Anxiety

[Wishing84]

Anyone else suffereing with this? Ds is a week old tomorrow and i get anxious when he sleeps therefore no sleep for me. Has anyone else experienced this? Hoping it will be a short term thing. Do I need to speak to my GP? X

 

[StanLove26]

Hi Wishing84. I went through something similar - struggled to sleep at first and checked on our son constantly. I did go and see my GP after I became anxious that our son was unwell (he was perfectly healthy) and they were brilliant. I was prescribed some medication, but I never took it in the end. I found that the anxiety eased after a few weeks. Hope it's the same for you. Xxx

 

[WildatHeart]

Anyone else suffereing with this? Ds is a week old tomorrow and i get anxious when he sleeps therefore no sleep for me. Has anyone else experienced this? Hoping it will be a short term thing. Do I need to speak to my GP? X

Hello,

I experiencing something similar although not sure entirely the same as you; when my dd got to about 10 weeks she started sleeping much better and I thought 'great, now I can get some decent sleep' but suddenly I started waking after about 1-2 hours and not being able to fall back to sleep for the rest of the night. It ended up in me not sleeping for three days straight and having a panic attack. I was completely wired and thinking some dark thoughts and ended up at the doctors-they gave me sleeping tablets which initially did not work, I took three in one night and still didn't sleep! So I then had to be prescribed Valium to calm me down and I was also referred for therapy. The therapist said it was acute stress from everything that had happened (traumatic labour, dd having operation, massive lifestyle change) and my body had basically been running on adrenaline and it was only when I finally started to relax when dd started sleeping that the stress came out causing the lack of sleep. Unfortunately for quite a few weeks I then got into a cycle of getting anxious about not sleeping in turn causing me not to sleep! But fingers crossed I am now much better and have slowly weaned myself off of the tablets.

I think mine was probably an extreme case though and I'm sure your's will just be a short term thing. It's a massive lifestyle change so it's normal to feel a bit anxious-I guess it's like you can't just go to bed and completely switch off anymore, you have a little human being that you are responsible for that you have to wake up for and that definitely takes some getting used to!

Not sure if you breast feed or not but what also helped me was my husband doing the night feeds for a while so I felt like I didn't have to worry about listening out for her and then gradually start doing it again.

If it does continue I would definitely speak to your gp though as lack of sleep can really affect you

Xx