Now we all know that an overtired baby or toddler
is going to be a nightmare.
Over tiredness is something that's talked about a lot.
We've all heard it, we ourselves experience it.
I definitely know I get over tired when I stay up too late
binge watching my shows on Netflix.
But under tiredness can have just as much impact
on your little one's sleep.
Today, I am answering your sleep question.
If my baby is over or under tired,
what impact is this going to have on their sleep?
And in this video, I'm going to talk you through
the commonly known over tiredness,
as well as under tiredness,
what to watch out for and what you can do.
So stay tuned.
Hi, I'm Nicki.
I'm one of the founders of Little Ones
and mother to three beautiful children.
At Little Ones, we specialize in infant, toddler and child
sleep and nutrition programs,
which are found in our state of the art mobile app.
We have a huge team of qualified experts
waiting and ready to help you.
So please visit us at www.littleones.co to find out more.
Let's start with over tiredness.
Now, quite simply, it is what it sounds like.
Your little one is too tired.
They've gone through ready for bed tired
into this strange horrific land
of I'm way too tired to do anything except scream,
especially if you have a younger baby.
And I'll explain a bit about why that happens
so you can really understand
what's going on for your little one.
So the younger the little one, the less awake time
between sleeps their body is able to handle.
So if they're awake for longer
than they biologically should be, depending on their age,
then they are going into fight-or-flight mode.
And this is because cortisol
which as you know is the stress hormone,
that's really circling around in their body.
Their stress levels are really elevated,
they're way too over stimulated
and their body is going into like a fight-or-flight
adrenaline response.
So the last thing on your little one's mind is sleep,
even though that's the one thing they really need.
So what this means is your little one
is going to be screamy.
They're gonna be agitated.
They might be rubbing their eyes.
They'll be yawning lots.
If they're an older baby or a toddler, they can even go
into a realm of hyperactivity and they might seem to get
like a second wind is what we call it.
And they suddenly seem super awake, like too awake.
They might be zooming around.
They might be talking heaps, but especially in a toddler
and a young child, you can tell it's over tiredness
because any little thing will set them off.
So I know in my own children at that age,
and to an extent even still with my six year old,
one tiny little thing, like her toast having a rip in it
is going to cause a monumental meltdown.
And that is because she's in that fight-or-flight zone
which her instinct in that moment is to fight.
There's no reason, there's no logic.
Those older toddlers and younger children go into their
what we call the red brain,
or their really sort of primitive, not emotional brain.
And so they're just going to be fighting.
And your baby, they're going to fight sleep.
So they're gonna be cranky, grumpy, winging
and it will seem like nothing you can do
can calm them down and get them to sleep.
It's literally a nightmare.
This is over tiredness,
and it means your little one has just been awake
for too long between naps.
Their brain and their body cannot switch off.
They want to sleep,
it's what they actually desperately need
but they just can't do it.
So what do you do about over tiredness?
As I said, it's almost impossible
to easily settle them to sleep,
so you just have to pull out the big guns
and do whatever it takes to get them to sleep.
If you've got a little, little baby
that might be you just feed them, feed them, feed them
until they're sleep, put them in a front carrier,
put them in a stroller or a pram and take them for a walk,
put them in the car and go for a drive.
Just whatever it takes to get them to sleep.
If your little one was previously happily
just falling asleep independently, forget about the rules,
forget about that, just actively settle them to sleep,
do whatever it takes to get them to sleep
because sleep is the thing they need at that point.
If they are over tired,
you've asked what impact this is going to have
on their sleep and over tiredness.
And because of those stress hormones
in your little one's body,
unfortunately it does impact their sleep.
It means that they're not really entering
a deep restorative sleep,
they're constantly sort of in a light fight-or-flight
I'm asleep but I'm listening out for danger kind of mode.
So it can mean really short naps,
and it can mean very, very fractured nighttime sleep.
This can become a bit of a cycle,
we would call it an over tiredness cycle
because your little one is so tired,
but then sleeping poorly
because they're too tired to sleep well.
And so they get more tired
and you can see how that over time
you can get on a bit of a vicious cycle
of just massive over tiredness.
And by prevention, I mean making sure your little one
doesn't get overtired.
And if you've ever had an overtired baby or toddler,
then if you are like me
you'll wanna do everything you possibly can
to make sure that that doesn't happen.
