Biology sets the pace
not Sleep Routine
Like all parents, at some point you’ll start thinking about your baby’s sleep — whether it's because the nights are getting tougher, or you're just trying to get ahead of things because you’ve heard from other families how difficult it can get.
And that’s when you end up with a ton of advice coming at you from every direction.
To help your baby sleep, you will be advised to either:
Try the “cry it out” method — letting your baby cry alone,
Teach them to self-soothe,
Set a new routine that builds “good habits” (and avoids creating “bad” ones),
Or change your baby’s sleep associations to avoid “dependence.”
All of them come from the same approach: sleep training, which focuses on shaping sleep behaviors.
The problem with that is, we end up focusing so much on how the baby falls asleep, that we lose sight of what’s really going on in your baby’s body － their sleep biology
WHEN YOU PRIORITIZE BIOLOGY－ SLEEP ROUTINE BECOME EASIER TO CHANGE
As we’ve seen in the last episode, sleep associations, routines and “good” habit, are amazing ! But they are only tool and they are not foundation for your baby sleep.
When sleep associations can work fast, sleep biology set the limit.
Because biology is what determines when your baby is ready for longer sleep stretches or major sleep milestones, when they are ready for the next step.
Unlike sleep associations, biology may take weeks to settle and adjust but when it does it’s solid, structured, and lays the ground for the foundation of restorative and deep sleep.
So supporting biology may take more time, sure, but it’s also so much easier. It’s not about being perfect or following strict steps — actually It doesn’t on you, doesn’t rely rely on what you do Biology doesn't wait for you to do her job, if you let her.
Biology works and supports your baby sleep by itself.
SLEEP ASSOCIATIONS CAN WORK FAST － BUT BIOLOGY SET THE LIMIT
The best example is when you are asked to be careful about the good or bad habit you might be forming, so you build the “ ideal” sleep association for your newborn to find sleep.
Let me explain to you why.
So if you are a parent of a 0-3 month baby, the very beginning of it life, It is important to know that in the first few months of life, only 50% of your baby sleep is going to be deep sleep, the one that looks like nothing on earth can wake them up.
But the other half will be an agitated sleep (also called active or REM sleep). It will look like your baby is not sleeping peacefully, and you will think he is not sleeping enough because it feels like he is constantly unsettled.
Yes, baby will move a lot, even make sounds like grunting, infact their brain will actually be active －you would be right ! And yet it will be a genuinely normal phase of sleep, yet, it will be restorative, meant to be like that at the beginning.
WE OFTEN HEAR:
"Put yourself in
your baby shoes,
Imagine you fall asleep somewhere, and wake up somewhere else
—you’d be confused too!"
And that is exactly in those moments, that it’s tempting to think the problem is that we’ve created a dependency. That is the reason why your baby is waking up, because they fell asleep at the breast and now they wake up and the breast isn’t there. Or because they were rocked in your arms and now they wake up and you’re gone.
Don’t get me wrong—it matters deeply to try to see the world through your baby’s eyes. But there’s a difference between hearing your baby, and imagining a story based on our adult logic.
One connects us to them. The other might pull us away.
So this idea—that your baby is waking because of how and where they are falling asleep—feels logical. Maybe it’s true. But the truth is—we don’t really know.
What we do know, what’s certain and backed by science, and what shouldn't be missed, is that babies wake up because they spend about 50% of their sleep in active sleep. That’s a biological reality. That’s a sure fact. So, it’s actually much more likely that your baby wakes simply because of how their body is designed, not because you’ve done something wrong or created a bad habit.