My Newborn Sleeps All Day and Is Awake All Night: What Can I Do?
There is a particular kind of disbelief that happens when your newborn has spent most of the afternoon sleeping peacefully through the doorbell, the washing machine and everyone talking around them — and then, at 2am, decides it is time to be fully awake.
Not necessarily crying. Sometimes just awake, eyes wide open, looking around as though something interesting might be about to happen. Perhaps they want to feed again. Perhaps they want to be held. Perhaps they seem completely baffled by your suggestion that the middle of the night might be a lovely time for everybody to sleep.
Meanwhile, you are sitting there wondering how someone who has been alive for twelve days has already managed to acquire jet lag.
If this is happening in your house, it is very normal. Your newborn hasn’t got their days and nights “wrong”. They simply don’t experience day and night in the organised way that you do yet.
Your newborn’s body clock is still developing
Babies don’t arrive in the world with a mature 24-hour sleep-wake rhythm.
The circadian system — the biological clock that eventually helps organise sleep, wakefulness and other processes around a roughly 24-hour day — actually begins developing before birth. But inside the womb, your baby isn’t responding to daylight, bedtime and the routines of family life in the way they eventually will. They are receiving rhythms and signals through their mother’s body.
Birth changes that. Suddenly there is daylight and darkness, feeding happens directly, and there are voices, movement, touch and interaction. Your baby’s developing circadian system gradually begins organising itself around this new environment.
That doesn’t happen overnight. During the first weeks, newborn sleep is spread across the whole 24-hour period. Over the following weeks and months, the distinction between daytime wakefulness and nighttime sleep gradually becomes stronger.
So I wouldn’t say that a baby’s circadian rhythm suddenly “switches on” at four months. It is more accurate to say that their body clock is developing throughout these early months and their sleep becomes progressively more organised around day and night.
Understanding that changes what we can reasonably expect from a newborn.
In the first few weeks, I don’t fight sleep
In the first four weeks or so, many newborns are extraordinarily sleepy. They fall asleep feeding, during a nappy change and sometimes almost immediately after you’ve managed to wake them.
I don’t expect a two-week-old baby to remain awake because a wake-window chart says they should. At this stage, I’m much more interested in whether the baby is feeding effectively, gaining weight appropriately, producing the wet and dirty nappies we expect and sleeping safely. I’m also interested in how the mother is recovering and how everybody in that house is coping.
Those things matter much more to me than establishing a perfect daytime routine with a two-week-old.
There is, however, an important difference between a newborn who falls asleep after a good feed and one who repeatedly falls asleep before managing to feed effectively.
Particularly with breastfeeding, I want to know whether the baby is actually sucking and transferring milk rather than spending a long time attached to the breast while mostly asleep. Sometimes a very sleepy baby needs a little help to remain engaged with a feed — perhaps changing their nappy, changing sides, gentle stimulation or breast compressions.
And if a baby is unusually sleepy or consistently difficult to wake for feeds, that’s something I would want assessed rather than treating it as a sleep problem.
Then they start waking up to the world
For many babies, somewhere around four weeks — sometimes earlier and sometimes later — parents begin to notice a change. Their eyes stay open longer. They look at you. They watch what is happening around them. Instead of moving almost continuously between feeding and sleeping, they begin giving you little periods of genuine alertness.
This is when I start working a little more deliberately with the difference between day and night.
I’m not keeping a tired baby awake simply because it’s 11am and somebody on Instagram says they need a particular wake window. I’m taking advantage of the alertness the baby is naturally beginning to give me.
During the day, I want the house to feel like daytime. I open the curtains and let natural light in. People talk and ordinary family life continues around the baby. When they are awake, we cuddle them, kiss them, talk to them and let them look at our faces and at the world around them.
There is good physiological reasoning behind this. Light is one of the important environmental signals involved in synchronising the developing circadian system. But parents don’t need to turn this into another project or buy anything special.
Mostly, you just need to let day be day.
Feeding is part of the picture too
Sleep and feeding aren’t separate little departments in a newborn. They affect each other constantly.
With the babies I care for, I pay close attention to feeding throughout the day. I generally don’t want a young baby regularly sleeping through opportunities to feed during daylight hours.
Depending on the baby’s age, weight, feeding method and individual circumstances, I will often make sure there is an opportunity to feed at least around every three hours during the day. That does not mean making a hungry baby wait three hours. Breastfed babies often feed considerably more frequently, and some newborns will have an individual feeding plan from their healthcare team.
What I’m looking at is the whole 24 hours. If a very sleepy baby is taking fewer effective feeds during the day and doing much more of their feeding overnight, that is useful information — not something the parents have done wrong.
As babies become more alert, I also try, as much as reasonably possible, to keep them actively engaged while they feed. With a breastfeeding baby particularly, I want effective sucking and milk transfer rather than a few sucks followed by twenty minutes asleep at the breast.
If they’re genuinely finished and sleepy, wonderful. Let them sleep.
But if they’ve had a good feed and they’re content and alert afterwards, that’s our opportunity to enjoy a little daytime interaction. They can look at you, hear your voice, cuddle, be kissed and simply begin discovering that there is a world outside the womb.
At night, I do almost the opposite
At night I deliberately make life less interesting. The lights are low, voices are softer and there is much less interaction. If white noise helps that particular baby settle, I may use it.
