The Four-Month Sleep Regression

As a professional sleep consultant, I hear the term “regression” used in regard to just about every imaginable circumstance. Essentially, if a baby doesn’t sleep well for a couple of nights, parents start dropping the ‘R’ word. Some people subscribe to the idea that there’s an eight-month regression, a 9-month regression, a 1-year regression, as well as teething regressions, growth spurt regressions, and so on. Others see these as simple hiccups caused by extenuating circumstances

But the four-month regression, everybody agrees on, and for good reason. It’s the real deal, and it’s permanent.

What is happening at 4-month sleep regression?

Stages of Sleep

Stage 1 is that initial stage we’re all familiar with where you can just feel yourself drifting off, but don’t really feel like you’ve fallen asleep. Anyone who has ever seen their partner nodding off in front of the TV telling them to go to bed, and get the canned response of, “I wasn’t sleeping!” knows exactly what this looks like.

Stage 2, is considered the first “true sleep” stage. This is where people tend to realize, once woken up, that they actually were sleeping. For anyone taking a “power nap,” this is as deep as you want to go, or else you’re going to wake up groggy.

Stage 3 is deep and regenerative. Also known as “slow wave” sleep, this is where the body starts repairing and rejuvenating the immune system, muscle tissue, and energy stores, and sparks growth and development.

Stage 4 is REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. This is where the brain starts to kick in and consolidates information and memories from the day before. It’s also the stage where we do most of our dreaming.

Once we’ve gone through all of the stages, we either wake up or come close to waking up and then start over again until the alarm goes off.

So what does this have to do with the dreaded regression we were talking about originally?

Well, newborn babies only have 2 stages of sleep; stage 3 and REM, and they spend about half their sleep in each stage. But at around the third or fourth month, there is a reorganization of sleep, as they embrace the 4-stage method of sleep that they’ll continue to follow for the rest of their lives.

When this change takes place, baby moves from 50% REM sleep to 25% in order to make room for those first two stages. So although REM sleep is light, it’s not as light as these 2 new stages that they’re getting used to, and with more time spent in lighter sleep, there’s more of a chance that baby’s going to wake up.

That’s not to say that we want to prevent or avoid baby waking up. Waking up is absolutely natural, and we continue to wake up three, four, or five times a night into adulthood and even more in old age.

As adults, however, we’re able to identify certain comforting truths that babies might not be privy to. When we wake at night, we’re able to recognize that,

“Hey, I’m here in my bed, it’s still nighttime, my alarm isn’t going to go off for another three hours, and I’m reasonably certain that there are no monsters lurking under my bed. I can go back to sleep”

And we do. Usually so quickly that, the next morning, we don’t even remember the brief encounter with consciousness.

Why is it becomes hard for little ones to link sleep cycles?

A four month old baby, of course, lacks these critical thinking skills. To a four month old baby who fell asleep at her mother’s breast, the reasoning could go much more to the tune of, “OK, the last thing I remember, there was a familiar, beloved face, I was having dinner, and someone was singing me a soothing song about the Teddy Bears’ Picnic. Now I’m alone in this dark room, there’s no food, and there’s probably at least three, possibly four, scary monsters in the immediate vicinity.”

That’s probably an exaggeration, but who knows what goes on in the mind of a four month-old baby?

Anyways, now that baby’s suddenly realized that Momma’s not around, and they’re not entirely sure where they’ve gone, the natural response is to do a little freaking out. That stimulates the fight-or-flight response and, next thing you know, the baby’s not going back to sleep without a significant amount of reassurance that everything is OK.

Major contributor

The other major contributor to this 4 month’s fiasco, I find, is that up until this point, parents have either been putting their baby to sleep with a pacifier, or by rocking them, or by breastfeeding them, or some similar technique where a baby is helped along on the road to falling asleep.

Now that baby’s spending more time in light sleep, and therefore have a higher probability of waking up, this suddenly becomes a much bigger issue. These sleep props or sleep associations can be very sneaky indeed because although they may be helpful in getting your little one to that initial nodding off stage, the lack of them when they wake up means that baby’s not able to get back to sleep again without some external help. Cue the fight-or-flight, the crying, and the adrenaline.

When this starts happening every half an hour, parents can find themselves in a nightmarish situation.

So, the good news for anyone experiencing the dreaded Four Month Sleep Regression is that it’s not, in fact, a regression at all. A regression is defined as “reversion to an earlier mental or behavioral level,” and that’s actually the opposite of what your baby is experiencing. This would be much more aptly titled the “Four Month Sleep Progression”

So, onto the big question. What can you do to help your little one adjust?

First off, get all of that light out of the baby’s room. I’m not kidding around here. You might think that baby’s room is dark enough, or that baby might not like the dark, and that it’s comforting to have a little bit of light coming through the windows or seeping in from the hallway.

Nope.

Baby’s room should be dark. I mean coal mine on a moonless night kind of dark. Tape garbage bags over the windows if you have to, or cover them with tinfoil. (Just be prepared to explain it to the police when the neighbours accuse you of running a grow-op.)

Newborns and infants are not afraid of the dark. They are, however, responsive to light. Light tells their brains that it’s time for activity and alertness, and the brain secretes hormones accordingly, so we want to keep that nursery absolutely pitch black during naps and bedtime.

The other nemesis of daytime sleep, (and nighttime for that matter, although not nearly as often) is noise. Whether it’s UPS ringing the doorbell, the dog warning you that the squirrels are back and for sure going to attack the house this time, or something falling on the floor three rooms away. With babies spending more time in lighter sleep, noises will startle them easily and wake them up, so a white noise machine is a great addition to your nursery to block all internal or external noises.

“Wait, isn’t that a prop,” you’re asking. Well, in a way, it is, but it doesn’t require any winding, resetting, reinserting, or parental presence. It’s just there and it can be on as long as the baby’s sleeping, so it’s not a prop we need to avoid.

Bedtime routines are also an essential component of getting your baby to sleep well. Try to keep the routine to about 4 or 5 steps, and don’t end it with a feed. Otherwise, you risk the baby nodding off at the breast or the bottle, and that will create the dreaded “association” that we talked about earlier.

So try to keep the feed near the beginning of the routine and plan the songs, stories, and getting into PJs towards the end.  The whole process should be about 20 – 30 minutes long, and baby should go into their crib while they’re still awake.

If you’re noticing baby getting fussy before bedtime, you’ve probably waited too long. Four month old babies should really only be going about two hours between snoozes, and bedtime should be between 7 and 8 at night.

Other Factors that can cause a few rough nights

Now, there are going to be a few bumpy nights when Travelling, illness,  cutting teeth, all of these things can cause your little one to have a few disrupted nights in a row. But when it comes to the four-month “progression,” I’m happy to report that this is a one-time thing. Once you’re through this, your baby will have officially moved into the sleep cycle that they’ll essentially be following for the rest of their life. Four glorious stages repeated multiple times a night.

And by taking this opportunity to teach them the skills they need to string those sleep cycles together, independently, prop-free, without any need for nursing, rocking, or pacifiers, you’ll have given them a gift that they’ll enjoy for the rest of their young lives.

Nursing Fact

At this point, If you are thinking WHAT no nursing at 4 months then I will put little light on here that you can 100% feed a baby 2-1 or 0-1 times at night depending on your baby’s temperament, health and needs but here my goal is to teach baby independent self-regulating skills to reconnect sleep cycles after taking a night feed.

Of course, some kids are going to take to this process like a fish to water, and some are going to be a little more resistant. If yours falls into the former category, count yourself as lucky, take delight in your success, and go ahead and gloat about it on Facebook.

Conclusion