Throughout the night, as you soothe your baby back to sleep when they wake, you’re using your safety state—including neurotransmitters like oxytocin—to bring your baby back into a safety state so they can go back to sleep. Nighttime nurture builds the stress system to be resilient and shapes how infants respond to stress after infancy, specifically by lowering cortisol responses following a stressor and faster cortisol recovery.4
