Short answer
Yes.
Exhausting, but yes.
Newborn sleep is fragmented. Newborns commonly sleep in short bursts and move through sleep cycles of around 40 minutes. They also need to wake frequently to feed.
Frequent waking is not evidence that your baby is bad at sleeping. Whoever coined ‘sleeping like a baby’ had clearly never slept next to one.
Why do newborns wake every 1–2 hours?
Young babies spend a large proportion of their sleep in active, lighter sleep, from which they wake more easily. From an evolutionary perspective, that easy arousability makes a lot of sense. Human infants evolved sleeping close to caregivers, feeding frequently and surfacing readily from sleep. Researchers have also explored whether easier arousal may be protective in relation to SIDS, which I go into in more detail below.
Australian Breastfeeding Association describes frequent waking as normal and as supporting nourishment, safety and connection. It also notes that easier arousal from active sleep in breastfed babies has been considered one possible factor in the association between breastfeeding and lower SIDS risk.
I would be careful not to turn that into ‘waking every hour prevents SIDS’, because that is not what the evidence says.
The useful point is that arousability is part of normal infant physiology.
Deep, uninterrupted adult-style sleep is not necessarily the biological gold standard for a newborn.
Anthropology makes this even more interesting
Biological anthropologists have been arguing for decades that a lot of Western infant-sleep research began with a culturally specific assumption: that solitary, consolidated infant sleep was the normal baseline.
James McKenna and colleagues studied mother-infant sleep as an interacting system and found that proximity changed infant sleep architecture and arousal patterns. Their work places frequent waking and parent-infant sensory exchange in an evolutionary context rather than automatically treating waking as a behavioural problem.
More recent anthropological reviews by Helen Ball, Cecilia Tomori and McKenna similarly describe close parent-infant sleep alongside lactation as part of the human evolutionary context for infant sleep.
That does not mean every shared sleeping arrangement is safe. Safe-sleep recommendations still matter.
It does mean that your newborn repeatedly surfacing, feeding and going back to sleep is doing something deeply newborn-like.
It may be maddening, but it is not meaningless. Frequent waking supports feeding, connection and normal infant physiology, even when it is absolutely exhausting for the parent living through it.
Knowing that changed my perspective enormously and made it much easier to lean into what my baby actually needed rather than constantly wondering how to make her sleep differently.
One thing that helped me enormously: I stopped looking at the clock
My eldest woke a lot.
For a long time I looked at the time every single time she woke.
12:47. 1:36. 2:21.
Then I would calculate how long she had slept, how many times she had woken, how little sleep I had managed, and how catastrophic tomorrow was going to be. Sometimes I would lie awake after she had gone back to sleep, hyperfixating on the consequences of exactly how little sleep I was getting.
At some point I stopped checking.
It was genuinely a game-changer.
She did not magically wake less. I was still tired. But I stopped giving myself a running overnight performance report on exactly how badly I was sleeping.
There is very little useful information contained in knowing whether your baby woke 49 minutes or 71 minutes after the last feed at 2am.
If you need the clock for medication or an individual feeding plan, obviously use it.
Otherwise, sometimes ignorance is remarkably peaceful. I could wake just enough to feed her and then fall back asleep much more easily.
When waking is worth looking into
Frequent waking itself can be completely normal.
I would pay more attention when it sits alongside something else: ineffective feeding, poor growth, low nappy output, significant distress, persistent snoring, mouth breathing, stridor or obvious breathing effort.
Normal waking and an underlying feeding or airway issue can coexist.
If frequent waking continues as your child grows and you are concerned, particularly if it comes with snoring, mouth breathing, restless sleep, breathing changes, significant distress or daytime difficulties, it is reasonable to talk with your GP about whether anything else might be contributing.
The 3AM Newborn Guide is coming soon.
The free articles are here for you now. The guide, with feeding, sleep, safe sleep and red flags organised in one place, is still being finished.