Split Nights
What are split nights?
Split nights are a special kind of night waking where the child is up only once a night! Hooray!
No. Not hooray. These wakings are long and no amount of rocking, feeding, shushing, patting, or any type of sleep training will get them to go back to sleep. And to make it even more fun, they usually happen EVERY night or at least every 2-3 nights until you modify the situation. Ladies and gentlemen, I can tell you from actual experience with my little princess, this is completely exhausting.
Part 2 of Joey’s sleep story is coming soon. If you missed part 1 about pacifiers, here it is. Part 2 will be all about her split nights. So, what exactly is a split night?
What happens during a split night?
With split nights, your babe will wake up usually around the same time each night, and usually after a pretty long chunk of sleep - likely the longest chunk of the night. They’ll usually be in a pretty good and playful mood and show little to no signs of actually being tired. This is because they likely aren’t tired enough. They may try to go back to sleep using their usual soothing method. You may see them sucking their thumb or pacifier, rolling around, cuddling with their lovey or stuffed animal, or just trying to find a new position, but they still won’t go back to sleep.
What are the most common causes of split nights?
Short naps and early bedtime: If you know anything about me, you’ll know early bedtime is my actual favorite thing in the entire world. Any time we have an off day, early bedtime is my go to. However, you can get into a cycle of habitually using an early bedtime with short naps, and baby is just spending too much time in the crib to be asleep the whole time. This will either lead to an early wake up (one of the biggest issues I had with Landen) or a split night.
Undertiredness: Similar to short naps and early bedtime, this is a result of the child spending too much time in their crib. They just truly and legitimately are not tired enough to sleep the hours they are expected to sleep. This has been one of my biggest issues with Joey.
Disrupted from a regression: It is normal to have split nights during a regression. Maybe baby is learning to crawl and practicing this skill, or maybe they’re going through a major cognitive leap. However, when this persists for more than a few nights or a week, something else is likely going on.
Overtiredness: Overtiredness leads to an increase in cortisol making a child more likely to wake up overnight and making it difficult to fall back asleep. This can cause split nights, although when a child is overtired you can usually help them back to sleep with a feed/rock/soothing method, and they often do not wake up happy and calm, which is why overtiredness is not usually the culprit.
Anxiety: As we all know, when you’re nervous about something it’s hard to sleep! Toddlers can have bedtime fears that make sleep more difficult as well, leading to bedtime refusal, early wake ups, and of course split nights.
What can you do about it?
If you suspect the split nights are a result of either a short nap/early bedtime cycle or undertiredness, make sure you are waking your child at the same time every day regardless of whether or not they experienced a split night. This is HARD, but if your child’s normal wake up time is 7 and they are up from 3-6, you will still want to wake them at 7. This will begin to reset their circadian rhythm and ensure that they aren’t spending too much time in the crib. This may then redistribute some nap times, which will also help reset circadian rhythm.
If you suspect that the split night is due to a regression, ride it out and try not to introduce any new habits or sleep props that you don’t want to become part of your routine. Stay firm in your boundaries and use your preferred sleep training method to let them know that you’re there for them, but they still know how to sleep! Once they get through whatever cognitive or motor milestone they’re working on, things should naturally go back to normal.
Overtiredness is a little bit of a different type of split night than the other two, and it is the most uncommon cause of split nights. It’s easy to tell if your child is overtired because unlike undertired they are often unhappy, which is not usually the case with a true split night. You can also usually get your baby back to sleep when they are overtired, although it may require some sleep props that you may not want to introduce. If you really are having split nights due to overtiredness, you’ll have to tweak the schedule to get some more sleep in somewhere in the day. Early bedtime is always my first suggestion, and if you need to you can help your baby stretch the naps.
Anxiety
If you’ve been here a while, you’ll know that I talk about how anxiety affects sleep a lot because I have a kid with pretty severe general anxiety. I learned about split nights in my Sleep Consultant Certification Course, and the four above causes are all research-backed and evidence based causes for split nights. Anxiety was not mentioned so here’s your disclaimer: this is purely anecdotal.
Joey was my split night kid. Yes, Landen is my anxious kid, but he has never had split nights. His anxiety comes out before bedtime or early morning, and then all day in between. Joey does not have a ton of anxiety day to day (although her separation anxiety was and sometimes still is next level which I honestly didn’t even realize may be connected until I literally just typed this RIGHT NOW so yes this blog is therapy for me), but she has always had some night time anxieties. She’s always been afraid of the dark, way before a normal age for kids to become afraid of the dark, and she’s always been more likely to try to coax us into laying with her until she falls asleep. I’ve never been coaxed, Eric has.
I am very convinced that Joey’s split nights were mostly anxiety related. They then became an undertired situation because I did not wake her up in the morning when I should have, but anxiety was definitely a huge factor. I’m not going to go too much into detail on this because I have an 8 million page blog in progress all about Joey’s split nights (actively trying to edit it down), so I’ll leave it at this. All of the evidence based stuff I talked about above, and all of the information on all of the sleep blogs is BASED ON THE AVERAGE TYPICAL KID. Your kid is not average and your kid is not a robot. There’s like one kid in the world who is at the exact average mark (this isn’t actually how it works, this is median, but we can do a math lesson another time). Every other kid is a little above or below average, or a lot above or below average, in every aspect of life.
My child had split nights and for the most part, none of those evidence based reasons totally fit. There was something else going on. There is almost always something else going on. So yes, if your kid has split nights definitely assess the situation from an evidence based standpoint and determine if you think they might need some schedule tweaks or if there’s a regression going on. It is likely that this will fix it! If it doesn’t, that’s what I’m here for. Feel free to reach out for more support if you’re having split nights and you don’t know why!