Understanding baby sleep cycles

Baby sleep cycles are quite different from yours, starting from the amount of time each of you spend sleeping. As you probably already know, your baby needs much more sleep than you do!

Here's a guide for a 24 hour period, depending on age:

Newborns need around 16 hours
3 month olds need around 15 hours
2 month olds + need around 12 hours
Of course, your baby will not take all this sleep in one long stretch, but in sleep-wake cycles throughout the day. You only need to consider the size of a baby's stomach (hint: tiny!) to know that they will need to wake more often to fill it up. Babies need to eat quite frequently just to keep functioning.

To properly compare the sleep cycles of adults and babies, let's start by taking a look at your own sleep cycles. When adults fall asleep, they go through several sleep stages, such as deep sleep and REM (or active) sleep. The latter stage is actually essential for the healthy life of any adult and is known widely because of its association with dreaming. What's more, even though the skeletal system is temporarily paralysed, brain activity during this stage resembles that of the waking brain - the eyes move quickly beneath the eyelids and breathing often becomes irregular. From beginning to end, an adult’s sleep cycle lasts about 90-100 minutes. At the end of a sleep cycle, an adult either wakes up or begins a new cycle by returning to an earlier stage.

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