Sleep research targets newborns
Interrupted sleep — a chronic nightmare for new mothers — may be eased by almost an hour a night with new University of Toronto research being published today.
Researchers in the school's nursing faculty have found a set of simple tips can help train newborns to recognize the difference between night and day, and add an average of 57 minutes of sleep to a mother's night within six weeks of birth.
"It's tough to be a new mom, but it's even tougher to be a new mom without as much sleep as you're used to," says lead researcher Robyn Stremler. "We have tips and strategies that will really improve how much sleep (a mother) is going to get and to help her work with her infant to sleep better."
Stremler's paper will appear today in the journal Sleep, which is published by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
Known as Tips for Infant and Parent Sleep — or TIPS — it involves a 45-minute information meeting with a maternity nurse, an 11-page pamphlet and weekly phone calls to discuss problems and reinforce sleep strategies.
The U of T team recruited 60 new mothers to test the program. One half received the full TIPS training course, while the remaining 30 were given minimal sleep information. The mothers then kept daily journals recording their sleep experience. Those with the TIPS training averaged 57 minutes more sleep a night than those without the help.
As well, the babies of the mothers in the sleep intervention group averaged 47 minutes more sleep a night than their newborn counterparts in the control group.
The program techniques are generally simple and include:
1) Learning to recognize when a baby is sleepy.
2) Relaxation and deep breathing techniques that help women fall back to sleep after feedings.
3) Going to bed earlier, with the baby, and going back to sleep in the morning if the infant does.
To help infants recognize day and night, Stremler says mothers should refrain from "bouncy" play with the baby in the evening and keep the lights low at night and brighter during the day.
"Babies are going to sleep throughout the day and night. We're not going to change that radically," Stremler says. "But we've shown with this package of tips they can start to sleep for longer stretches at night and wake up less frequently at night."
Stremler hopes to expand her study next year to some 234 mothers, and expand the social and ethnic diversity of the group.
She says an extra hour of sleep could help prevent some postpartum depressions and even general anxiety.
"We know in healthy adults — even a chronic sleep deprivation to six hours a night — we really see effects on people's moods. Their cognitive performance and their physical well-being really goes down," she says.
"An extra hour sleep would mean a lot," says Ariana Birnbaum, co-founder of Becoming Maternity and Parenting Centre in Toronto and the mother of a 3 1/2-week-old girl.
Birnbaum, whose organization runs training programs for parents from pregnancy through to toddlerhood, says 90 per cent of her clients complain of sleep deprivation. The Eglinton Ave. and Avenue Rd. centre charges $150 for a private sleep consultation package.
Birnbaum says there are a host of strategies such as swaddling infants available to help parents deal with wakeful babies.
"We've been fairly successful in typically doubling the stretches (of sleep), so people who have two hours can get four hours."
Stremler says her dream is to make sleep information as ubiquitous in hospitals as breast-feeding training is today.