Why does my newborn breathe fast and then slow down?

Why does she sometimes breathe so fast

Nobody had warned us that newborn breathing looks wrong. It speeds up, slows down, occasionally pauses for a few seconds, then picks up again as if nothing happened.

Watching it for the first time, in the dark, having just brought home a baby born at 33 weeks, is not a relaxing experience.

How to actually count it

We were counting while she was crying, or feeding, or wriggling — which measures crying, feeding and wriggling.

Do it when she's calm, ideally asleep. And count a full minute rather than fifteen seconds times four, because the rate genuinely isn't steady enough for that to work.

Newborns breathe much faster than adults, often around 30 to 60 breaths a minute while calm. Forty may sound slow, but it is still one breath every second and a half. Their breathing can also speed up and slow down, especially if they were born early, with short pauses that settle again.

Effort matters more than speed

This was the shift that made us calmer, because it's what someone examining her is actually looking at.

Is the chest pulling in under the ribs or at the base of the throat with each breath? Are the nostrils flaring wide? Is she grunting on every single breath out, rather than occasionally? What colour is she, especially around the lips? And is she still feeding — because a baby working hard to breathe stops managing that first.

Fast but easy, in a pink, feeding, settled baby, is a very different picture from slower but visibly laboured.

Film it

Twenty seconds on a phone answers questions that five minutes of description can't, and it means you aren't relying on your own memory of something that frightened you.

The things that don't wait: blue or grey colour, especially around the lips. A pause that comes with a colour change or with her going floppy. Real effort with every breath. A baby who's stopped feeding or is hard to wake.