Gradually bringing your baby’s bedtime closer to your own helps with excessive night waking

Here we discuss the evening pressure point on your baby's body clock. To work with your baby's evening pressure point, you gradually make your baby's bedtime later, little bit by little bit, night after night, over a one or two week period.

(There are two other pressure points you can use to reset your baby's body clock when she is waking excessively in the night, which are discussed here.)

If you're doing a reset, and you've decided to work with the evening pressure point, try to make your baby's bedtime ten or 15 minutes later each night. This can be very hard work (which is one reason why we don't want to be trying to do a reset too regularly)!

You'll need to use your two baby sleep superpowers, frequent flexible feeds and rich sensory motor nourishment, to keep your little one as dialled down as possible while his sleep pressure rises. You might find it useful to plan how you're going to provide rich and changing sensory motor nourishment in a way that is as easy and enjoyable as possible in the evenings, since you're likely to be exhausted by this time of day, and a breastfeed or feed might send the little one to sleep but doesn't help the reset.

Inside the home in the evening, two useful sources of rich sensory nourishment are

• Loud and hilarious physical play with a parent or sibling, often on the floor

• Very long and splashy baths with a parent.

If it is at all possible, getting out of the home into an interesting sensory environment in the evenings can make the reset easier, because the interiors of our homes are low sensory environments for babies. Depending on what's sensible in your locality or climate, you might

• Visit the local markets

• Visit relatives or friends

• Walk in the evening air.

Nudging bedtime that little bit later is not being unkind to your baby in any way. You'll know when it's time for the Big Sleep (which is usually helped along by a feed, depending on how you're doing it and your little person's age).

Our aim is to have the sleep pressure just as high as you possibly can before you decide that now it's definitely time for your baby to go to sleep.