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As a sleep-deprived first time mom, I was willing to try anything to get a few more hours of rest. Expensive sleep courses? Sign me up. Wake windows? You know I followed them. Monitoring sleepy cues like a spy? Just call me James Bond. But I still couldn’t figure out why my baby was wide awake for hours in the middle of the night.
Determined to fix this, I embarked on a mini research project. Nearly all of the recommendations for handling middle of the night wakings included keeping the room dark and quiet to avoid waking your baby up more. I did my best, but I needed some form of light to change his diaper or nurse him without crashing into furniture.
Much to my delight, the online sleep experts had a solution: Red light, which is apparently less jarring to your eyes and internal clock than white lights. I wasn’t fully sold on the science of this, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to try.
I didn’t want to spend $50-plus on an actual red or color-changing light before knowing it would work, so I swapped my actual nursery light bulb for a $7 red light bulb I found on Amazon. My personal science experiment had begun – would this cancel our unplanned and undesirable middle of the night parties?
The first time my baby woke up overnight, I headed in and turned on the red light, eager to see if it would work. There was an instant difference. Usually my baby would be blinking from the bright light, and I too would feel jolted out of my slumber. The red light was warm and comforting, and I could feel both of us staying more calm. After we settled in the rocking chair, my baby drifted back to sleep fairly quickly. Better yet, I was able to fall right back to sleep after putting him back in his crib.
From that night on, our red light bulb stayed and our overnights got so much better. Of course, there were still some times when my baby would decide to party at 2 a.m., but I do feel like the red light dramatically decreased the frequency of these long wakes. Perhaps most important was how this red light kept me in a calm and peaceful state while I comforted my baby.
Now my kids are two and four, and we still utilize the red light. I never actually bought an official red light; rather I moved the bulb to my second child’s room when she was a baby. Even though they both sleep through the night (most nights), I turn on the red light to read books. The cozy glow has become a staple in our bedtime routine and I have no plans to ditch it anytime soon.
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