Your Overstimulated Baby
Imagine stimulation coming at you from all sides. Lights are bright and changing. Sounds are blaring - from the TV, the beeping microwave, multiple voices in your ear. One minute you feel the smooth skin of your mother’s cheek. The next your dad’s scratchy sweater. Then back to mom. This is too much. You’re overtired and overstimulated and you just can’t take it anymore. Time to start wailing.
This is what your newborn experiences when they are overstimulated.
And if you’re the parent of a small baby you have probably experienced the overwhelm and frustration that comes from trying to soothe an overstimulated baby. Once your baby reaches this point, it can be incredibly hard to get them to stop crying and calm down. And many parents unwittingly make the overstimulation worse in their attempts to soothe their baby. Yep, that’s right. If you don’t recognize the signs of overstimulation, it’s easy to contribute to it.
Any time your baby’s five senses are engaged - touch, sight, hearing, taste, or smell - their brain is stimulated. This is how babies develop and learn and a certain amount of stimulation is good. But too much stimulation is not. When the senses have become swamped or overwhelmed, fussiness, crankiness, and crying can occur.
And your newborn is incapable of calming themselves down.
They need their parents to help them with this. And this is where a new parent who is unfamiliar with overstimulation in babies can actually make the experience worse. Imagine your baby is already overstimulated as you pace back and forth in the kitchen with lights bearing down on your baby from all angles. Their sense of sight continues to be stimulated and the crying escalates. As you get frustrated, you pass your baby off to your partner in the hopes they can soothe the baby. Your baby goes from one set of arms to another, further stimulating their sense of touch. Your partner takes the baby into the living room, where the TV blares in the background, and now begins bouncing around and singing, in the hopes this will do the trick.
I think you get the picture. The stimulation is just continuing to pile on and pile on and your baby is getting fussier and fussier.
So what can you do to help your overstimulated baby? The best thing to do is remove the stimulation.
Retreat to a dark room - a walk-in closet or bathroom with no windows is ideal or you can draw the curtains and turn off all the lights
Hold your baby close - when babies feel secure and their startle reflex is dampened, they are calmer, so hold your baby to your body as firmly as you can or swaddle your baby
Skin-to-skin time - let your baby feel your skin next to their skin, skin-to-skin time releases oxytocin and reduces stress and crying (and it probably feels good for both of you)
Add in some movement and white noise - a consistent soothing movement like swaying or bouncing on an exercise ball will help to calm your baby, as will some loud, white noise
Do your best to stay calm during this time. Take a deep breath, drop your shoulders, roll your neck around, anything you can do to release some tension. And then just stay the course - hold your baby close in that dark room, bouncing and shushing, until they finally calm down. It might feel like eternity, but more likely it was just a rough few minutes.