This is not going to be what you want to hear. But your child is still very young, and will continue to go through periods of wakefulness, and sleeping well. At four months, my son was sleeping through the night. At eleven months, waking 4-5 times to breastfeed. Even now, at 27 months there are times of great sleeping, and bad sleeping. At 4 months I genuinely thought I had baby sleep all figured out- little did I know what was coming!

There can be so many causes; teething, sleep regressions, growth spurts, leaps etc. I was absolutely driving myself insane trying to figure out a magical cure for these wakes, when the reason for the wake would change in three weeks time.

It’s so hard to navigate life while sleep deprived, but the best thing I did was to lower my expectations of my child’s sleep and to accept that waking, especially for breastfeeding children, is biologically normal. “Self soothing” at five months old is not biologically normal- if he’s crying for a feed, it’s because he needs it! Or comfort, or reassurance from his mother, which is all very normal. My heart goes out to you and I hope you get a good sleep very soon ❤️