My Own Anxious First Year of Motherhood
People often ask what made me want to become a sleep consultant. The honest answer isn't "I've always loved babies" or "I'm naturally an early riser." It's that I lived through the exact exhaustion and fear I now help other mums through, twice, with two high risk pregnancies of my own.
Before either of my children arrived
Both my pregnancies came with the kind of anxiety that doesn't really have an off switch. Extra scans. Careful monitoring. That particular quiet dread that sits with you through every appointment, waiting to be told everything is still okay. I remember bracing for bad news so often that I almost forgot what it felt like not to. What I wasn't prepared for was that becoming a mother didn't switch that anxiety off. If anything, it gave it somewhere new to live.
The first year, honestly
Once my babies were here, safe, healthy, the fear didn't pack up and leave. It just found new things to attach itself to. Was that breathing pattern normal? Was I doing the sleep environment right? Was I somehow getting it wrong in ways I couldn't see yet? Add in the genuine, deep all consuming exhaustion of the newborn months, and I found myself in a place a lot of the mums I now work with will recognise, desperately wanting to do right by my baby, running on almost no sleep, and quietly terrified of getting something wrong. I tried the generic advice. Some of it helped. A lot of it felt like it was written for someone calmer than I was, someone who didn't flinch at the idea of a few minutes of crying, someone whose anxiety wasn't already stretched thin before bedtime even started.
What I actually needed
Looking back, what would have helped most wasn't a stricter method or a gentler one specifically, it was someone who understood why I was struggling, not just that I was tired. What I needed was someone who could sit with me in the anxiety, not just hand me a schedule and walk away. A plan that worked for my baby's sleep, delivered in a way that didn't ask me to switch off every protective instinct I had. That's what took me back to train as a Certified Infant Sleep Consultant through The Sleep Consultant Academy. Not because I'd found sleep easy and wanted to teach it, but because I'd found it hard in a very specific way, and I wanted to be the person for other mums that I'd needed for myself.
Who I built this for
Baby Bears Sleep Consultancy exists for mums who are doing everything they can and still feel like they're one step behind, particularly those who came into motherhood already carrying the weight of a high risk pregnancy. You don't need someone to tell you to just relax and trust the process. You need a plan that actually works, delivered by someone who understands why trusting the process doesn't come easily right now. I'm a mum of two, still figuring plenty of it out day to day, and I bring everything I wish I'd had, the qualifications and the lived experience into every family I work with. Reach out whenever you're ready, there's no version of "too anxious" or "too much" here. I've been there.
