How I taught myself to go to sleep

Turns out, we're all just big toddlers

Photo by Gregory Pappas on Unsplash

I’ve been a troubled sleeper all my life, and I’ve struggled with intermittent insomnia since I was a kid. Every time my life has been stressful or unsettled, it creeps back in.

So needless to say, when I had a kid nearly two years ago, I was very worried about the impact it would have on my ability to rest. I sometimes hear people express that that being an insomniac, or frequently pulling all-nighters, or being a heavy partier may be good preparation for the sleep deprivation of having a baby. Unfortunately, that is a convenient pre-parenthood delusion. The sleep deprivation of early parenting is a foreign country. If you’ve never been there, you’ve never been there.

The first year of baby sleep was unspeakably hard. If you’re currently in this space, you have my deepest empathy and solidarity. There is not enough understanding or support in our capitalist society to account for how difficult this period is, especially if you have to show up to work and pretend to be a functioning human being at the same time. All I can offer you is the knowledge that it will get better, and in the meantime you should accept all the help you can (paid or from friends/family). If no one is offering, ask for it. You were not supposed to do this all alone.

But as my son approaches two years old, I have been sleeping better than I ever have in my entire life. By which I mean, each night, I fall asleep within ten minutes of getting into bed. The quality of my sleep feels deeper too. This is unprecedented for me, as my brand of insomnia has typically been the sort where I struggle immensely to fall asleep, with my anxiety spiralling as each passing hour goes by. The relief of feeling a bit sleepy and drifting off quickly and effortlessly is something I now savour. For the first time in my life, I look forward to bedtime.

Even though my son now sleeps through the night pretty reliably (praise all that is holy for that), he still gets up extremely early as toddlers seem hell-bent on doing. The change I’ve noticed in the quality of my sleep is a direct result of a series of habits I put in place in order to survive these early starts, day after day.

Indeed after a lifetime of struggling with my own sleep, the wild, crazy-making, and unhinged world of baby and toddler sleep has been a great teacher for me. Turns out, we’re all just big toddlers.

Let me take you back to July of 2023. My son had just turned one. He had never slept through at this point, and we’d been responding to every cry in the night for over a year, anywhere from two to four times. We were zombies. I would spontaneously cry multiple times a day. I told my husband that gentle/responsive/attachment parenting could now go heartily fuck itself. We could absolutely not continue doing what we were doing anymore.

Here’s something that’s not said enough in the era of intensive parenting: Kids don’t thrive with destroyed, depleted, and burned out parents. It was abundantly clear to me that the single best thing we could do for our son at that time was to figure out a way that we could get more sleep. I think we made this decision at exactly the right time — he had learned by then that we were always going to be there for him — and I don’t regret it one bit.

We hired a gentle sleep consultant who we met over Zoom, which my parents kindly offered to pay for because they couldn’t help from afar (this is what I mean when I say accept help in whatever form it comes). She was of the strictly anti cry-it-out variety, which is what we were comfortable with. But in reality, what we were doing was so-called sleep training. We were training our son to understand that he falls asleep in the cot, not being rocked in our arms, that he was capable of putting himself back to sleep in the night, and didn’t need a bottle or us to come help him every time.

I won’t go into her full protocol here (if you want it though, hit reply or email me — I’m happy to share) but here’s the TLDR: Every single nap, every single bedtime, every single soothe has to happen in the exact same way. The same dinner time, the same bath time, the same sleep sack, the same noise machine at the same volume turned on at the same time, the same walk through the house where we turn off all the lights saying goodnight, the same lullaby we made up in a sleep-deprived haze when he was tiny.

We were always there for him when he cried (still are). But rather than pick him up and rocking him back to sleep — cute in the early days but physically ruinous for us the bigger he got — we went in his room, sang to him, rubbed his back etc. His body and nervous system quickly learned that there was one way he fell asleep: lying down in his crib, with his parents nearby if he needed them.

