I teach yoga through pregnancy, I am a mother and I am a certified infant sleep educator. After a birth, the question I hear most often has nothing to do with yoga. "What am I doing wrong? The baby will not settle and nobody is sleeping." Usually the answer is nothing: the parents were never told how a newborn sleeps, and that is what this article sets out.
What a newborn's sleep is like
A baby is born with a body clock that is not yet running. The rhythm that tells an adult to be sleepy at night and alert in the morning takes months to appear, and in the first weeks a newborn's sleep is spread across the twenty-four hours in short stretches with no regard for the sun. Each stretch is made of sleep cycles shorter than an adult's, with more of the light, active sleep in which a baby twitches, grimaces and sometimes cries without waking. Waking between cycles is how newborn sleep is built, and nothing has gone wrong when it happens.
A newborn also has little way of calming down beyond sucking and a hand to the mouth. In the families I see, that ability comes with months, and with being soothed by someone else many times over. Your baby does not yet have a settled nervous system of their own; I think of them as borrowing yours.
What a ten-year study found
I say the next part carefully, because it can frighten people who are already frightened. In 2020 a research team in Melbourne published, in Archives of Disease in Childhood, results from the Maternal Health Study, which followed 1,460 mothers and babies from pregnancy to the child's tenth birthday. About one baby in five had sleep problems the mother described as severe and that persisted through the first year. Compared with the babies who settled, those children had roughly double the odds of an anxiety problem or an emotional disorder at ten, with wide margins around that figure.
That is an association, not a cause. Nobody has shown that fixing a baby's sleep prevents anxiety a decade later, and the children of worried parents may be more likely to be reported as both poor sleepers and anxious. What the study does show is that persistent, severe sleep trouble in the first year deserves attention rather than endurance.
Safe sleep comes first
Before any advice about settling, these rules do not bend. They are the guidance of the American Academy of Pediatrics, updated in 2022, and of the Lullaby Trust in the United Kingdom. Lay your baby on their back for every sleep, day and night, until their first birthday. Use a firm, flat mattress with a fitted sheet and nothing else: no pillows, soft toys, loose blankets, bumpers or weighted products, and nothing on the baby's head. Give your baby their own sleep space in your room for at least the first six months, and never fall asleep with them on a sofa or armchair. Do not use inclined sleepers, swings or car seats for routine sleep. Keep the room smoke-free and comfortably cool, around sixteen to twenty degrees. The full lists are on both organisations' sites, and everything below sits inside them.
- Moon RY, Carlin RF, Hand I, and the AAP Task Force on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. (2022). Sleep-related infant deaths: updated 2022 recommendations for reducing infant deaths in the sleep environment. Pediatrics, 150(1), e2022057990. https:/
/ doi. org/ 10. 1542/ peds. 2022-057990 - The Lullaby Trust. Safer sleep advice. https:/
/ www. lullabytrust. org. uk/ safer-sleep-advice/
What helps
The best trial I know of the approach I teach was designed mainly to study something else. The INSIGHT study, published in Pediatrics in 2016, followed 279 first-time mothers and their newborns and taught half of them responsive parenting: how to read their baby's cues, how to build a short bedtime routine suited to the baby's age, where and how the baby should sleep, and how to respond to waking in the night without rushing to feed and without ignoring it. By the mothers' own reports, those babies slept longer at night: 35 minutes more at eight weeks, 25 at sixteen weeks and 22 at forty weeks. They were more likely to have an early bedtime and to settle themselves to sleep. By one year the two groups slept about the same, so the gain came in the first months, when a tired mother needs it most.
A 2018 review in Sleep Medicine Reviews gathered the evidence on bedtime routines specifically: the same few steps, in the same order, at the same time every night. Children with a consistent routine slept better, and in large cohort studies a routine in the early years was associated with better language, literacy and emotional regulation later. Most of that evidence is observational, but the direction is consistent, and a routine costs nothing to try.
What helps the mother
A baby's sleep and a mother's mood are tied together. In 2002 a randomised trial in the BMJ gave 156 Australian mothers of babies between six months and a year old, all with severe sleep problems, either written information or three consultations with a structured sleep plan. At two months, 70 per cent of the babies in the consultation group had settled, against 47 per cent of the others. In the mothers who had started out most depressed, scores on the Edinburgh depression scale fell further than in the written-information group. By four months the two groups' babies were sleeping about the same.
I quote that trial for the mothers, not for the method, which used timed checks that I do not teach. Later trials of the same kind of structured approach, including a small one that measured infants' stress hormones and one that followed families for five years, found no sign of harm to the children. Those were firmer methods than mine, and I do not borrow their safety record; what they tell me is that a calm, consistent approach has not been shown to hurt anyone, and that helping a baby sleep helps a mother's mind, measurably. What I add, from the yoga side, is that the mother's own breath and rest are part of the method from the start.
The approach in practice
Four things, and the order matters.
Timing. A baby can stay comfortably awake for a stretch that lengthens with age, and a baby put down towards the end of that stretch, at the first yawn and the first look away, usually settles more easily than one who has gone past it. Learning to see that moment is the skill I spend most time on in the first months.
Routine. The same short sequence before every sleep, so that the body learns what comes next: a feed, a nappy, a song, then the cot, with the feed early in the sequence rather than last. Keep it short, and keep it the same.
Environment. Dark at night, cool, quiet, safe. A baby's sleep space holds the baby, a firm mattress and a fitted sheet, and nothing else.
Response. When your baby wakes, go to them. Settle them where they sleep when you can, with a hand or a voice, and pick them up when that is what they need. In my experience you cannot spoil a newborn by going to them; being answered, night after night, is how a baby learns to settle.
Your breath and theirs
This is where the yoga and the sleep work meet. I believe a baby reads a body long before it understands a word: a tense jaw, a held breath and a racing heart reach a newborn lying against a parent's chest, and so do their opposites. The breathing I teach in prenatal yoga, a slow in-breath and a slower out-breath, is the breathing I ask parents to use at three in the morning, because it settles the person holding the baby first. I know of no trial of this. What I have is the physiology of slow breathing, which I set out in Six Breaths a Minute, and what I see in the families I work with.
When to ask for help
If your baby is on the way or newly here, start with the workshop: about two and a half hours on how sleep works and what to do from the first day, for parents and for whoever else will be doing the settling. It costs US$30 for up to two people. If your baby is between six months and two years and the nights are long, the next step is one-to-one sleep coaching. We look at how your days and nights run now and build a plan around timing, routine, the room and how you respond. For a baby in between, message me and I will tell you which fits. Both run in English, Spanish, Portuguese or German, in Siem Reap or online.
If your nights are hard, and the safe-sleep rules above are in place, then in my experience you have simply not yet been told how a baby sleeps. Message me and we will begin with your nights as they are.