How to use a sleep diary to help improve your quality of sleep.

Why you should have a sleep diary

Keep and use a diary to help understand your sleep patterns and problems. You may find it challenging to work out what is affecting your sleep, but a sleep diary can help achieve a good nights sleep. Sleep diaries allow you to count the hours you sleep and any disturbances throughout your night. A sleep diary involves recording information about your sleep habits. 

Information to keep in a sleep diary

Some of the information that can be kept in a sleep diary includes:

• The time that you went to bed and woke up.
• A total number of hours of sleep.
• Overall rating of sleep quality. A scale between 1-5 can be helpful.
• How many times you woke in the night, what do you do whilst awake and how long you are awake.
• Whether you had any nightmares, night terrors, sleep paralysis or sleepwalking during the night.
• Whether you slept during the day, and if so, for how long?
• Any medication you may be on, including dosage and time of taking the medication.
• The amount of caffeine, alcohol or nicotine you have in a day
• The amount of physical activity you do.
• What you eat or drink.
• Your general feelings and moods, including any anxious or repetitive thoughts

Example of a sleep diary

An example of a sleep diary is below; You can record this any way you feel best suited to you. This example is in a table style, but writing these things down in a physical diary works as well.   

Remember to keep a sleep diary when going to bed and keeping your daily routines as normal as possible. It will help you identify any issues in your day-to-day routine and allow you to be aware of the areas that need work to help you get better sleep. 

For those visiting a doctor about their sleep problems, a sleep diary will help your doctor best understand your routine and disturbances. It can help your doctor identify the problem and give you the help and advice needed. A sleep diary will be more reliable for a doctor than just asking you to recall each night sleep many days or weeks later. 

Keeping a good sleep diary routine 

Remember to update your diary each morning; the sooner you record everything in the sleep diary, the more accurate the information is.

Getting in a morning routine to fill in the diary will help avoid gaps, giving a more informative diary. 

Sleep diaries are a small effort to keep and an even smaller cost to maintain, but the reward can be huge, the key to help you find your best night’s sleep.