In Part 1 of this topic, I open up about life when your kids won’t sleep. I share my personal story of nearly 10 years of sleep deprivation, my experiences, my advice and how you can possibly think about caring for your body when you feel like a zombie. Join me next week, for Part 2, when I dive into the science of what sleep deprivation does to your body, your appetite and more.
Disclaimer: This podcast does not constitute medical advice. You should always speak to your doctor before changing your nutrition or exercise habits.
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WHEN YOUR KIDS WON’T SLEEP – EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
In guys, all right, the tone of this episode is going to be a little different than usual, a little less peppy, a little less upbeat. And that’s actually really intentional. Because the topic that we’re going to talk about today is sleep deprivation, how it affects your body, how it affects your life. And I am extremely sleep deprived right now and just really spent I just had this exhausting day my husband’s out of town right now for the whole week. And somebody has needed me literally every moment since 6am. And it’s currently 1030 At night, and I just got my last child to sleep with no break anywhere in the day, no children napping, no downtime, nothing. And as I was putting my middle daughter to sleep, who is extremely hard to get to sleep, I just started getting the ideas for what I wanted to talk about in this episode. And I started writing them down. And I was like, You know what, I don’t want to wait to record this until tomorrow because I want to record this volume weary. I want to record this in that place that I know so many of you guys are in because I had this idea for this episode after waking up literally like cleaning to the edge of my youngest child’s bed last night because I was sleeping in with her room because she has nightmares. And I had like a quarter of a pillow and I was almost falling off the bed and I’d had a horrible night’s sleep, I’d
been up twice because she needed water one time, she had a nightmare. She wet the bed like all this stuff. And I was just I woke up and I was like God, I need to talk about this. And the response that I got the posts that I made on Instagram and Facebook about living with sleep deprivation and from our children. It was like overwhelming how many of you guys are struggling with this. So kind of my vision for this episode is I’m probably going to record the first half of the episode from this weary place and share like my personal experience and stock, talk about the mindset stuff and the emotional stuff. And then I’m probably going to re record the second section when I’m feeling happy and like talking about the science and what it actually does to your body in your mind. So if you guys hear a dichotomy or like a real difference between those two parts, that is why. So I want to share a little bit about my story with my kids in terms of sleep deprivation. So my oldest is 10 now, but when he was born, my husband deployed to Afghanistan, 60s after he was born. So this was for my first child. And it turns out that he ended up he not my husband, he my child ended up having a tongue tie that wasn’t caught until about five weeks after he was born. So he started losing weight. And then we had to go through the process of having his tongue tied clipped during lactation consultants trying to get him to nurse right. And it never really like fully. He never really got a good feeding. So because of that, even as a baby, he wanted to eat six, seven, sometimes nine times a night like he just couldn’t settle. It was terrible. I was there by myself. I had no family. We were living in military base housing, my husband was deployed and I just kind of had to survive, right? But being a first time mom, I was like, Oh, well, this is just the season I have to get through right? Well, because of his being used to waking up so much to nurse waking up through the night for my son persisted well into his late twos. And then I ended up getting pregnant when he was a I want to say like two years and three quarters because my kids are what three and a half years apart. So I don’t know it’s kind of late, may not be doing the math right but about that, right? Everybody knows nobody sleeps while when they’re pregnant. It’s just kind of how it goes. So there was nine months of not sleeping well again. And then my daughter arrived and my middle daughter did not want to be put down at all, basically, for her first four months of life would not sleep in the crib, but would not be anywhere except for the carrier like classic, what they call the fourth trimester, another child who didn’t sleep through the night until she was well after too. And then she was my child who had night terrors. So even after she started sleeping through the night, for, I would say, probably until she was four, she would wake up crying in the middle of the night for two hours straight. And there was nothing we could do about it at the time, we were living in California, where real estate is expensive, and our houses were really small. Our first apartment when she was a baby was only 800 square feet. And all four of us were in that. And then when we moved to our condo that we bought in North County, that was only 1300 square feet, so really small. And when a child is up crying in the middle of the night, everybody is up in the middle of the night, it was really hard season. And then when she was three, I got pregnant with our youngest, and again pregnant for nine months, not sleeping well. And I would say my youngest out of all the kids was probably the best sleeper, but I still did have to co sleep with her not because I wanted to, but just because I couldn’t get her to sleep on her own. And I was so exhausted from the other kids that I just couldn’t even deal with anything. And then my husband deployed again for 12 months, when she was I want to say five or six months old. And it became apparent that I was going to need to sleep train her. But I physically could not do it by myself. So I would try for a day or two. And honestly guys, I’m I’m somebody who would prefer to never have to sleep train my children. But I was just so exhausted, that I had no other choice, right, I was trying to literally be in survival mode. So we could do, I don’t even want to touch the topic of whether sleep training is a good thing or a bad thing. It’s not something I’m trying to do in this episode. I understand both sides of it. But from like a survival perspective,
I needed I needed to sleep because I was parenting three children by myself. And I just couldn’t do it. Like I was so tired that I could not deal with her crying. More than a night I needed to sleep. And then we moved across the country moved here to New York, with her sleeping was just getting to the point where it was good. And then she potty trained. And she started potty training at night. And so then she needed to get up to go to the bathroom at night. And she’s almost four now. Or she would wet the bed at night, right? So literally 10 years straight of not getting a good night’s sleep 10 years straight, I can count on one hand, the number of nights, I have had a solid eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. It is from personal experience, one of the most excruciating things in the world.
