One of the most critical things I have learned after having a baby is to what degree I had optimized rest in my life. Before my baby, I was living on the edge of being exhausted, working out ways to maximize waking hours without reaching the level of being completely drained. This is most likely your case, too. When you have a baby, that perfect optimization of time you have achieved simply does not work. Below, you will find how I found out and how my wife and I adjusted our resting schedule to meet our family’s new requirements.

For almost the entirety of the first three months of our baby’s life, which both my wife and I took off from work, we did not get continuous rest at night, which is pretty common. During those weeks, we felt tired and had to catch up with our sleeping time during the day. But at some point, right before our baby turned three months old, she started to sleep continuously during the night. She almost always woke up around five thirty in the morning, but my wife and I could sleep continuously for around seven to eight hours at night if we went to bed at the same time as our baby. As most first-time parents will tell you, this is a blessing beyond measure.

Those days when we got continuous sleep and were still off from work surprised me because even though we had more than enough sleeping hours, especially considering what we had just been through, I still felt somewhat tired. I did not feel exhausted, like the weeks before, but I did not feel rested. At that moment, I started trying to figure out what had changed. I was getting enough sleep most of the time, but that was no longer enough.

Then came the day we had to return to work, and everything became clearer. Work made us take a break from the full attention we were paying to our baby. Of course, it required full attention and mental work for eight hours each day, but it did take us out of the world we had gone into after the birth of our daughter, which was all about the baby. And that break shed light on the remaining piece of the puzzle, allowing us to fully understand what had changed. It was mainly two things. In short, resting is a cumulative process, and we suddenly no longer had time for ourselves. 

The first reason became clear when, even if for just one night, you did not get the full rest we started getting when our baby turned three months. It made us feel as though the world would end. This was a stark difference from the first nights of the baby, in which the feeling of despair was just not there yet. To describe it, it was as though we had a special reserve that had run dry.

The second reason became clear in those first weeks of going back to work when you could finally slam your laptop shut for the day, but you had to get up to hold your baby to soothe her, prepare her bottles, do her laundry, etc. That moment of happiness when you finish your day and you can take a moment just for you, was no longer there for us. We went from working to having to jump in immediately to being parents and caring for our daughter. It is as though you could not turn your mind off for a second.

It was then that we fully identified how tiring having a baby is. It is not only about getting enough sleep, which is essential and challenging in itself, but you need to get enough sleep continuously and also have time for yourself. That is the full extent of the challenge, being able to rest in this broader sense of the term.

The practical implication from what we learned and that I described above was that we needed to internalize that the very optimized way in which we handled our time to balance everything we wanted to do with rest was no longer helpful for our new family of three. Before having our baby, we knew our limits very well, knowing exactly how much rest we needed and being able to sacrifice some of it as a trade-off to achieve something. In that trade-off analysis, we knew precisely how tired we would be for every resting opportunity we missed and how to manage them in relation to our responsibilities, like work.

To illustrate the point, imagine that it’s a Sunday, and you made plans with your family to watch a movie in the evening. You leave the movie theater, and suddenly, one in the group suggests you all go to dinner. The movie was relatively early, say at seven, so it is only around nine. You make a quick calculation, probably considering things like what meetings you have in the next few days, how intense or not the week will be at work, and how many things other than work you have to do. You add that all up, see how much energy that will require, and decide whether you can afford to go to bed around midnight.

Well, surprise! A baby completely upends those calculations. And because nobody had told us that, we found out the hard way. Using that old framework for our trade-off analysis, we came home a couple of times really needing those hours of sleep, only to have to spend them soothing a baby that would not fall asleep no matter what we did. With that experience, we had to devise a new system to allot our time to the things we wanted to do and the rest we needed.

The new system is quite simple. It completely changes the approach we originally had. Instead of deciding how much we would rest according to what we wanted to do (i.e., the minimum amount of rest needed to maximize the number of things we can do), we now decide what we do according to a fixed resting schedule. In other words, we have set aside time that we will use to rest no matter what, and that leaves us with a fixed amount of free time for other things. And we use rest here in the broad sense we used it above, so it is not only sleeping time but also some personal time for my wife and me. This approach presented two questions that we had to answer. The first is, how much time do you need to rest? And second, how do you decide how to invest the remaining free time allotted to other things?

The first question is relatively easy. Since you do not know when the baby will prevent you from resting, the more time you allot to rest, the better. That way, you account for the time you may spend tending to her unforeseen needs, like soothing her at two in the morning. Remember that whatever time you do not spend tending to your baby’s unforeseen needs, you will spend it on yourself, either catching up with sleep or doing things you like. When we realized this, the anxiety of thinking we would miss out on too many things was reduced considerably, and we embraced our resting time. In this crazy, fast-paced world, who doesn’t need some time for themselves?

For example, our schedule for the first eight months of our baby has been to have an entire day of the weekend wholly dedicated to rest. We decide as we go whether it will be Saturday or Sunday in any given week, but the whole day is a constant. Of course, some weeks, it has felt like we could have done other things or said yes to a plan we said we could not make it to. But that is after the fact, meaning that when we said no to the plan, we did not know whether we would need that time to rest. Trying to soothe a baby at two o’clock in the morning on a Monday after an active weekend is just too horrible, so we are determined to do everything we can to not go through that again.

The second question is more problematic because it materializes the sacrifice the new system requires. Which of the things you want to do do you say no to? It was a little hard for us to decide, so we left it as much as possible to chance. A good criterion is saying yes to things as they come up. For example, if my wife’s friends organized a dinner, we would say yes to that and then no to whatever plan came up after, even if it was something we really wanted to do. After a while, when you have said no to several plans, you start realizing what you have had to miss out on, and you become more proactive in making the plans you missed happen again.

Having a baby is more like a marathon than a sprint, so tiredness compounds and can make things get out of control. Hopefully, this will work as a cautionary tale, and you will go through the transition better than we did, avoiding those harrowing times when you realize you will have to power through several days until you can rest again. It is not easy; it is a sacrifice, but it will be worth it.