With a newborn baby at home and continuous nighttime awakenings, the mother's sleep is often affected both in quality and quantity. According to a study conducted in the United States on women who have had their first child, quality is more affected than quantity, since it states that new mothers sleep enough, but poorly.
They have detected that the amount of hours the mothers slept, 7 hours per night, is the recommended rest time for an adult, but nevertheless the continuous interruptions are what make the sleep of poor quality.
Fragmentation of sleep more than a few hours of sleep, is the real cause of fatigue. It is believed that the continuous awakenings subtract in total two hours of sleep each night, so the ideal would be for the mother to recover that sleep time during the day taking advantage of the baby's naps.
Lack of sleep can become a big problem for the mother. Not getting a quality rest can have an impact, for example, on a greater tendency to postpartum depression. That is why it is essential to have the support of the couple and other loved ones during the first weeks of the baby's life.
Sleep occurs in repeated cycles of between 90 minutes and two hours. That is, depending on how many times the mother wakes up throughout the night, she may complete few or no sleep cycles.
The pattern of this problem, the researchers explain, is similar to other sleep disorders such as apnea. The mother can remain in bed for several hours, but the quality sleep time, the one that really rests, is very short.
They propose as a possible solution, in addition to naps during the day, that in the case of breastfeeding, the mother withdraws the milk so that it is also the father who can feed the baby and thus prevent her from waking up at night.
