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Taking care of a newborn is exhausting. A new survey reveals that parents lose more than six weeks worth of sleep in the first year of caring for a baby.

The survey found that night feeds, crying babies and waking up with the worried were the top three reasons survey respondents gave for not getting enough sleep.

The survey found that insomnia and never-ending chores were also common reasons for not getting enough sleep.

The latest survey, which involved 1,800 people from across the UK, revealed that parents are getting only 5.1 hours of sleep a night in the first year of their child's life.

The latest finding suggests the average new parent loses 2.9 hours of sleep per night below the recommended minimum of eight hours a night. This means that parents lose about 20.3 hours of sleep per week and 1,055.6 hours or 44 days of sleep in the first year of a child's life.

"Sleeping is one of the most important elements of everyone's lives, so we wanted to take a good look at sleeping by numbers - how much sleep we rack up in a lifetime, how good our sleep is and generally what our sleeping experiences are as a nation," said a spokesman for Ergoflex, the company that carried out the latest survey, according to the Daily Mail.

"It was incredibly interesting to see how everything adds up. While we all know that we sleep for a large portion of our lives, 26 years is an incredibly long time - as is losing 44 days of sleep in the first year of being a parent," the spokesman said.

"Good quality sleep is vital to ensuring we're enabling our minds and bodies to rest and rejuvenate; ultimately providing the foundation for a healthy life," he added. "It's only a matter of time before sleep-debt accumulates and health can begin to suffer."