All mothers expect interrupted nights after their baby is born, but anxiety and overtiredness can lead to long-term sleep disorders

For five years after the birth of her son, Jane Alexander averaged three hours’ sleep a night. “It was torture,” she says. “I’d get to sleep at 4.30am and then be woken at 6am by the baby. My husband would get up and look after him while I tried to catch up on sleep, but I was on a knife edge and woke at the merest whimper.” Even long after the baby was sleeping through the night, the insomnia seemed impossible to shift. “If I was under any kind of stress, I didn’t sleep at all,” says Alexander, 49, a journalist. She returned to work a few weeks after the birth and the next half decade was a blur. “If I drove, I had to pinch and slap myself to keep alert. I was dizzy, confused and unable to string sensible sentences together. All I wanted was to hide away.”

Everyone knows that babies equal broken sleep, but postnatal insomnia — the inability to go back to sleep when the baby does, or to fall asleep in the first place — is a widespread problem for mothers. The latest research has shown that new mothers typically spend 20% more time awake during the first six weeks after childbirth than is the average. In addition, post­partum women wake more frequently and have less dream sleep than non-postpartum women. “I see this problem a huge amount,” says Jenny Smith, a senior NHS midwife and author of Your Body, Your Baby, Your Birth. “And if the lack of sleep is chronic, it can lead you into postnatal depression.”  Read on…