Postpartum sleep is meant to be fragmented

All humans have built-in circadian polyphasic sleep options; new moms NEED to know how to activate them

My polyphasic sleep work is influenced by Navy research, where they teach sleep as a combat advantage. It translates to other fields quite well and we’ve had a lot of success basing protocols off the Navy frameworks.

Lamenting the inability to sleep 8 hours straight in the mothering season of life is like wishing you could get all the nutrition you need for breastfeeding from just one meal.

Instead of running pumps and bottles so that other people can feed mom’s baby, hiring night doulas (I used to be one), and seeking new sleep training methods, mom culture could just lean in to this:

all humans have built-in circadian polyphasic sleep options

Once forgotten, but now rediscovered by scientists who study mood and sleep architecture, we can deliberately flip the cues so that sleep naturally arranges itself around the clock.

Then, instead of trying to put 8 hours of gas in a 2 hour tank, moms can sleep lightly around their babies’ schedules, waking rested every time whether it was 20 minutes, 2 hours, four hours or more.

Earlier this year, I taught a class teaching moms exactly how to flip this switch (and how to protect against the modern postpartum culture trends that make this physiologically impossible—which is why everyone now believes postpartum is “just this way” or that it’s moms faults for not sleep training their babies the right way).

I’m really passionate about this topic and believe knowledge of circadian polyphasic sleep possibilities is a complete game changer for postpartum and motherhood.

Until you’ve experienced it, it can be hard to imagine you can wake up alert and refreshed literally any time day or night, after even the shortest of sleeps.

But this is what a circadian polyphasic sleep architecture feels like.

This is as opposed to when you are chronically in sleep debt to a monophasic pattern that doesn’t really work for your season of life, which is what most moms are experiencing

Learning how to tell your body to expect polyphasic sleep (so it can prepare and respond appropriately) is a gift to yourself and your family to feel this good on so little sleep.

Here’s where you can watch the parent version:

And for practitioners, I taught an extended version expanding into using polyphasic sleep for illness recovery and understanding how polyphasic sleep happens in extreme climates—what to expect and how to support it.

You can get access to the practitioner version of my polyphasic sleep training here. It counts as CEUs for board certified quantum biology practitioners (BCQBPs) and issues a certificate of completion.

We will also be talking more about this in the upcoming class Sleep Like A Mother: Circadian Postpartum Planning on July 23rd.