Baby Sleep Cycles

How Your Babys Sleep Cycles Change Around 4-6 Months.

Baby sleep cycles. Lets start by defining what a sleep cycle is. A newborn babys sleep cycle falls into the two categories of REMactive and NREMquiet. As a baby grows their sleep cycles progress and they begin to spend less time in REM sleep.

Jenni et al 2004. Baby sleep cycle may also refer to a single sequence of two types of sleep. Many babies seem to switch overnight from long stretches of daytime sleep to catnaps of 30-40 minutes.

Teaching a baby to connect nap sleep cycles is probably the most difficult type of sleep issue to tackle. The four month sleep regression. Until 4 months your babys time sleeping is divided in two.

Baby sleep cycles are also shorter than adults typically having a 45-minute duration in the first 12 months. They have two different kinds of sleep active sleep and quiet sleep. Newborns and adults have very different sleep cycles.

At first shell need to wake up for feeds. Active sleep is the sleep your baby enters first. And for the youngest babies -- those under 3 months of age -- the average sleep cycle looks like this.

Stage 3 and stage 4 or REM and spend about half of their time asleep in each stage. As babies grow the initial REM phase becomes shorter and eventually fades. By 3 months of age babies can be sleeping around 15 hours over a 24 hour period.