Your 7-day sleep diary

Sleep diary 5 min

You will be able to: Log a night in under two minutes and read the first patterns from your own data.

This diary is the backbone of the course. For the next 7 days, fill it in every morning, within an hour of getting up. It takes about two minutes. Do not change your habits this week: the point is to see your sleep as it really is.

Why bother? When people keep a record of their progress, they reach their goals more often, and the effect is bigger when the record is written down rather than kept in your head. Doctors use sleep diaries for the same reason: if you ever see a GP or a sleep clinic about sleep, they may ask you to keep one.

How to fill it in

• Estimate, do not clock-watch. Your best guess in the morning is good enough. Watching the clock while you try to sleep has been shown to increase worry and make falling asleep take longer.
• Bedtime is when you got into bed; lights out is when you started trying to sleep. The gap between them is often where the evening goes.
• Minutes awake in the night is the total of all the times you were awake after first falling asleep.
• Out of bed is when you actually got up, which may be later than when you woke.
• Rested is a 1-5 score: 1 = exhausted, 5 = fully refreshed.
• Missed a morning? Fill it in when you remember and add "estimated" in the notes. A rough entry beats a blank.

What to look for after 7 days

The summary under the diary points out patterns for you. Three that matter most in this course:

1. How much does your wake-up time move? If it swings by more than an hour, your anchor time is your first target.
2. Your average sleep versus your need. Compare it with your calculator window.
3. Your efficiency. Well below 85% means you are spending a lot of time in bed awake. Module 7 explains what helps with that.

Sources

• Carney et al. (2012), The Consensus Sleep Diary, Sleep 35(2): 287-302, PubMed 22294820
• Harkin et al. (2016), Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis, Psychological Bulletin 142(2): 198-229, PubMed 26479070
• NHS, Insomnia (when to see a GP)
• Schutte-Rodin et al. (2008), Clinical guideline for the evaluation and management of chronic insomnia in adults, J Clin Sleep Med 4(5): 487-504, PubMed 18853708 (sleep diaries in assessment)
• Ohayon et al. (2017), PubMed 28346153; Sleep Foundation, How to determine poor-quality sleep (85% efficiency)
• AASM Sleep Education, Sleep diary
• Tang, Schmidt & Harvey (2007), Sleeping with the enemy: clock monitoring in the maintenance of insomnia, J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry 38(1): 40-55, PubMed 16793001 (clock-watching)

Next: sneak peek, build a night