And the schedule had to be tight too. Down to the minute. The hours of 6 to 8pm unfold in exactly the same way in our house every damn day. There are no late afternoon “danger naps” — naps too close to bedtime which threaten to throw off the precious process of him falling asleep on his own. All of this is very boring and tedious to keep up, but at 8pm most nights, when my child has just fallen asleep with nary a cry, I am blissfully happy about our life choices.

So how did I apply all of this to myself? Let me count the ways.

1. I stopped letting myself fall asleep in front of the TV. I’ve been doing this my entire adult life. You’re watching something on the sofa, bedtime is an hour away, and you feel your eyelids going. You promise yourself you wont fall asleep until … you’re out. Here’s the problem: That 20 minute stint of sleep an hour away from when you want to go to bed is the same thing as a danger nap! You’re extinguishing what the sleep experts call “sleep pressure,” which builds up in our bodies the longer we’ve been awake. Just like with a toddler, it doesn’t matter if it was only a 15 minute nap at 4:45pm. Relieving a bit of the pressure means there is less built up at 8pm and it will be harder to fall asleep. These days, if I’m that tired, I get up off the couch and get ready for bed so I can spend my sleep pressure where I really need it.

2. I stopped charging my phone on my bedside table and stopped looking at screens a minimum of 30 minutes before bed. I would never let my toddler watch TV or do something super stimulating in the hour before bedtime. This would be asking for trouble. So why on earth was I allowing my brain to access to the sum total of the world’s information via my glowing rectangle right before I want to go to sleep? I now relish the moment when I “put my phone to bed” for the night. If you’re wondering what I use for an alarm clock, parents of small children don’t need alarm clocks lol.

3. I start getting ready for bed an hour before. Our lights-out bedtime is 10:30pm, which means just like my toddler, I start getting ready for bed about an hour before this. Yes this is annoying when you want to watch another episode of whatever you’re watching. But the discipline pays off. Just like for my son, I do the same things, in the same order, every night: First I finish tidying the kitchen for the morning, take a shower, queue up the tea-making station for the early morning start, heat up my lavender heating pad because I am an old lady, get a glass of water, and slide into bed in a dimly-lit room with my actual book (remember, no screens). As a bonus, I’ve been finishing more books lately, too.

4. I started taking two magnesium pills at bedtime. I’m not a big believer in supplements, but I recently began seeing a functional medicine practitioner who recommended this, among other things. Magnesium is meant to be good at settling the nervous system, and I’m stunned by how effective it seems to be. I think the quality of my sleep — not just the ease with which I fall asleep — has benefitted majorly from it. I’ve slid on taking the other supplements, but the magnesium is here to stay. Here’s the one she recommended — it’s not cheap, which is part of the reason I ditched all the other supplements.

5. No caffeine after 12 noon. Another boring but effective way to improve your life.

6. If I drink alcohol, I stop drinking it by about 8pm. I have not yet turned into a monk and thus still enjoy a glass of wine or two a few nights a week. But I have it with my very early, toddler-timed dinner — eating early is good for your digestion and blood sugar levels — and I and stop by 8:30pm or so, followed by herbal tea or glass of water.

If you’ve gotten to the end of this list and feel disappointed, if you were expecting some life-changing tip you’ve never heard before, all I can say is that the grinding consistency is what makes this work. Surviving being a working parent with a small child forces you to be regimented in a way you’ve never had to be before. There is no slacking off or hitting snooze in the morning when you’re taking care of a toddler. It is ALL GO EVERY DAY. In order to survive this, you basically have to start living like a toddler yourself.

Toddlers want structure and consistency. Their emotions and inner worlds are so trippy, unpredictable, and out of control that stacking the same habits and hitting the same external beats each day — mealtimes, sleep times, playtimes, reassuring physical objects, fresh air, nervous system-calming practices like low light and soothing sound — help keep them on the level.

Turns out, you and I need exactly the same things. The modern world is trippy and out of control and a pretty bad match for our animal bodies which love ritual, routine, and consistency. My body wants me to reliably hit those same notes, in the same way I structure my son’s day. Or just like a grizzly bear, a cat, or a salamander instinctively does for themselves.

All of this is unsexy and unglamorous and will really get in the way of a social life of any kind. But my god, the good sleep is worth it.

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