Little Nest Sleep, East Street, London (2025)

11/10/2021

I have a confession: I’ve been really struggling with sleep lately.

The irony of a sleep consultant with insomnia is not lost on me.

Ugh.

I’ll never forget the first time my son ever slept through the night, I stared at the ceiling for about 7 hours, anticipating his cries and checking the monitor obsessively.

Was he breathing? Would this ruin my milk supply? Is he SICK?! What did I do differently today, and how do I recreate it tomorrow?

WHY CAN’T I SLEEEEEP?!

Well I’m going through a similar phase now… my 2yo is currently in a pretty good patch of sleep. If he wakes it’s usually just a bad dream and all he needs is quick cuddle. Or he’ll ask for a sip of water. Nights are calm…

But here I am, unable to switch off. Intrusive thoughts. To-do lists cycling through my head.

So this week I’ll be focusing on maternal sleep and what we can do to help ourselves to feel more rested - even if we have a wakeful child.

I’ll share what helps me and what doesn’t as I work on improving my own 💤💤💤

Do you find it hard to switch off?

What’s helped you?

31/08/2021

Nope!

In the first 6 months daylight for naps is particularly important.

⏰ This is because we are born without body clocks. This sophisticated internal system is influenced primarily by sunlight.

☀️ We need newborn babies to learn that nighttime is dark (so they can start to produce evening sleepy hormones) and that daytime is bright, noisy and when we are (mostly) awake.

💤 Babies have much faster building sleep pressure than adults, so they need naps to stop them getting cranky and dysregulated… but it’s a really good thing for the body clock to have daytime sleep in a light room, or even better - outside in fresh air!

❓So why do sleep “experts” say naps need to happen in rooms so dark you can’t even see your own hand?

🪟 Well, darkness IS soothing for babies. It’s womblike and calming. So that can help with settling.

👁👁And some babies are super alert and get easily over-stimulated. Which means they might fall asleep more easily in the dark.

If this is your baby and FOMO is causing them to fight sleep, once they are older and have a more established body clock (usually over 6m but every baby develops at their own rate) you might find that dimming the lights helps them find their calm faster.

Another reason darkness is recommended is because it can become a sleep association. And we all have them. I love an eye mask and can’t drift off unless I’ve brushed my teeth. My husband listens to a podcast every night. We all develop rituals around sleep and babies do like familiarity.

The tricky thing with pitch black darkness being a sleep association though, is that it’s fine at home - but what happens if you are on holiday? Or stuck in traffic at naptime? Life gets in the way and the quest for darkness can be stressful!

And finally there are some people saying darkness helps with melatonin production for naps. This is the literal opposite of what we want. Melatonin should only ever be produced at nighttime. There is some evidence to suggest that being in darkness for 3+hrs can cause melatonin release which would seriously eff up your body clock and likely mess up overnight sleep. So ignore that myth please.

07/07/2021

Newborn classes tomorrow!

4-7m & 8-12m also now on sale

26/05/2021

Episode two of the podcast is now live!

13/05/2021

🎙 I’m so bloody excited to finally share this!

Listen now on , and , maybe even too once they approve it!

If you can subscribe, rate and comment I’ll be enormously grateful forever and ever. Even though I am so lucky to have a very supportive nest around me, I’m a one-woman team writing, editing and producing all this free content so am so thankful for every last bit of support I get.

🥰

16/04/2021

So, it turns out it’s REEEEALLY tough to write posts about reflux. There is just so much to include and generalising isn’t ideal.

What is not included in this post is information about osteopathy - but IG only lets you post 10 slides! More posts on this subject to come soon, don’t you worry...

Reflux is common. It’s not always the cause of bad sleep though. I believe it is over-medicated and very few people are supported to find the cause.

I am particularly passionate about working with unsettled, refluxy babies!

I also need to say there is a difference between GOR aka physiological reflux and GORD (gastro oesophageal reflux DISEASE). This post should not be a substitute for appropriate medical advice and you should speak to your doctor to rule out other medical conditions.

My own son vomited until he was 14m but for 90% of babies reflux has disappeared by the first birthday.

For us the cause was a tongue tie (seeing an IBCLC and osteopath helped) and over feeding (I thought I needed to tank him up with bottles at bedtime to sleep longer 🙈).

What about you?

24/03/2021

Why is teething, eczema and tummy ache worse at night?

Cortisol! Or rather, the absence of it...

In the mainstream baby $leep world this hormone has a bad reputation: too much of the “stress” hormone and our little ones are apparently over-tired, extra wakeful and super fussy. However it’s not really that simplistic... cortisol is our body’s in built alarm clock and helps us stay alert and take new information in.

Toxic stress is obviously bad, but we all need a healthy amount of this stress hormone to keep us awake and ready for what the day throws at us.

Cortisol is also mother nature’s natural ibruprofen!

And at night our body clocks stop cortisol production in order to flood our brains with sleepy melatonin instead.

Which means aches and itches are felt more intensely unfortunately.

20/03/2021

Tongue Ties! 😝👅
Big disclaimer here: it’s not ALWAYS a tongue tie and a division does not ALWAYS “fix” things.