And people who have children who sleep do not understand. And I say this respectfully and would love And remember guys, like I’m recording this, honestly three sips into a margarita with that weary heart because I am spent as a mom right now, right? Everybody in their mother and their brother and their cousin and their pets will offer you advice on how to get your children to sleep. And it’s like they don’t think they don’t think about the fact that you obviously want your children to sleep well. And as well meaning as their advice is it’s like you obviously are doing the best that you can and they’re not if they think they’re so good at getting consistently, they’re still not able to come into your house into the middle of the night and and make this work right. So it’s kind of like disheartening, because you’re you’re having a really hard time in general because you’re exhausted and then everybody wants to sweep in and tell you how to fix it. And you kind of just want to like combination of cry and throw something all at the same time. Right? And so then we layer on top of this, this expectation of like, okay, we are sleep deprived in a way that is literally epic, that very few people will ever be sleep deprived, like even my husband’s in the military, even people who are deployed, get to come home after a year and get a good night’s sleep if they don’t have children at least right. Mom’s like we don’t we don’t get to do that literally for me 10 years of sleep deprivation.
So then we layer on top of this, the fact that we have these expectations Have ourselves in terms of how we’re going to care for our bodies getting back into our pre baby shape, wanting to feel good in our skin, when if you have kids who don’t sleep, you are just up against so much. So you’re expecting yourself to be able to make good choices about where you’re eating, to be able to be organized, in terms of having like a meal plan and your grocery shopping, and you’re budgeting. And you’re comparing yourself to all these other people and all these other women who are maybe not experiencing what you’re experiencing with lack of sleep. And it really, it’s a really hard season.
And I just want to let that I just want to make space for that I think exactly how hard of a season it is. And I think that maybe like a lot of women just don’t really talk about that like how hard it is how much sleep they’re not getting, how many years it’s been. And they just sit with it alone. And I don’t know if it’s because mom culture has gotten really heated about like co sleeping versus sleeping in the crib sleep training versus not sleep training, Attachment Parenting versus something else. I’m not sure why that is. But it seems like something that women just don’t feel super supported through.
So I just want to make space for that, because it’s so important. And, you know, there’s this, there’s this line that I really walk as a coach, at a wellness strategist, that’s really tricky. Because I am really big on setting realistic expectations, right realistic goals, and about not hustling for our self worth and not doing things just because we’re trying to keep up with the Joneses. We’re trying to impress somebody, we’re trying to get back into our pre baby bodies so that we can feel good about ourselves, because we need that external validation. Right? You guys all know, that’s not what I’m about. But then there’s also a side of me that recognizes that 10 years is a really long time to treat your body badly.
So for me, when I am working with women who are experiencing this sleep deprivation with their children, it’s such a sensitive area, and it’s so it’s something you have to just be really artful and how you address it, because you need to make space for how hard it is. But also, something that’s really important to acknowledge is, like I said, 10 years is a really long time. And at some point, you just have to make the choice, that you’re going to overcome what you’re going through. Now, I almost hesitate to say this, because it’s really hard to do that, it’s really hard to make that choice. And it’s really hard to make that flip. And I don’t want anyone to ever feel shame, for not getting to that place. Because it is really, really hard. But I also want to make space for expanding your horizons and for knowing that you have the choice to choose something different, right. And I was realizing as I was sitting on the edge of my daughter’s bed for the 100 and 52nd minute of trying to get her to sleep. I was realizing that that choice is something that many women don’t realize they have, because they spend so much time thinking about how hard the thing is that they’re going through. And when we focus on how hard things are, we spend our mental energy on sort of I don’t want to say self pity, but you know, really processing our emotions of how hard it is.
And there’s a part of us that feels like we deserve to be rewarded or compensated in some way for the pain that we are going through for what’s being taken from us. And again, like I want to acknowledge the fullness of what is being taken from you when you are sleep deprived because it is real, that you’re when I when I re record the section where I talk about the science of how it impacts your body and stuff like it is real what is being taken from you is real.
But when you dwell so much on how hard it is and how much is being taken from you, and how you don’t deserve this and how you deserve better, which is true. You also give away some of your power. You give away some of your power by focusing on the negative side of things. And I feel like if you really want to thrive regard LIS of what is happening to you with sleep deprivation, you have to make a choice to reframe what you’re experiencing as not necessarily a hardship, but as something that just is a normal part of having children.
That doesn’t mean it’s not hard, but it just means that the power that we’re giving to it is diminished a little bit. And again, like this may not be the case for you, I’m certainly not the expert on how to approach this particular issue for every single person. But just for me, this has been the case, when I shifted my perspective on sleep deprivation, from this huge hardship to just being a normal part of parenting.
Like sometimes children don’t sleep, sometimes all three of your children don’t sleep, it really freed up my energy to seek innovative solutions and to make different choices. And there’s just something so powerful in that and I’m honestly as I record this in the dark in my living room with my quarter drunk Margarita, I’m… I’m processing so much of this myself, because I’m still in this season. But I feel very deeply that this shift is an important one, and just accepting the normalcy of it and the way that you know, I talk to you guys a lot about how the expectations that we placed on women and the expectations that we place on our bodies are not realistic, right?
I don’t think that it’s spoken about enough that the expectations that we place on children and the expectations that we place on sleep. And the way families and sleep situations are presented are also greatly not really particularly realistic. So if we are constantly measuring ourselves and our lives and our children against this yardstick that set too high, it’s going to eat away at our mental energy it’s going to eat away at our positivity and it’s going to take away from our ability to see the situation in a realistic light Okay, so my my brain just shut down it just hit I think it’s 1101 here but I’m gonna pause this and then come back to you guys with some ideas about the science and exactly how living with this impacts your body
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