What are Split Nights?
What is a “split night” and what do you do about them? I’m here to answer all of your questions about one of the most brutal baby sleep habits.
First, what is a “split night”, anyway?
A split night is when your baby wakes in the middle of the night and stays awake, ready to play, having a hard time resettling, for a long time. A true split night is more than a 1-off rough night, it’s a pattern if a few consecutive nights of this happening, or if it’s happening multiple times per week.
Split nights are typically due to unbalanced daytime sleep. Usually it’s that the nap totals for the day are too much for your baby and/ or their bedtime is too early. This causes too-low sleep pressure and the circadian rhythm being thrown off. Imagine they’ve had 3 or 4 hours of nap time during the day. Then they go to bed at 7:00pm. This means that by about 1:00am, your child has already banked around 10 hours of sleep! Considering that some infants only need around 11 or 12 hours of sleep total per 24 hour cycle, it’s no wonder they’re waking up refreshed and ready to party!
What do you do about a split night?
Early bedtimes are great in theory, but if you’re compensating for poor naps by using an early bedtime for several nights in a row and you’re expecting the overnight to be over 12 hours, this can lead to a split night. The concept of an early bedtime is also a popular sleep training trope, and many parents are terrified of their baby becoming overly tired. They try and get their babies lots of long naps during the day and an early bedtime, in hopes that they will sleep well overnight. This can actually do more harm than good.
So where do you start to fix this pattern of split nights? The night needs to condense before it can extend again. This requires patience and can take several days to a couple of weeks as you are resetting the circadian rhythm.
To start:
Shift bedtime later by 15 min per night and wake baby 15 min earlier in the morning.
To compensate for the earlier morning and later bedtime, you may need to add a nap or extend one of your baby’s naps through babywearing, contact, or motion. You might try stretching the middle wake window of the day, so that the wake time before bed isn’t terribly long leading to overtiredness. Tips to extending wake time include time outside, a mid-day bath, fun snacks, or a new/ novel sensory experience.
Continue consolidating nights for up to 5-7 days or until the split night stops.
If this doesn’t work after a few days, you’ll also want to evaluate your nap schedule and consider if it’s too much sleep for your baby. Even once your nights are consolidated and bed/ wake time are consistent, your baby might be getting too much daytime sleep, which can throw off their homeostatic sleep pressure.
Keep in mind that for total sleep per 24 hours, infants from 4-11 months require an average of 12-15 hours. This means that if you’re expecting 10-12 hours overnight, you might want to cap your baby’s daytime sleep at about 1-3 hours maximum. For most infants under 1 year, that is split between 2 or 3 naps. As infants approach one year and enter toddlerhood, they might drop down to just one nap, which can sometimes help with issues like split nights, because they have more time to build sleep pressure before bedtime.
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