So for your baby, I would be making sure doubly sure
that they're awake windows are really age appropriate.
And if you need help with that,
we've got all the answers for you
in our sleep programs inside our app.
We know it can be tricky
and there's a lot of conflicting information out there,
so we've done all the thinking for you.
Inside our app you'll get age specific
schedules, wake windows, ideal nap structure,
just to help you breeze through your day
and hopefully avoid over tiredness in the first place.
So now let's talk about under tiredness.
Because it's something that there's until recently,
it hasn't really been talked about that much.
We like to talk about it a lot
because it is just as frustrating for your little one
as over tiredness.
Let me explain why.
When your little one is under tired,
they simply haven't been awake for long enough
between their naps to be tired enough to nap well.
So if you think about it as if you yourself,
assuming that you are not a devastatingly over tired parent,
you yourself, say you had a nap at 5:00 PM in the evening.
Now I know definitely for myself, if I just lay down
and had a nap at that, and then a nap at that time of day,
I would not be able to go to sleep
at my normal bedtime of around 10,
because I'd had a sleep just beforehand.
And it sort of sabotages your nighttime sleep.
Then I would end up staying up really late,
and then I'm probably gonna be tired
and cranky the next day.
This is under tiredness
and it's no different for our little ones.
So in a young baby, what that looks like is
you are trying to settle your little one to sleep
after 45 minutes after an hour of being awake,
and they just haven't had enough awake time,
they're just not tired enough yet.
So they are going to resist going to sleep
because they're simply not tired.
It looks like over tiredness, that's the worst part.
They can be cranky, difficult to settle.
They might just be lying there staring at you
which I know is what my son did when he was a baby,
this beautiful little boy who would just lie there
and stare at me with this huge blue eyes,
and I'd get so frustrated.
And I was thinking, why aren't you going to sleep?
You've been awake for an hour.
You're gonna get over tired.
Hindsight of course is a wonderful thing.
And he was under tired,
and I should have just kept him up
and kept him stimulated for a bit longer
so that he could then be ready to take a really good sleep
and settle a lot easier.
This can definitely happen
in toddlers and young children too,
particularly if they're still having a daytime nap.
So if your little one is say three,
which is sort of on the outside edge
of needing a day sleep anyway,
and they're still napping for two hours across the day,
and you're trying to put them to bed
at seven o'clock at night
and they're mucking around for two hours
and they're getting out of bed 4,000 times
and asking you why ducks don't have arms,
then your little one is under tired
and you need to start cutting down on that nap
because their body clock is telling you
that they've just had too much sleep.
Also the timing of little ones naps
can have an impact on whether they're under tired too.
So if you're little one is having a nap
a bit too close to bedtime,
and that's sort of regardless of their age really,
and they're not settling well or easily at bedtime,
that wake window was too short
and they've already had too much sleep just before bedtime.
And so they're under tired in that situation too.
So how do you fix under tiredness?
Unlike over tiredness,
it's actually a relatively straightforward fix.
You simply need to extend your little ones awake times,
and or slightly adjust when their naps are happening.
And that can literally happen tomorrow.
If you think your little one is under tired
and they're not having enough awake time between naps,
just extend it out
and maybe look at how close to bedtime
their last nap of the day is or their only nap of the day,
if they're just having one nap
and maybe pull that forward a little bit.
Again, we have all of this completely mapped out for you
from birth to six years old inside our app
in our sleep program.
And because it can be kind of tricky to get it right.
And actually in young babies,
they're awake times need to be increasing week by week.
And that's a tricky thing to try and figure out on your own.
So have a look at our app and our sleep programs
and the link is below
and have a look at how we could help you
through over tiredness, under tiredness
and getting those awake times right for you a little one,
no matter what their age is.
So I hope that's given you a bit of guidance
around over tiredness and under tiredness,
which to be honest are probably the two biggest contributors
to poor napping and poor nighttime sleep.
For tons more information,
make sure you check out our website.
There are so many articles on there around these topics
and loads others, so have a look at that.
If you are interested,
have a look at all the videos on our YouTube channel,
there are millions of them,
And don't forget to follow us on all our socials
and also on YouTube.
Thank you very much for watching today,
and I'll talk to you again soon.