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Interrupted Sleep Plagues New Mothers
- June 6, 2025
- Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter
FRIDAY, June 6, 2025 (HealthDay News) — It’s not news that new mothers lose a lot of sleep in the weeks after giving birth.
But a new study underscores just how much of a dent a new baby puts into a woman’s sleep patterns.
In particular, a new mom’s ability to get uninterrupted sleep suffers for weeks after their new baby’s arrival, researchers will report at the upcoming meeting of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM).
Even after a couple of months, moms still are unable to manage more than four-hour stretches of uninterrupted sleep, the study showed.
These results explain why new mothers continue to feel exhausted months after delivery, even after they’re back to getting the recommended seven or more total hours of sleep per night, researchers said.
“The significant loss of uninterrupted sleep in the postpartum period was the most dramatic finding,” said lead researcher Teresa Lillis, an adjunct professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.
“These results fundamentally transform our understanding of postpartum sleep,” she added in a news release. “It’s not the lack of sleep, but rather, the lack of uninterrupted sleep that is the largest challenge for new mothers.”
New mothers average a little more than four hours’ total sleep the first week after giving birth, compared to nearly they eight hours they got prior to pregnancy.
But their longest stretch of uninterrupted sleep plummets to just over two hours during that first week, compared with about five and a half hours before pregnancy, researchers said.
“While mothers generally returned to their pre-pregnancy total nightly sleep duration after the first postpartum week, the structure of their sleep remained profoundly altered,” Lillis said.
For the study, researchers tracked the sleep of 41 first-time mothers ages 26 to 43. The moms wore Fitbit sleep trackers for a full year before childbirth and through their first year of motherhood.
Nearly a third (32%) went more than 24 hours without sleep at some point during the first week with their new baby, the study found.
Data show that sleep gradually improves for new moms, rising to more than six hours on average in weeks two through seven and more than seven hours in weeks eight through 12.
However, new moms continued to suffer from interrupted sleep.
Their longest stretch of uninterrupted sleep was about three hours in weeks two through seven and four hours in weeks eight through 13.
“Our results validate the lived experience of new mothers’ exhaustion and provide a new target for sleep-related interventions,” Lillis said.
“Rather than simply encouraging mothers to ‘nap when the baby naps,’ our findings show that mothers would most benefit from strategies that protect opportunities for uninterrupted sleep,” she said.
Lillis is scheduled to present these findings on Monday at the AASM meeting in Seattle.
Findings presented at medical meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.
More information
Johns Hopkins Medicine has more on quality rest for new parents.
SOURCE: American Academy of Sleep Medicine, news release, May 30, 2025
