The Witching Hour: Why Your Baby Cries Every Evening (And How to Survive It)

It’s 5pm. Your baby — who was perfectly content an hour ago — has dissolved into fussing, crying, and refusing everything: the breast, the bottle, the pram, your arms, the other arms. Nothing works for long. And tomorrow, at almost exactly the same time, it will happen again.

This is the witching hour — a misleading name, because it’s usually two to four hours of late-afternoon and evening fussiness, typically landing somewhere between 5pm and midnight. It usually appears at around 2–3 weeks of age, tends to peak at around 6–8 weeks, and fades somewhere between 3 and 4 months.

Here’s the single most important thing to hold onto: evening fussiness in young babies is normal, extremely common, and temporary. It is not a sign of poor milk supply, a wrong formula, a bad routine, or anything you’ve done. Infant crying follows a well-documented developmental curve — it increases from around two weeks, peaks in the second month, and settles by three to four months — and it clusters in the evening. Your baby is following a script written by biology, not reacting to a mistake you’ve made.

In this guide we’ll cover why it happens, how to tell it apart from colic and from genuine illness, and a realistic hour-by-hour survival plan for the evenings themselves.

Nobody can point to a single proven cause of evening fussiness, but four well-grounded explanations overlap — and most babies are experiencing several at once:

• An immature nervous system running out of capacity. A newborn’s brain is doing an enormous amount of filtering, processing, and regulating — and it’s not very good at it yet. By evening, the system is simply saturated. Crying is the release valve. This is also why the witching hour fades at 3–4 months: the nervous system matures, and babies get better at regulating themselves.
• Overstimulation accumulating through the day. Every face, light, sound, nappy change, and car journey is input. Babies can’t opt out of stimulation the way adults can — it builds all day and spills over at the end of it. Busy days often mean harder evenings.
• Day-sleep debt. Newborns who’ve had a patchy nap day hit the evening overtired, and overtired babies are wired, not sleepy — stress hormones make them harder to settle, which makes them more tired, which makes them harder to settle. If evenings are consistently rough, day sleep is the first place we’d look: our guides to newborn wake windows and overtired baby signs will help you spot whether this is part of your picture.
• Cluster feeding. Many babies want to feed almost continuously in the evening — short, fussy, on-off feeds that can look like dissatisfaction but are actually normal behaviour, particularly in breastfed babies. Evening fussiness and cluster feeding are so intertwined it’s often impossible to say where one ends and the other begins. We’ve written a full guide to cluster feeding and sleep if this sounds like your evenings.

Notice what’s not on this list: your milk, your parenting, or your baby being “difficult.” Evening fussiness happens to breastfed and formula-fed babies, first babies and fourth babies, babies with routines and babies without.

“Witching hour” and “colic” get used interchangeably, but they describe different intensities of the same territory — and the distinction matters, because it changes what support you need.

The traditional definition of colic is Wessel’s “rule of threes”: crying for more than 3 hours a day, on more than 3 days a week, for more than 3 weeks, in an otherwise healthy, well-fed baby. Colicky crying also tends to be more intense — inconsolable, often high-pitched, with a red face, clenched fists, and a baby who seems to be in genuine distress rather than just grumbling and fussing.

	Witching hour	Colic	Possibly unwell — call GP/111
When	Predictable evening window	Often evening-weighted, but longer and more days	Any time; often a sudden change
How much crying	Fussy, on-off, consolable in bursts	3+ hours/day, 3+ days/week, 3+ weeks; often inconsolable	Unusual for your baby — weak, high-pitched, or continuous
Between episodes	Content, feeding and gaining well	Content, feeding and gaining well	Feeding poorly, lethargic, fever, vomiting, rash
What helps	Feeding, motion, low stimulation, time	Sometimes nothing — support for parents is key	Medical assessment

The reassuring headline for both witching hour and colic: in an otherwise well baby who is feeding and gaining weight, both resolve with time, usually by three to four months. Colic deserves its own deep-dive — we cover it fully, including soothing approaches and how to protect your own wellbeing through it, in our course — but if your baby’s crying fits the rule of threes, do mention it to your health visitor or GP too, partly to rule out contributing factors like reflux or allergy, and partly because you deserve support through it.

You can’t switch the witching hour off, but you can take the edge off it and stop it derailing bedtime. Here’s how we’d structure a typical late afternoon and evening with a baby in the fussy weeks:

Around 3–4pm: protect the late-afternoon nap

The single best predictor of a survivable evening is a baby who isn’t running on empty by 5pm. Don’t fight for a perfect cot nap at this time of day — a pram walk, sling nap, or contact nap absolutely counts. The goal is any sleep, however it happens.

Around 4–5pm: start winding the house down

Begin lowering stimulation before the fussing starts. Dim the lights, turn off the TV, reduce visitors and passing-around, keep handling slow and quiet. You’re trying to slow the drip of stimulation before the bucket overflows.

