It’s extremely important for YOU to be comfortable with whatever sleep training method you use. You want to be comfortable executing your sleep plan through until the end.  Why?  Because consistency is crucial to get your baby sleep well!

If something makes you feel uncomfortable, there’s a good chance your sleep plan won’t work.  Here’s why:

1) Your emotional well-being is an extremely important aspect of your sleep plan.  If you are feeling nervous, anxious and uncomfortable with your plan, your baby might feed off of this negative energy.  This can cause your baby to cry and protest more, making it far more challenging to stick to your plan.  And at the same time, confidence is contagious!  If you are calm, cool, and collected, your baby will feed off of this positive energy.

2) If you are comfortable with the approach you’re taking, there’s a much higher chance you’ll follow through to the end.  Look, implementing a sleep plan typically isn’t enjoyable.  However, it’s one thing to be dreading the process but eager to make changes.  And it’s another thing to have this awful feeling in the pit of your stomach that what you’re doing is wrong.  If your plan isn’t sitting well with you, take a different approach.  Otherwise, there’s a good chance you’ll end up throwing in the towel halfway through the process.  Cry-it-out isn’t the only option here!

If you’ve been encouraged to let your baby cry-it-out, but your gut is telling you not to do it, listen to yourself!  Look, if you are ready to make changes and are determined to fix your child’s sleep problem, then you’ll definitely want to explore a more gentle sleep training approach.   However, if you’re feeling pressure from people around you to sleep train when this is something you don’t want to be doing, tune them out 🙂  You don’t HAVE to sleep train if you don’t want to!  Sleep training is only for families who WANT to make changes to their current situation.  If your current setup is working for you, there’s no need to change a thing 🙂