There’s a particular kind of sleep advice that really gets under my skin. It’s confident, absolute, and often framed as a warning. Women are told they need 8–10 hours of sleep because of their hormones, sometimes vaguely attributed to “the adrenals”. I see claims that if you’re awake for a couple of hours in the night, your cancer risk increases by 50%. I saw one version of this when I was in the depths of the four-month sleep regression and it terrified me, adding an extra layer of stress to what already felt like an impossible situation.
Sleep is described as the single most important thing you can do for your health, above all else. We’re told to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day, no exceptions. Even after a bad night, we should push ourselves to exercise because we’ll “feel better afterwards”. Has anyone actually tried to go to the gym on four hours of broken sleep, on a background of years of sleep deprivation? I have, and I can tell you it wasn’t pretty. I couldn’t decide whether I was going to pass out or throw up, and then I spent the rest of the day even more exhausted because I’d used up my tiny remaining physiological reserves. I won’t be making that mistake again. There’s also the insistence on getting outdoor light within 30–60 minutes of waking, which is physically impossible if you wake at 4.30am and live in the UK for at least half the year, and the rule that your phone should never be in your bedroom, which doesn’t quite account for the reality of modern baby monitors. All of it sounds neat and sensible, but almost none of it fits this stage of life.
What my nights actually look like
My sleep is broken. I’ve had two children (now three and one) who, for the first year of life, woke on average every one to two hours. Things are better now, but still they’re only asleep by 8pm, one is often awake by 5am, and another is usually up at least once in the night. There’s a constant game of musical beds: my bed, a mattress on the floor, my daughter’s bed, sometimes the spare room. The baby monitor is always on. Babies and young children are noisy sleepers, once I heard them described as truffle pigs, with all the snorting and grunting, which felt very apt. There are intermittent cries, flailing limbs, giggling, talking in their sleep, and of course, the outlandish nightmares. A strong contender in our house at the moment is the walrus that keeps coming into my daughter’s room.
There’s a constant background level of hypervigilance: waking suddenly, convinced I can hear screaming even when there isn’t any. Add a snoring husband, a snoring dog, and the occasional woofmare for good measure, and nights are rarely quiet. Mornings start early regardless of how the night went, and days are long and full-on. After a particularly hard night, I sometimes look at the clock and think: how on earth am I going to get through the next sixteen hours feeling like this? Trying to work and emotionally regulate small, unreasonable humans when I feel completely depleted myself.
Don’t get me wrong – sleep does matter
I do understand why sleep is talked about so much. The evidence that poor sleep affects cognitive function, reaction time, mood, and emotional regulation is actually very strong. Anyone who’s ever tried to make decisions after a bad night doesn’t need a study to tell them that. Short-term sleep deprivation clearly affects attention, memory, and judgment, and it makes day-to-day life harder. I don’t dispute that at all. I also don’t doubt that sustained, severe sleep disruption can contribute to poorer physical and mental health over time. Where I start to struggle is with how this evidence is often stretched far beyond what it can reasonably support, particularly when it’s used to imply that broken sleep during normal life stages is inherently dangerous or permanently damaging.
When you step back and look at the wider evidence on sleep and long-term health, it’s much less absolute than social media tends to suggest. Many of the studies linking sleep to outcomes like heart disease or cancer are observational. They describe population-level patterns, not individual destiny, and they often can’t fully separate cause from effect. You’ll sometimes see this illustrated with studies showing a small increase in heart attacks in the days following the spring clock change. This is a real finding, and it likely reflects abrupt circadian disruption at a population level. But the increase is modest in absolute terms, short-lived, and rates return to baseline within days. Crucially, these kinds of events are thought to act as triggers rather than root causes; occurring predominantly in people who already have underlying cardiovascular disease or significant risk factors. They don’t suggest that otherwise healthy people are suddenly having heart attacks because of a few nights of poor sleep, or that waking regularly with children meaningfully increases long-term cardiovascular risk.
Similarly, while prolonged circadian disruption (such as years of night-shift work) may be associated with certain health risks, this is very different from the fragmented sleep that comes with caregiving, illness, or intense life stages. Claims that women biologically require dramatically more sleep, or uninterrupted sleep, are often presented with a level of certainty that isn’t really supported by high-quality data, and hormonal explanations are frequently vague or overstated. Overall, the science supports sleep as important. What it doesn’t support is fear-based messaging that treats sleep as perfectly controllable, or frames normal phases of life as biologically dangerous.
Gentle things that help (a bit)
Honestly, not a huge amount does. I’m perpetually tired, but I do what I can to prioritise sleep as much as possible. I aim for an 8-hour sleep opportunity, so I go to bed early to give myself a buffer for bad nights. For the last half hour before bed, I keep the lights low (or off) and read. I actually prefer this, by the end of the day I often find TV too overstimulating and want nothing more than to sit in a dark room in silence. I do take magnesium. I’m very aware the evidence is mixed and the effects are probably small at best, but it seems to help me a little, or at least I think it does, and we all know the power of a placebo. I’m also lucky that I can get away with using earplugs, as my husband often covers the baby monitor. He’ll wake if they’re genuinely upset, but not for every tiny noise; whereas, even a sneeze will have me out of bed, halfway down the landing, flooded with adrenaline. When I wake and can’t settle, I sometimes count backwards from 10,000. It’s incredibly dull and frustrating, but I don’t think I’ve ever made it past 9,000, so it clearly does something. Occasionally, I sleep in the spare room, though I know not everyone has that option. And sometimes, at weekends, I stay up a little later than ideal just to spend time with my husband, because connection matters too.
Perspective
What I keep coming back to is that human children have always needed care at night, and parents have always adapted to fragmented sleep during child-rearing years. For most of history, there were no baby monitors, blackout blinds, or uninterrupted 8-hour sleep blocks. This is, of course, my own reflection but I often remind myself that if this stage of broken sleep were as biologically dangerous as it’s sometimes framed online, it’s hard to see how our species would have survived. That doesn’t make it easy, or pleasant, or something to romanticise. But it does suggest that our bodies are more resilient than fear-based sleep messaging allows. For now, I’m trying to loosen my grip a little, stop over-analysing, and remind myself that this too shall pass.
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