Is my baby waking due to habit or hunger?

Is my baby waking due to habit or hunger?

Hunger or Habit?  

Trying to figure out if your bubs is waking overnight from genuine hunger or if they have fallen into a bit of a habitual wake up? It can be tricky to spot and happens pretty quickly due to bubs picking up on patterns in just a few nights!  

Hunger will look like –  

  • Waking after 4-5 hours of sleep after bedtime  
  • Having a big feed 
  • Settling back off to sleep and sleeping for another big stretch 
  • Waking at similar times but not the exact same times 
  • Waking, settling then waking shortly after  

Habit will look like – 

  • Waking within a couple of hours (or each hour) after a feed 
  • Waking at the exact same time every night for a feed – 1:11am, for example. 
  • Having a very quick drink before falling asleep again  
  • Waking around 11PM and 3AM each night. (this is the end of their sleep cycles and usually the indication of a sleep association).

If you suspect your little one is waking out of habit, you can help them consolidate their sleep cycles and not rely on the feed to resettle in between these sleep cycles, if it is becoming unsustainable. (Find out more on how to teach bub to self settle here . When dropping night feeds, you need to ensure bubs is having enough calories throughout their day. This is one of the things we look at when working with families to help them achieve great sleep. 

From around the age of 6-8months we can see babies starting to show signs of pushing their one feed out and dropping it off. *this can happen earlier and later as well but as an average of what we see!* What we can see helps this transition is below –
  • Baby is having 4 consistent feeds throughout the day at the start of their awake window
  • Baby has started some solids
  • Naps are complimenting night time sleep – about 2-3 naps across the day and day sleep of about 2.5-3hours max.
  • Monitoring dropping off the third nap, starting to reduce it from 30mins to 15mins when baby is showing you that a routine tweak is needed. (from about 6months this can shift)
  • Baby can self settle away from external help (milk, rocking, holding, dummy)

If you feel your little one is waking out of habit and would like to look at removing these extra wakes we have all the tools in our sleep guides OR book a one on one consult here

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