Sleep Debt and Disturbed Sleep

This has been a rough week few weeks with my 22 month old’s sleep. He has been going through huge developmental leaps which tend to lead to disrupted sleep and then he got a cold which doesn’t help. I thought we would be back on track this week, but it was the worst week yet! This week, he had a tendency to go down pretty easily, but then he was waking very frequently (almost every hour) in the early part of the night.

Sleep Debt and Disturbed Sleep
Interestingly, the falling asleep easily and waking frequently actually points to being overtired and having sleep debt. Did you know that being overtired can actually disturb sleep? This can be counterintuitive. We have a tendency to think that when babies are tired that they will sleep well, but it is actually the opposite. What happens when are babies are overtired or have sleep debt is that they fall asleep very quickly or “crash” into sleep. When they “crash” into sleep, they skip the early, lighter sleep stages and fall right into a deeper sleep. When those early, lighter sleep cycles are skipped, the sleep architecture or the way sleep stages are put together for the rest of the night changes. That change in sleep architecture will often lead to babies waking in between every single sleep cycle. Babies who are overtired and in sleep debt also tend to wake earlier in the morning than normal. Thankfully, we’ve avoided that disturbance lately.

The fix for this frequent waking due to change in sleep architecture is addressing sleep debt. The first thing to look at is overall sleep needs. 22-month-olds on average need 11-14 hours of sleep with 1 nap of 2-3 hours and nighttime sleep of 10-11 hours. That is an average of sleep needs and many children will fall outside of those ranges. While my first child was a very low sleep needs baby, my second has always been a little bit higher sleep needs. Lately, he has been getting 10 hours of sleep at night and a little over a 2 hour nap. While that falls within the range of averages, because he is a little bit higher sleep needs, it is probably not enough overall sleep for him. He does not usually wake up from his nap groggy and irritable, which tells me that the length of his nap is great. Thus, he probably needs more nighttime sleep. Unfortunately, waking later in the morning is probably not going to happen, so we need to move up bedtime. Right now, he is sleeping from 8:30pm-6:30am. The first thing that I will try is moving bedtime up to 7:30 or 8pm. The timing of his nap may need to shift to allow enough sleep pressure to build up before bedtime, but I am optimistic that addressing his nighttime sleep will correct his sleep debt and overtiredness.

How will I know that it does correct his overtiredness? His sleep latency or the amount of time it will take for him to fall asleep will normalize to about 15-20 minutes. If his sleep latency normalizes, but he is still waking frequently, then it is back to the drawing board! Want more information on your baby’s sleep and how to troubleshoot/optimize? If you have more questions about sleep debt and disturbed sleep, check out the sleep guides here or reach out for 1:1 support.