In fact I’ll do a separate post about how to treat TTs so watch this space.

Have you had a little one with a TT? Was it spotted early or late?

Did you get it snipped?

15/03/2021

It’s so I’m going to be talking about WHERE your baby sleeps this week and sharing lots of great info from the .

Sadly many mainstream sleep businesses and baby books actually promote unsafe practices like putting your baby in their own room before they are 6m, using wedges or tilting cots for refluxy babies or telling breastfeeding mums they need to top up with a bottle of formula at bedtime. None of these things are necessary for better sleep.

(I’m not trying to shame formula-feeding families either - I gave my own baby both a bottle and b**b and am very open about how hard I found breastfeeding - but we need to spread awareness about these things and talk about risk factors, even if it’s a bit difficult to do so sometimes).

Sleeping lightly (compared to adults), waking frequently and feeding lots at night are evolutionary survival mechanisms and help to protect babies against SIDS or any other night-time threats (like getting eaten by a bear! 🐻)

We are so lucky to have all this research into safer sleep nowadays, let’s make sure we put it to good use!

02/03/2021

It looks idyllic doesn’t it. New mum feeding her 2-week old baby, a gorgeous park full of flowers and sunshine.

It’s all fake.

Feeding was going so, so badly. My son wouldn’t gain weight, was tiny, fed constantly, never slept, never seemed full. We were all constantly covered in milk and vomit.

I found the c section recovery brutal. I kept pushing myself, I’m so impatient. I got an infection. I had to keep upping the pain meds. I hallucinated from sleep deprivation. Too much to learn and not enough headspace to take it all in.

My heart was bursting out of my chest with love as my head told me I was massively failing. My gut said “you can’t do this.”

Every piece of advice was conflicting, every problem I googled 30 times a day.

The thing that shocked me the most was that I wasn’t That Person.

I saw myself as reasonably resilient, organised, diligent. I was a grown up and I thought I knew what was coming with parenthood. Instead I got hit for six and it was a good while before I came up for air.

This is why I became a sleep consultant. In a world that tells you not to soothe your baby at night and that independence must be taught young, I couldn’t find the support I needed.

I couldn’t Wait It Out, the cost of that approach was too high for me, I was struggling too much. But I couldn’t Cry It Out either.

And now I spend my time reassuring mums and dads: there is a halfway house between doing nothing and leaving a baby to cry. That those old fashioned Ferber techniques have had their day.

You’re not alone even if you feel like you are. There are always alternatives.

28/02/2021

It’s easy to think you’re the only one finding it THIS hard.

It’s not just other families on social media we subconsciously compare ourselves to, but our own relatives and strangers in the park.

We are pack animals after all, it’s normal to look around and wonder why others seem to have their s**t together (and why you don’t).

But the truth is, everyone is winging it.

The mum with clean hair, great outfit (not covered in baby sick) and a happily snoozing baby in the pram might have now walked 8 miles and is wondering why her baby won’t sleep in a cot. She might have just had a huge row with her partner. Or someone she loves is making her feel bad for how she’s chosen to feed her baby.

We can never know the whole picture, and although things can appear ideal from a certain angle, nobody is nailing it all the time.

Baby sleep, in particular, is one of the most up and down parts of parenthood. It is never linear, and always goes through different phases. “Sleeping through the night” is not a milestone, it’s something will come and go and begins at different ages for everyone.

Some babies sleep long stretches from just a few weeks and then wake very frequently as an older baby or toddler. Some are great at night but naps are a nightmare. It’s all normal, and it’s all ever-changing.

That’s why I focus on sharing information about what’s normal, what we can work on and what’s out of our control - so that we don’t waste our time chasing unattainable goals or set ourselves up for failure.

You might not be nailing it but you are doing amazingly!

26/02/2021

I keep seeing (expensive) sleep consultants saying that poor sleep is bad for babies.

Honestly, don’t exhausted parents have enough on their plates without sending an extra portion of guilt and worry their way?

I’m here to talk about alternatives rather than judge anyone for sleep training, but it really makes me angry when I see these dirty sales tactics.

Where is the evidence that shows a baby who wakes a lot or has shorter naps will grow up to be any less intelligent or strong? There isn’t any!

Babies have been waking and calling out to their parents for food, love and reassurance since the beginning of time. It is still the global norm today.

Infant sleep is never a linear process. We all have good phases and bad patches with our babies’ sleep. However when we look at all the data out there is certainly a pattern that emerges, and that is eventually, over time babies and toddlers sleep more at night and less in the day. Waking becomes less frequent. Nobody is out there sleep training 12 year olds. So to imply that children won’t ever sleep well unless taught, and that their development will be impacted by feeding, rocking or cuddling at night, is irresponsible and totally inaccurate.

I’m not saying you can’t do anything about sleep challenges and you need to wait it out. But please don’t worry you’re letting your baby down if it’s taking a minute to figure out how to improve sleep.

Little Nest Sleep

11/10/2021

31/08/2021

07/07/2021

26/05/2021

13/05/2021

16/04/2021

24/03/2021

20/03/2021

15/03/2021

02/03/2021

28/02/2021

26/02/2021

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