You Don’t Need To Take Pills. You Need Sleep!
I bought a Fitbit to track my sleep. The result shocked me and made my sleep deprivation even worse
In the early days of motherhood, out of the blue, I started to have high blood pressure and a racing pulse. I called the doctor and he said it may be hormones playing tricks on me. Although I still was in the postpartum period, I couldn’t believe this was the ‘real’ reason why my pulse was so high.
My baby was around three months old at this time, still in the stage where he was waking up every second hour and needed nursing back to sleep. We’d been practicing co-sleeping from day one and I didn’t feel any regrets about it.
Hang in there. It will pass.
My mom often came to visit us, and when she saw the dark circles underneath my eyes, she regularly asked me how the previous night had gone. Some nights were ok and I had the feeling I’d got a few hours of shut-eye. Some were really terrible and I had the feeling I hadn’t slept at all.
My mom tried to encourage me by saying things like: ‘Sadly, that’s part of mom’s life’, or ‘Hang in there. It will pass.’, or ‘Maybe tonight will be better.’
My pulse was 150 plus
But it didn’t get any better. I felt tired, sleepy and became moody. Within a few days, my health had become worse. Although I didn’t want to visit the doctor’s office because of Covid-19, one day I finally had to because, in the morning, my pulse was 150 plus. I felt devastated and as if I had lost control over my body. When my baby cried, my pulse went up, higher and higher. As I’d predicted, the doctor prescribed me an antihypertensive drug for my high blood pressure and pulse. In her opinion, it was all about the hormones.
Should I ‘just’ take this drug that would lower my blood pressure?
Back home, I felt completely disheartened. I had never needed to take prescription medicine and now I should ‘just’ take this drug that would lower my blood pressure?
Since my husband is a very sensitive man, he could tell that I was feeling uncomfortable, not only because of my view on taking drugs, but also because, in the morning, I had to wait two hours after taking the pill until I could breastfeed again so that I wouldn’t pass on the chemicals to my baby. That was a torture. Although I pumped some milk beforehand, he wanted more or would refuse to drink from the bottle.
The doctor had informed me that it could take up to a week until my body and blood pressure would react fully but that the drug would help me immediately and lower my blood pressure. It did get better but it was still higher than it had been before.
Finally I ‘had some data’
One morning, when my baby was in the middle of a major meltdown because he had to wait for his next milkshake, my husband asked whether I would like to have a sleep tracker in order to monitor my sleep and ‘have some data’ (you know men :)). I used to have a step tracker for our hikes but this didn’t have a feature for tracking sleep.
The next day, my new blue Fitbit arrived. My husband set it up for me and I downloaded the app. I slept with it on and, the next morning, we could see what the sleep had been like. When my mom arrived, she took the baby, and my husband and I analysed the data. Well, let’s say it hadn’t been a good night’s sleep at all. It was no surprise that I had been up every two hours! But what was truly disturbing was that I couldn’t find any of the crucial deep sleep, and sometimes the Fitbit categorized me as awake even though I thought I had been asleep.
Sleep is like a car wash for your brain cells
In general, each sleep cycle is 90 minutes and moves sequentially through each stage of sleep: wake, light sleep, deep sleep, Rapid Eye Movement (REM), and repeat.
In sum, I had slept around four hours, the Fitbit said. The sleep cycles had too many interruptions. Only if you make it through one cycle without interruption do you enter the REM-phase in order to re-energize your brain.
A recent research report from Boston University shows that we need sleep in order to keep our brains healthy.
‘Sleep physically washes toxins, including those that can lead to Alzheimer’s, from your brain.’
To put it simply:
from day to day, new garbage is piling up in our brain like dirty laundry. If you don’t sleep at all, or with interruptions, your brain becomes full to the brim with toxic garbage. This, the report points out, can ultimately lead to Alzheimer’s because we never get them washed away.
In my case, all the garbage was piling up
So sleep is like a car wash. If you manage to get your eyes shut for a decent length of time (I measure it by the moodiness or happiness of the next day), it washes away the dirty laundry from the day before.
But in my case… all the garbage was piling up. Therefore, a normal night in life as a new mother was about four hours’ sleep with a lot of interrupted sleep cycles that left me groggy if awoken.
It even got worse because, with the tracker on my wrist, I started tracking my sleep during the night as well as in the morning, checking how many hours I had slept so far. If it was three o’clock in the morning and I’d only gotten two hours, I was so frustrated I could not fall asleep again.
The restless nights of sleep are only one piece of all the unseen work moms do. It’s no wonder around 90% of mothers report getting less than eight hours of sleep each night — according to the State of Motherhood survey 2021.
‘Sleep divorce’ with my husband and my son
The solution? Yes, there was one. Within two weeks, I managed to get more sleep by doing a ‘sleep divorce’ with my husband and my son. In the evening, my husband took our little one and slept on the couch, our baby next to him in the Babybay.
- When he woke up, my husband took him in his arms and cradled him. If he didn’t fall asleep, he brought him to me. I nursed him back to sleep and then my husband took him away again.
- In addition, during the daytime, I started meditating and including little precious moments of self-care like taking a hot shower or listening to music.
Within two weeks, I felt much better. And I discontinued the pills, because it only helped artificially, addressing the symptoms, not the cause.
I’m sharing this story in order to let you become part of my personal experience. It doesn’t replace a visit at the doctor, of course. But since there is very little information on the connection between blood pressure in (young) moms and sleep, I thought it might be helpful for you.
To a good night’s sleep!