Your baby sleeps through now. Why don't you?

The monitor has been quiet for a fortnight. Your baby goes down at seven and wakes at six, and the health visitor is pleased. You, meanwhile, are lying awake at twenty to three, the time the night feed used to be, listening for a sound that does not come.

This is a common stage and an annoying one. The reason for the broken nights has gone. The broken nights have not, yet.

Your sleep was rebuilt around the baby

For months you went to bed expecting to be woken, slept lightly, and came round fast at the first noise. That was useful. It takes a while to stop doing it once it is no longer needed, and nobody hands you a date when it will.

Researchers in Germany followed 2,541 women and 2,118 men through the birth of a child, asking every year how long and how well they slept. Sleep was at its lowest in the first three months. After a first baby, neither mothers nor fathers had fully returned to their pre-pregnancy sleep satisfaction and hours by six years on, the end of the study.

So if yours is taking longer than you expected, you are not doing it wrong. There are things that help it along.

Less time in bed, not more

The instinct after months of short nights is to bank sleep: early nights, a lie-in at the weekend, a nap on the sofa while the baby naps. The NHS advice for poor sleep points the other way:

• only go to bed when you are sleepy
• get up at the same time every day
• do not sleep in after a bad night
• do not nap during the day

Sleepiness builds the longer you are awake. An afternoon nap or a nine o'clock bedtime spends some of it, and you arrive at bed with less. Lie there awake for long stretches night after night and the bed starts to feel like the place where you lie awake.

Start with the fixed morning time. Pick one you can keep on Saturday and Sunday too, not only on weekdays. If your baby still has the odd bad night, take the nap you need that day and go back to the routine the next.

When you wake at the old feed time

Do not check the time. The NHS Every Mind Matters advice is to keep clocks out of view and put your phone face down. Working out how many hours are left is a good way to stay awake for one of them.

If you are still awake after around 20 minutes, get up and sit somewhere comfortable with a lamp rather than the main light. Read, or listen to something quiet, and go back to bed when you feel sleepy.

If it is the list for tomorrow that keeps you up (nursery bag, the 9am call, the form that still needs signing), the same advice suggests writing it down before you go to bed.

When it is more than a slow recovery

On the NHS list of postnatal depression symptoms is difficulty sleeping, even when you get time to rest. So are low mood, finding it hard to enjoy anything, and feeling anxious or worrying all the time. The NHS says symptoms can begin up to a year after the birth, and that fathers and partners can be affected too.

If that sounds like you, speak to your GP, midwife or health visitor. The NHS also suggests seeing a GP if you have had trouble sleeping for months and changing your habits has not helped.

Worth knowing before 25 October

The clocks go back on Sunday 25 October. Your baby's body clock does not know that, so a baby who wakes at six will be awake at five by the new time. If you have settled on a fixed wake-up time by then, keep it through that weekend.

Tonight

Choose a wake-up time you can keep seven days a week and set the alarm for it, Saturday included. Then turn the clock away from the pillow.