Anna Baker on What Sleep Deprivation Does to a Marriage
Every exhausted parent has heard that a new baby will wreck your sleep. What almost no one warns you about is what it can do to your relationship. Anna Baker has spent years sitting in living rooms with couples at their breaking point, and she's noticed something the sleep charts don't capture: it's rarely the tiredness itself that does the damage. It's the silence that grows between two people who used to talk to each other, and have started talking through her instead.
In this conversation, Anna talks candidly about the score keeping, the missed touch, the "expert" parent who ends up doing everything, and the exact moment couples stop feeling like a team. She also shares the one practical shift she gives to almost every household she works with, and why the middle of the night is the worst possible time to have any conversation that matters. It's a raw, honest look at a season most parents survive but rarely talk about, and a reminder that protecting your partnership might be just as important as protecting your baby's sleep.
1. You work with exhausted parents every day. What's the first sign you notice in a couple that tells you their infant's sleep problems have started affecting the relationship, not just their energy levels?
They stop speaking to each other and start speaking through me.
She'll say "he sleeps through everything" while he is sitting right there on the couch next to her. He'll say "she won't let me do it my way" to me, not to her. Neither of them looks at the other one while they're saying it.
That's the sign. Not the tiredness. The fact that there are now two versions of what's happening in that house, and they're both telling them to a stranger.
2. Beyond exhaustion, what are the less obvious ways chronic sleep deprivation shows up between partners, like resentment, communication breakdown?
They keep score. Both of them can tell you to the minute what they got and what the other one got. "I did 11 til 3." "Well I did 3 til 6 and then got up with her." It's not a conversation, it's an invoice.
Then the little digs start. The sigh when he doesn't hear the monitor. The eye roll when she says she's tired.
Then they stop touching each other completely. Not because anything is wrong between them, but because there is nothing left in either of them to give. Nobody warns you about that bit, and it frightens people, because they think it means they've fallen out of love. They haven't. They're just empty.
And they stop making plans. No dinner out, no weekend away, nothing in the calendar. Life shrinks down to getting through tonight.
3. In your experience, is there a "sleep debt tipping point" where a couple goes from managing to genuinely struggling? What does that usually look like?
Yes, and it's not a number of weeks. It's the night one of them thinks: this is just my life now.
Up until then, being wrecked is something you're going through together, and there's an end to it somewhere. The moment you stop believing there's an end, everything changes. You stop being teammates in a hard season and you start being two people who resent each other.
It usually hits when leave finishes and one of them goes back to work. Up until that Monday you were both in it. From that Monday, one of you is in an office and one of you is home alone at 2pm with a baby who won't nap, and neither of you can see what the other one is carrying.
4. Sleep struggles often expose an uneven division of labor at night. How do you help couples navigate that imbalance without it turning into blame?
I get it out of the middle of the night and into daylight.
Nobody has ever had a fair conversation at 3am. At 3am you are not you. You're the worst possible version of yourself, and so is the person next to you, and anything you decide then will be used against one of you later.
So we sit down on a Sunday afternoon with a coffee, and we write it down. Who's on when. Which nights. What happens if it's a bad one.
Once it's written and you both agreed, nobody is choosing to get up and nobody is choosing to stay asleep. It's just the roster. It stops being about what kind of person you married.
5. What's a pattern you see repeatedly, where one partner is coping very differently from the other, and how does that gap tend to play out over time?
One of them becomes the expert.
Usually mum. She's read everything, she knows the wake windows, she knows what each cry means. And she's exhausted, so when he tries, she corrects him. Not to be cruel, she just knows it'll be faster if she does it.
So he stops trying. And now she's doing all of it and furious that she's doing all of it. And he's standing in the hallway feeling useless in his own house, with his own child, and he'd never say that out loud to anyone.
They're both hurting and each of them is certain the other one caused it. That's the one I see most, and it's the saddest, because they're both trying so hard.
6. For couples who feel like they're "on different teams" during this season, what's one practical shift that tends to bring them back into alignment?
Stop being awake at the same time.
I know how small that sounds. It's the single biggest thing I change in most houses.
If you're both up at 2am, you get two ruined people by morning. If you split it, one of you gets a genuine unbroken block of sleep, and one rested person in a house changes everything. They can make the coffee. They can be kind. They can take the baby at 6am so the other one gets another hour.
Two half-decent nights beats two people running on fumes, every single time.
7. How does the sleep training process itself, not just the outcome, either strengthen or strain a couple's partnership?
Both, and it depends entirely on one thing: whether they both actually agreed, or whether one of them just went along with it.
When they're genuinely in it together, it's the best thing that's happened to them in months. For the first time since the baby came they're working off the same plan instead of both guessing in the dark, and there's something about that. They start being a team again before the sleep even improves.
But if one of them is quietly not convinced, it comes out at night. They'll go in when they said they wouldn't. And then it isn't about sleep any more, it's about trust, and that's a much harder thing to fix.
So I make them have the conversation properly before we start, with both of them in the room. It's uncomfortable and sometimes it takes a while. It's also half the work.
8. If you could tell every new parent one thing about protecting their marriage during the sleepless months, before it ever becomes a crisis, what would it be?
Take shifts. You do not both need to be awake.
I see it constantly. Two parents sitting up together at 2am in a dark nursery, trying to be there for each other, and by morning there isn't a functioning adult left in the house. It comes from such a good place. It just doesn't work.
Dad has usually gone back to work and has to be capable at his job the next day. Mum is working just as hard at home, and anybody who thinks otherwise has never done it. It isn't about who has earned the sleep. It's that one wrecked person and one rested person can run a house, and two wrecked people cannot.
So split the night. One of you takes the first half, the other one takes the second. Then protect each other's block like it's an appointment you can't miss, because it is.
That's what supporting each other actually looks like in this season. Not sitting in the dark together. Letting the other one sleep.