Can we facilitate this for each other?
Or at least, for new mothers who are caring for their babies around the clock?
Just here to encourage all the new mamas to worry less about sleep overnight, and to nap more.
Circadian health research is validating the old-fashioned advice to “sleep when your baby sleeps.”
But it feels impossible to so many of us.
Why?
because our bodies no longer feel the need to sleep.
The modern environment full of artificial lights and isolated from natural light with newfangled thermal & UV-blocking windows has made that advice feel nearly impossible to follow.
We just get ever-more wired-but-tired, even to the point that many new mothers (as well as the population at large) have diagnosable sleep disorders.
And when I bring this up, there are also many who just dismiss this because they “can’t.”
What would it look like to re-integrate napping in today’s world?
In non-industrialized areas, people sleep less, sleep less efficiently, and nap more.
Yet they show more robust circadian health!
I wrote about this earlier this year:
And what I know to be true is that even if we are living in an industrialized way, we can have robust circadian health, too!
It just may take giving up on this whole 8 hours of sleep overnight thing.
Wehr, the very same researcher who pioneered bright light therapy for mood disorders, called the 8 hour sleep an artifact of 16 hours of artificial light. Not a human necessity.
So… maybe we only need 6 hours of sleep at night, the right light/dark cycle, and then to have a little nap during the day?
Can we facilitate that for each other?
Or at least, for new mothers who are caring for their babies around the clock?
I think we can! And I know this mindset shift + calling in of support has made a world of difference in my mood as a mother to many.
Let me know in the comments how sleep and napping are looking like for you lately and if it feels like it is working for you or not. I’d love to know!
Especially with the daylight savings time change and shifting season.
If you feel like you need a bit more support on what this kind of sleep could look like with a new baby, here are a couple podcast interviews I did last year about postpartum sleep and baby sleep:
And if you use the search bar at the top of my website you can find many more posts about sleep in the archive.
Nikko, I love this in theory. Truly. It makes so much sense from my lens of feminine blueprints that we wouldn’t push all day just to pass out at night, drained. This is one of those things I’m noticing in myself that the conditioning is so real. It seems too luxurious to take sleep back. It’s an interesting observation for someone that lives pretty counter cultural to give myself permission to not feel like a bum if I nap during the day. And also, from a practical standpoint in winter, nights are so long up here. Navigating them from 4:30 pm and beyond would be tricky. I’m so tired by 8:30 because it’s been dark for almost 4 hours.
Thanks for this! And looking forward to listening to the podcasts. We have our first, five weeks old now. And grateful to find valuable information from you