My wife and I were happy to welcome our second child into the world last week (*applause*).
This has, of course, given me reason to pause and reflect on life, as major events often do. I’ve spent a lot of time comparing the difficulty of this pregnancy and delivery with that of our older child, of how the expectations you have for yourself and your children change over time, and how simultaneously delightful and tiring it all is.
So, I put together this infographic based on data from the National Sleep Foundation. It shows to scale approximately how much sleep people should get according to their age. A healthy adult ought to get between 7 and 9 hours of sleep per night. A newborn, by contrast, clocks in at a whopping 12-18 hours.
Sadly, these 18 hours don’t come in a solid chunk, but are meted out between ten minutes of lung-belting banshee songs where they demand that all their corporeal needs are met at once.
What is fascinating (and troubling) to me about these numbers is that they also seem to be inversely proportional. The more *frequently* your newborn sleeps the less you end up sleeping overall.
Such is life.
Tiring as it may be, it’s still worth it.
About Joshua Rigsby
Joshua Rigsby runs an independent bookstore in a small Georgia town. His writing has been featured on Thrillist, Atlas Obscura, Southern California Public Radio, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Atlantic.
