Night Nurses Tips for New Parents to Stay Healthy

November 13, 2022

updated April 6, 2025 – Night Nurses Tips for New Parents to Stay Healthy are the Let Mommy Sleep team’s tips to prevent and lessen the severity of contagious illness.

Sleep deprivation and anxiety can wreak havoc on new parents’ immune systems, especially in the winter months when we tend to stay indoors. Add older kids in daycare or school and it can seem impossible to stay away from the germs that make us sick! Working with newborns, it’s imperative that our team remain illness-free, so who better to ask for wellness tips than our own nurses and night nannies?  

Night Nurses Tips for New Parents to Stay Healthy

Here’s our team’s best advice for steering clear of illness as a new parent:

• Stay Hydrated: “Water, water, water!” says BJ Edmunds, NCP for over 2 years.  Keeping properly hydrated allows the body to fight infection, maintain proper digestion and remove unhealthy toxins efficiently. Coffee and sugary drinks can dehydrate your body. So if you have these drinks, be sure to counter the dehydrating effects with –you guessed it- more water.

• Wash those Hands: Handwashing is a simple but highly effective way to keep germs and bacteria from entering our bodies. 20 seconds of handwashing is the minimum. If hand sanitizer is your only option, you should use it, but washing our hands is more effective than sanitizer.

• Saline + Vaseline: You’ve probably heard that saline solution, warm water with salt dissolved in it, can be used to flush out nasal passages. This helps fight off colds and flu by taking trapped germs out before they can get in your body. But there’s a second step that can be even more helpful. Joy Becker, LPN, says: “Use Saline in the nose daily, then apply petroleum jelly at the opening of your nostril. The saline flushes out any germs and bacteria. Then the petroleum jelly helps protect germs from going into your nasal passages, which can help prevent colds and sinus infections.”

• Take a sauna:  A common misconception about saunas is that they work because we’re “sweating out toxins.”  While yes, we’re sweating out dirt that’s on the surface of our skin, actual toxins are eliminated by our liver and kidneys. However, studies show that sauna use does lessen the effects of colds and flu.

Night Nurses Tips for New Parents to Stay Healthy – What about Sleep?

Prioritize Sleep: Sleep deprivation is a fact of life for most new parents. But it’s more than just feeling tired. Sleep deprivation leads to a chain of issues like weakened immunity, migraines and an increase in potential accidents due to drowsiness. Compounding these challenges is the constant “alert state” of caring for baby, where it can be very difficult to switch gears to sleep when you actually do get time to rest.

One way to help switch from a wakfeul to sleep state is through conscious breathing like this:

1. – Close your mouth and inhale quietly through your nose for a count of four.
2. – Hold your breath for a count of seven.
3. – Exhale completely through your mouth, making a whoosh sound to a count of eight.

Switch Nights or Hours – Our favorite advice to combat sleep deprivation is to set a schedule with your partner where one of you is completely off overnight. Switch whole nights or blocks of time with your partner so you’re both getting at least 1 or 2 nights of uninterrupted sleep. If you’re breastfeeding you can have your partner do all of the other care like diaper changing, swaddling and getting baby back to sleep after feeds.

How Else Can I Minimize the Risk of Contagious Illness?

• Vitamin D AND Vitamin C  In looking at over 82 studies, Vitamin D is the one supplement shown to protect against the common cold in all age groups. You can find vitamin d in dairy and cereals but a free way to get Vitamin D is to go out in the sun for 10-30 minutes a day.   Vitamin C is effective in keeping our immune systems strong too, but the trick is that it has to be taken consistently for 3-4 months to make a difference in the severity and length of a cold.  The ideal scenario is to use Vitamin C and D together all winter but if you can only 1 thing to help your heath, get some free sunshine!

• Hospital Grade Disinfectant – You already know how powerful Lysol disinfectant is, but did you know there’s a hospital grade version? It’s a little bit more expensive but is proven to kill Norovirus (the gross stomach flu) in addition to other germs and bacteria. You can also make your own disinfectant using household bleach and water.

• Get the your vaccines: To protect yourself and those too young or medically unable, please get vaccinated if you aren’t already. Measles, for example is highly contagious so be sure you’ve received both doses.  Receiving the flu vaccine is another way to take a preemptive strike against influenza. An added benefit is the protection the flu vaccine gives your infant. According to the CDC, one study showed that giving flu vaccine to pregnant women was 92% effective in preventing hospitalization of infants for flu.
• Mask if you’re sick: Masks act as a filter so if you are sick and need to go out in public, please mask up to cut down on the spread of harmful germs.

Night Nurses Tips – General Advice

Doing your best to avoid and minimize the severity of contagious illnesses helps ensure you’re physically and mentally able to care for your baby. It also protects your newborn, whose immune system is still developing and more vulnerable to infections. In addition to staying healthy, follow your pediatrician’s advice on taking your newborn out in public and an appropriate vaccine schedule.

Are you expecting? Sign up to receive our free newborn and postpartum care guide for more tips to help make your life easier.