How can I teach my baby to self-soothe without crying?

https://youtu.be/r8ex-XlojNQ This week I want to look at one of the reasons that could be behind your little one’s night wakings, and that is sleep onset. I will explain what that is, what it means and how this could absolutely be the game-changing nugget of wisdom that resolves your little one’s sleep in a really, really big way. So make sure you read until the end so you fully understand what sleep onset is all about. First of all, what does it mean? What does sleep onset even mean? It means falling to sleep. It’s the way that sleep comes about. So what could that include? When we fall to sleep, our body goes through a certain sensation of closing down. We close our eyes, our breathing becomes slower, and there are all kinds of things that happen to us physiologically and biologically, but there are also external things that happen as well. So once we understand how we’re falling asleep at the sleep onset, it actually plays a really significant role in how we sustain our sleep throughout the night. Now, of course, we do wake up. It’s really important to know that nobody just sleeps the whole night without waking. But the wakings are so minimal, sometimes you don’t even know you’ve had one. They can be so partial, so subconscious, semiconscious, you just have this slight arousal and on back off into sleep. They are cycles of sleep. So you go down into deep sleep, you cycle up, you come through, lighter sleep, and then this is the point where you might just wake up. But, oh, no, we’re down into another sleep cycle. We go down, we’ll go into deep sleep, and we cycle through sleep like this all night long. But it’s when we are in that lighter sleep that we do actually slightly wake and go back off. We have to, our bodies need to do that to regulate and to keep us alive. And so babies and children are the same, but when they’re tiny, when they’re really little and they don’t actually know how to get to sleep and they haven’t really grasped the sleep onset yet, when they have those cycles that they’re coming into that light sleep and they’re just about to tip over into the next cycle. They find themselves awake and they find themselves and they don’t know how to get back to sleep, because they didn’t know how they got there in the first place. And they cry and they look for your help because they need to get back to sleep. So this is why the sleep onset is key because once they’re doing it, once their body is in that rhythm and it knows the body just does it and they fall to sleep, then the body and the mind will be trained. They will be efficient and effective at going back to sleep when we have those stirrings and wakings or partial wakings in the night. So hopefully you feel reassured that, “Oh, okay, waking up is normal,” and it is completely. But it’s the getting back to sleep that matters, and when your little one is doing that, they’re not going to cry out or look for you or look for help because they’re able to do it themselves. So you won’t know that they’ve had two, three, five wakings in the night because they’ve resettled themself when they’ve had those stirrings. And that is when it feels so lovely and like they are sleeping through the night, which is what we all aim for, don’t we, for as soon as possible. So the thing we need to look at is the sleep onset associations. Now, some people will talk about these as sleep crutches or sleep props, and they’re not all bad. To be honest, you can have healthy, positive sleep onset associations, as well as unhelpful destructive sleep onset associations, and it’s really important that we know the difference between the two. So a sleep onset association is something that puts your little one to sleep. It’s something, an association that helps them to go to sleep. But some things will help, whereas other things will do the job for them. For instance, if you rock your baby and you rock, rock, rock, rock, rock all the way to sleep, that’s done it for them. They haven’t