Two different questions get bundled together under "newborn sleep": what's actually safe, and what's actually normal to expect. The safety guidance is specific and worth following to the letter. The "normal" part is more forgiving than most new parents assume.
The safe sleep guidelines
The American Academy of Pediatrics' current safe sleep recommendations, echoed in detail by the NIH's Safe to Sleep campaign, come down to a consistent set of rules:
Always place your baby on their back to sleep, for every nap and every night, until age 1.
Use a crib, bassinet, or portable play yard with a firm, flat mattress and a fitted sheet made for that product — nothing inclined, nothing soft.
Room-share without bed-sharing: keep your baby's sleep space in your room, but on its own separate surface, for at least the first six months. This alone is associated with up to a 50% reduction in SIDS risk.
Keep the sleep space bare — no pillows, blankets, bumper pads, or stuffed toys. Use a wearable blanket or layered clothing instead of loose bedding.
Avoid overheating — dress baby in roughly one layer more than you'd wear yourself, and skip the indoor hat.
Breastfeeding, offering a pacifier at sleep times (once breastfeeding is well established), and avoiding smoke, alcohol, and other substances around your baby are all additional protective factors.
Never bed-share, and never let your baby sleep on a couch, sofa, or armchair, including in your arms while you're on one — the NHS notes this specifically raises risk by as much as 50 times compared with a proper sleep surface. Sudden Unexpected Infant Death is the leading cause of injury death in infancy, and Black and Native American/Alaska Native infants die from sleep-related causes at more than double the rate of white infants, which is part of why these guidelines exist for every family, not just "high-risk" ones.
Neither the WHO nor the CDC issues separate safe-sleep-position guidance of their own — both organizations point to and endorse the AAP's recommendations, which is why they're the consistent reference point here.
What newborn sleep actually looks like
Newborns sleep roughly 16 to 17 hours a day in total — but rarely for more than one or two hours at a stretch, since babies don't develop regular sleep cycles until around six months of age. Waking during the night and needing help settling again is typical well past the newborn stage.
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Newborn sleep itself moves through stages: drowsiness, then active (REM) sleep with irregular breathing — including brief pauses of five to ten seconds followed by faster bursts of breathing, a pattern doctors call "periodic breathing of infancy" that's normal and usually outgrown by mid-way through the first year — then lighter sleep, then deep, quiet sleep where movement stops almost entirely and your baby becomes harder to wake.
A note on swaddling
Swaddling doesn't reduce SIDS risk on its own, but some babies do settle better swaddled. If you swaddle, stop once your baby starts showing signs of rolling over, typically around three months — a swaddled baby who rolls face-down loses the ability to reposition themselves.
Sources
Every claim, sourced
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