Why can't I sleep when someone else has the baby?

The night we were meant to sleep

We had night cover. The baby was being looked after. The house was quiet.

There is something particularly demoralising about that, because the thing you have been desperate for has been handed to you and you can't use it. It's easy to read it as ingratitude, or as evidence that you're broken in some way.

Why the mind stays switched on

You have spent months being woken repeatedly, and your body has sensibly adapted by never going all the way down. That adaptation was useful. It doesn't know the arrangement has changed.

It takes longer to unlearn than it took to learn, and it unlearns over weeks of consistent opportunity rather than in the first night someone covers for you. Which means the first few off-duty nights being wasted is the normal shape of this, not a sign it isn't going to work.

Removing the thing to listen to. On a night someone else was covering, the monitor went out of the room entirely. Earplugs as well — which felt like an abdication and was the single biggest change either of us made.

Sleeping somewhere else in the house, where the usual sounds did not reach, worked better than staying in the room where we normally got woken. Even sleeping on the living-room sofa helped. The point was to be properly out of earshot, not only out of arm's reach.

What helped us switch off

"This is my one chance, I have to sleep now." It is the least restful sentence in the language and it guarantees the outcome it fears.

What helped was lowering the stakes out loud. The night is already partly lost. Resting without sleeping is still worth something.