They don’t operate on a 24-hour cycle, nor do they have any regard for night or day. They can be up to six months old before they begin to show any sense of functional consistency and may be years old before they stop night waking. All this to say, there are legions of sleep deprived parents out there in the world, going about their days in a time-warped slow motion, feeling anything other than themselves.
As a sleep-deprived parent you may find yourself the butt of many jokes or on the end of pitying looks as family and friends – sometimes even strangers –recall ‘the slog’ of their own early parenting days before dishing out supremely unhelpful comments like ‘What else did you expect?’ We’ve all been there. The chances are you’re there right now.
If only it were a laughing matter. But the effects of sleep deprivation are real. You may find it hard to concentrate, suffer memory lapses, mood swings, anxiety, elevated stress, slurred speech, lose your libido, put on weight and even find you have a low immunity making you less able to fend off bugs. At its extreme, studies have shown sleep deprivation can lead to brain damage. That sleep deprivation has been used as a means of torture for centuries says it all really.
For those of us who have always enjoyed – or survived on – a good night’s sleep, the lack of sleep that comes with being a parent can be a shock. No, debilitating. Of course, some days are better than others and it’s incredible how quickly you can return to baseline with a good night’s sleep, that feeling of being a new person again hard to top.
Not so long ago, the idea of being able to survive on little sleep may have held some kudos; ‘successful’ people championing themselves on needing as little as two to three hours a night. How we marvelled that Margaret Thatcher could run a country on four hours sleep is, frankly, ridiculous knowing what we know now; that persistent lack of sleep is directly linked to an increased risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s. Yep, that ship has sailed. Boasting about how little sleep you need is really only a race to the bottom. Sleep is not, ‘just for wimps’.
As a new parent you may covet the enviable extensive sleeping hours of today’s teenagers and your younger self, but instead, ask how is it they can sleep for so long? It is not because they are ‘lazy’. It’s because their brains and bodies are developing at such rapid speed it necessitates the factory reset that sleep brings. Wanting more sleep does not make you lazy. Instead, it shows a healthy regard for your own physical and mental well-being.
According to the US National Institute of Health, ‘When one sleeps the brain reorganizes and recharges itself, and removes toxic waste by-products which have accumulated throughout the day…a minimum of seven hours of daily sleep seems to be necessary for proper cognitive function.’ Seven hours. A luxury if you’re a new parent. And toxic waste? No wonder you’re feeling so rubbish.
In their paper The Neuroprotective Aspects of Sleep, Andy R Eugene and Jolanta Masiak write “Essentially, sleeping acts as a garbage collector that comes during the night and removes the waste product left by the brain. This allows the brain to function normally the next day when one wakes up from slumber.” Clinically, this is known as the brain’s glymphatic system. We can now appreciate how not getting enough sleep physically alters the chemical balance in your brain, hence the title of this post; You’re not losing your mind, you’re just sleep deprived.
What’s worse, in a punishing twist, the states produced by sleep deprivation can actually make it harder to sleep. Anxiety and depression brought on by poor sleep patterns can often cause insomnia so that you may find when your baby is finally sleeping, frustratingly, you cannot.
So, what is going on in your brain when you are sleeping? Well, sleep turns off the norepinephrine (a stress hormone), serotonin (modulates mood) and histamine (immunity) neurotransmitters, allowing their receptors to rest. Now we can see directly the consequences of not getting enough sleep; the elevated stress levels, a struggle to make a proportionate response to an emotional event, of feeling constantly under the weather – every day a battle. Now we can understand what is happening to us.
And in today’s world of peak perfection and productivity, of having heightened expectations, increased stimulations, technology on tap, of always being ‘on’, of problems being solved in a ‘hack’ we can consume on TikTok then we may be feeling the effects of sleep deprivation more than our predecessors – and its negative effect on our psyche.
But it’s not all bad. It won’t last forever (trust, us, it really won’t). You will get through it. Your children will grow and sleep. Until they do, there are things you can do to address the slump you feel, to try and rebalance your brain and body and feel more like yourself.
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