Around 5–7pm: feed freely and get moving

This is the heart of it. Feed as often as your baby wants — cluster feeding now is normal, not a supply problem. Between feeds, motion is your best friend: a sling or carrier (keeping baby’s airway visible and chin off chest), a walk outside, gentle bouncing, a change of scenery. Rotate through your toolkit — swaddle or firm holding, rhythmic shushing or white noise, sucking (feed or dummy), a warm bath — without expecting any single tool to work for long. Ten calm minutes per tool is a win.

Around 7–8pm: keep bedtime short and boring

A long, elaborate bedtime routine can backfire during the witching weeks — by this point your baby is saturated, and more input makes things worse. Keep it brief: feed, fresh nappy, sleeping bag or swaddle, dim room, white noise, cuddle, down. And follow safer sleep every single time, however chaotic the evening: baby on their back, in a clear cot or Moses basket with no pillows, duvets, wedges or positioners, feet to the foot of the cot, room at 16–20°C. Our safe sleep guide covers the full checklist.

All evening: tag-team and take breaks

If there are two of you, work in shifts — 30–45 minutes on, then swap, because a fresh, calm adult genuinely soothes better than a frazzled one. If you’re on your own and reaching your limit, it is always OK to put your baby down safely in their cot, on their back, and step out of the room for a few minutes to breathe. A safe baby crying in a cot is infinitely better than an overwhelmed parent holding them. Never, ever shake a baby — if you feel close to the edge, put baby down, step away, and call someone.

This deserves its own section because the witching hour is precisely when it goes wrong: it’s 9pm, the baby has finally settled on your chest, you’re shattered, and the sofa is so comfortable.

Never let yourself fall asleep with your baby on a sofa or armchair. The Lullaby Trust is unambiguous: sleeping with a baby on a sofa or armchair carries a risk of sudden infant death up to 50 times higher. If there is any chance you might drift off during an evening feed or cuddle — and during the witching weeks, there is always a chance — feed sitting up in bed with hazards moved away, set an alarm, or hand the baby over. If baby falls asleep on you and you’re getting sleepy, transfer them to their clear, flat sleep space, on their back, even if it risks a wake-up.

A woken baby is a nuisance. A parent asleep on the sofa with a baby is a genuine danger. This is the one rule of the witching hour that has no flexibility in it.

For most babies, evening fussiness peaks at around 6–8 weeks and then gradually eases, with most families finding it has largely resolved by 3–4 months. It doesn’t usually stop overnight — you’ll notice the fussy window shrinking, the crying softening into grumbling, and the odd evening that’s simply… fine.

The fade happens because the underlying causes mature away: the nervous system gets better at regulation, feeding becomes more efficient, day sleep becomes more organised, and an earlier, more predictable bedtime naturally emerges — many babies who fussed until 10pm at six weeks are settling happily at 7pm by four months. Our newborn sleep guide covers how sleep typically evolves across these months, so you know what’s coming next.

In the meantime, lower the bar. During the witching weeks, a “successful evening” means everyone fed, everyone safe, and everyone eventually asleep. Dinner at 9pm over a baby in a sling still counts as dinner.

The witching hour is a well baby having a normal, hard evening. It’s time to contact your GP, health visitor, or 111 if you notice any of the following:

• A sudden change — a baby who never had evening crying abruptly becoming inconsolable, or crying that sounds different (weak, moaning, or unusually high-pitched)
• Crying with feeding problems — refusing feeds, fewer wet nappies, poor weight gain, or projectile or green vomit
• Signs of pain or illness — fever (call 111 or your GP urgently for a fever in a baby under 3 months), a rash, drawing legs up with a hard or swollen tummy, blood in the nappy
• Crying that isn’t confined to a window — inconsolable crying around the clock rather than a predictable evening pattern
• Your instinct says something is wrong. You know your baby’s normal better than anyone. If this doesn’t feel like fussiness, get them checked — no one will ever criticise you for it.

And one more flag that matters just as much: you. Hours of evening crying, night after night, is genuinely hard on parental mental health. If you’re feeling hopeless, unusually anxious, angry at your baby, or not yourself, tell your GP or health visitor. That’s not weakness — it’s exactly what they’re there for.

To be clear about our lane: this article is sleep support, not medical advice. When in doubt about your baby’s health, contact your GP or call 111.

The witching hour makes parents doubt everything — the milk, the routine, themselves. So let’s end where we started: evening fussiness is one of the most universal, most temporary experiences in early parenthood. It is not feedback on your parenting. It peaks, it fades, and by three to four months most families barely remember which weeks were the worst ones.

Until then: protect the afternoon nap, dim the evening early, feed freely, keep moving, tag-team, follow safer sleep without exception, and forgive yourself the evenings where all you did was hold a crying baby and wait it out. That was enough. That was the job.

And if evenings have you at the end of your rope and you’d like a real plan built around your actual baby, our 1:1 WhatsApp support exists for precisely these weeks.