Of course we still respond to them. We feed them when they’re hungry, change them when necessary, wind them, cuddle them and give them all the comfort they need. But I don’t turn a 3am feed into social hour.
This distinction between day and night is also consistent with NHS sleep guidance, which recommends daylight, interaction and ordinary household noise during the day, followed by lower lights, quieter voices and less stimulation at night.
We’re not expecting a three-week-old to understand what nighttime means. We’re simply giving their developing biology the same signals, over and over again.
Why I often use a bath
A bath is one of my favourite ways of beginning to mark the transition into nighttime.
Not because there is something magical in bath water that makes babies sleep, and certainly not because every newborn medically needs a bath every evening. I like it because it can become a familiar, predictable change in the rhythm of the house.
The baby has a bath, gets into a fresh nappy and sleepsuit, has a feed and a cuddle, while the lights come down and the house becomes quieter. After a while, that sequence becomes familiar.
There is some evidence that consistent bedtime routines in young infants are associated with better consolidation of nighttime sleep, although research involving very young newborns is still developing. So I don’t describe the bath as a sleep technique.
For me, it is simply a cue that the busy part of the day is ending.
Please don’t keep your newborn awake all day
This is one of those ideas that sounds completely logical when you’ve slept for approximately eleven minutes since Tuesday.
If she sleeps less today, surely she’ll sleep tonight.
Unfortunately, newborns don’t work like that.
Keeping a tired young baby awake beyond what they can comfortably manage can leave them overtired and much harder to settle. We’re not trying to exhaust a baby into sleeping at night. We’re allowing them the sleep their developing brain and body need while gradually creating a clearer difference between the environment of daytime and nighttime.
Those are two very different things.
What if my baby is still wide awake at 2am?
Sometimes you can do everything beautifully and your newborn will still stare at you at 2am as though they have several things they’d like to discuss.
And sometimes they really are simply awake.
In the early weeks, babies can have periods of quiet alertness at any point across the 24 hours. Because their developing body clock isn’t yet strongly organising wakefulness into daytime and longer periods of sleep into nighttime, that surprisingly bright-eyed baby at 2am may be genuinely alert and interested in what is around them.
I see this often with newborns. The house is dark and quiet, you’ve finished the feed, and suddenly there are two enormous eyes looking back at you as though this is clearly the most appropriate moment to explore the world.
That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re hungry, uncomfortable, overtired or that you’ve done something wrong. Sometimes they’re simply awake.
What I wouldn’t do is interpret that alertness as an invitation to start the day.
Keep the environment calm and dark. Hold them, rock them if they enjoy it, and feed them again if they’re showing hunger cues. Give them the comfort they need, but keep nighttime wonderfully uninteresting.
Your job isn’t to make a newborn sleep. It’s to create the conditions that support sleep and respond to them while their brain and body gradually learn how to organise it.
Sometimes that distinction takes an enormous amount of pressure out of the room.
When will my baby know that nighttime is for sleeping?
There isn’t one magical developmental birthday.
Research suggests that during the earliest weeks sleep is distributed throughout day and night. Many babies begin showing more daytime alertness over the following weeks, and by around three months considerably more sleep tends to happen at night. Other parts of the circadian system continue maturing beyond that, and there is enormous variation between individual babies.
You may have three surprisingly lovely nights and think, We’ve cracked it, followed by a night during which your baby appears to have opened a small nightclub between midnight and 4am.
That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve gone backwards or done anything wrong.
Development isn’t beautifully linear.
And babies haven’t read the research.
You don’t need to optimise your newborn
The internet has made early parenthood feel increasingly like an enormous optimisation project. There is always another wake window, nap length, feeding interval, bedtime or sleep association to monitor.
Some of that information can be genuinely useful. But underneath all of it is a human being who has only just arrived in the world — and usually another human being caring for them who has just given birth, is recovering, is exhausted and is trying desperately to do everything correctly.
I don’t want that mother believing that her 17-day-old baby’s inability to distinguish Tuesday afternoon from Tuesday night is another thing she has failed to get right.
You haven’t failed.
In those earliest weeks, concentrate on feeding your baby, holding them, allowing them to sleep and making sure feeding, weight gain and safe sleep are going well. As they become more alert, you can begin gently showing them the difference between day and night through the ordinary rhythm of family life.
You aren’t forcing their body clock into existence. You’re giving them consistent cues while it develops.
You give them the cues. Their developing biology gradually begins to make sense of them.
Need some help with your newborn?
If you’re struggling to make sense of your baby’s sleep, feeding or settling, you don’t have to work it all out on your own.
Through my Remote Newborn Support, I work with families during those intense early weeks to understand what is happening with their individual baby. We can look together at feeding, sleep, settling, routines, day and night rhythms, and the small adjustments that can make everyday life with a newborn feel much more manageable.
This isn’t about putting your baby onto a generic schedule. It’s about having experienced, ongoing support from someone who can look at the whole picture with you, answer the questions that inevitably come up, and help you work out what is right for your baby and your family.
You can find out more about Remote Newborn Support , or get in touch if you’d like to talk about whether it would be helpful for you.
About Solange
Solange Martins Stanger is a maternity nurse and coach. Through SOL Coaching, she offers practical newborn support and thoughtful coaching for women navigating motherhood, change, and the question of what comes next. She works with clients online and provides in-person newborn support during private bookings in London and across Europe.