routine that taught the baby to fall asleep in their own bed, said Ms Ryan.

Parents needed to settle on a ritual of dinner, bath, massage, book and song and repeat it every night between the hours of 5pm and a bedtime of 7pm.

“Babies like to know this follows this follows this, it makes them feel secure,” she says.

Babies achieved their deepest sleep before midnight so a bedtime of 7pm gives them the best chance of getting this, she said.

Baby product company Johnson’s has launched a new Johnson’s Bedtime app which sets out a three step routine to help parents settle their children.

It offers tips on how to get baby to sleep, includes lullaby music that can be played to the baby and provides access to Tresillian Live Advice where mums can chat directly with a Tresillian nurse between 5pm and 11pm weekdays.

The company claims it will help new mothers get an extra hour of sleep a night.

If they had an extra hour in the day when they had a young baby seven in ten mums say they would catch up on sleep, nearly half would catch up on household chores.

A US study recently found women need more sleep than men because they multi task and researchers from Loughborough University’s Sleep Research Centre found women need about 20 minutes more sleep than men each night because their brains are more complex.

In 2013 a study linked inadequate sleep to greater risk of heart disease and diabetes in

women. The study also found women are more likely to experience stress, anxiety and depression than sleep-deprived men.

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