This chimes with research on how the way we view our sleep can change our own energy levels. Less rigid expectations of sleep might not just help us relax and unwind at night but also help us feel less fatigued during the day, no matter how we slept the night before.
Since mothers who breast sleep are breastfeeding rather than using formula or pumping, their sleep quality may also feel improved due to the hormone prolactin, which spikes during breastfeeding and can make mothers sleepier. One study of 133 mothers found that breastfeeding parents got around 40-45 minutes more sleep than parents who used formula, for example, while another study on 120 mothers found that mothers who breastfed exclusively got about 30 minutes more sleep per night at one month postpartum.
Samson himself swears by this. He and his wife spent their daughter’s first three months struggling to get the sleep they needed until trying the same breastsleeping he’d witnessed with the Hadza, following public health guidelines about how to bedshare as safely as possible. “Our entire life changed,” Samson says. “She didn’t have to sit up, she didn’t have to wake up, she was just aware – oh, she’s feeding now – and then boom, back to sleep. And it changed everything.”
Not all studies have found that sleeping close to one’s infant improves a parent’s sleep. One study that followed 139 families across the first year of infancy, for example, found that mothers who shared a room or bed with their infant had more disrupted sleep than those who did not. Their babies, however, did not wake more. (Of course, it is hard to tease out cause and effect: it could be that more vigilant or anxious mothers, who also might wake more often, were more likely to want to keep their babies close during sleep rather than separate.)
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