Sleep

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.

	Day 1	Day 2	Day 3	Day 4	Day 5	Day 6	Day 7
I went to bed at	11 pm	10.30 pm	10.15 pm	11.20 pm	11 pm	11.30 pm	11.45 pm
I woke at	7 am	7.30 am	8 am	7.20 am	7.45 am	8.30 am	6.45 am
Sleep rating (1-5)	4	3	2	4	2	5	3
Wakeups	none	Once, for 10 mins, toilet.	Twice for the toilet, 10 mins each time.	none	Awake on the phone for 1 hour at 3 am	none	Twice for the toilet. 10 mins each time
Total hours of sleep	8 hours	8 hours	9 Hours 45 mins	8 hours	7 hours, 45 mins	8 hours	6 hours 40 mins
Notes: I Will leave the phone away from the bed. Eight hours is enough sleep for me. Over 9 hours was too much sleep for me. Felt exhausted when I woke up—fewer fluids before bed to minimise waking up.

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.

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