Having taken a career break from legal recruitment to have her first child at 28, Dharmana was the first among her friends to have a baby.

Despite being an organised person and reading plenty of baby books, nothing prepared her for this experience.

Her firstborn, Myla, suffered from colic (prolonged and intense periods of crying) and reflux, which are common issues with newborns. These made the process more challenging.

“After every feed we had to spend a portion of the time holding her up. It’s all a blur,” Dharmana says.

Myla woke up every two hours. Her husband was supportive and did the 3am shift. But Dharmana couldn’t sleep even as he paced around the living room with Myla to try to settle her.

She had been sleeping poorly for weeks. She wasn’t coping and felt very low. At her six-week paediatric appointment, she completed a questionnaire for postnatal depression.

Although she didn’t meet the criteria, she wasn’t far off.

“There wasn’t much support because I wasn’t officially diagnosed. I felt a big shift in my overall happiness and my anxiety levels were really high. I questioned everything I was doing.

“It was a combination of fatigue and wanting to make sure I was doing things right,” Dharmana says.

When Myla was four months old, her colic eased, but her sleep was still very broken.

Dharmana knew she needed to make sense of the situation and hired a sleep consultant. That one-hour consultation at her home marked a shift in her mindset.

“She reassured me, and I relaxed a little; it helped with the anxiety. That was a turning point for me, and I went on my own journey and did my own research,” says Dharmana.

That led her to undertake online certification from the International Parenting and Health Institute as a maternity and child sleep consultant. She started the course when Myla was nine months old, and by the time she completed it at the end of 2018, her son Theo had been born.

Newborns are driven by the need to sleep and feed. After four months, they start to develop more mature sleep formation cycles, Dharmana says. The time it takes to settle a baby back to sleep varies. Newborns need to be settled to sleep regularly.

“At the time, I didn’t understand that. My baby would have been overtired at times. When a baby is overtired, they build up more of the stress hormone cortisol which triggers a more awake feeling,” Dharmana says.

Her best advice to mothers of newborns is to try to relax into the first few months.

Challenges can be expected, but if they stretch beyond five months, it is time to pay attention to healthy sleeping habits and perhaps consider the help of a professional.

There’s a lot of information online, which can be overwhelming. While sample sleep schedules may be useful for some parents as a guideline they can be confusing for others, as babies don’t all meet the average sleep needs.

A sleep consultant will analyse a baby’s sleep logs, see how much sleep they are getting in a 24-hour period, and map out an optimal schedule for the baby, balancing naps in the day with nighttime feeds.

There are many factors that come into play – how long the baby takes to fall asleep, how much activity the baby is getting, its self-soothing, the environment – so sleep schedules will be tailored to each child.

Additionally, putting your child to bed at the same time each day, aiming for a 7pm bedtime and getting up at 6.30am, can help establish a routine. If your child wakes in the night, it’s important to resettle them in a dark room.

It’s very helpful to get plenty of natural light during the day, even if you’ve had a bad night’s sleep with lots of interruptions.

“Go outside and take a stroll. Morning daylight helps to boost the circadian rhythm and is a mood boost for everyone,” she says.

As you might expect of a sleep consultant, Dharmana is passionate about sleep.

“My husband and I are early birds – early to bed, early to rise. We sleep no later than 10pm and I wake up about 6.30am. We love our sleep,” she says.