Sleep Disorders

Glossary

"The golden chain that ties health and our bodies together" - Thomas Dekker

Sleep Diaries

The Sleep Diary is a simple but effective way of getting insight into a person’s sleep patterns and habits. All it is is a record of when the person went to bed and when he or she woke up. More data can be included, but there is no fixed official format of what the diary must contain. Some things you might want to record are:

Time of last food/beverage intake before bed
Time of last significant exercise (physical activity) before bed
Time and amount of alcohol consumed during day
Time and amount of caffeine consumed during day
Number and duration of nighttime awakenings.
Number and length of naps during the day
Subjective evaluation of how you felt in the morning – e.g. groggy, alert.

You may be told to keep a sleep diary by a therapist or doctor or you might just want to keep one for your own benefit. It doesn’t take a highly trained professional to get some insight from a sleep diary.

Other things you can do with your sleep diary:

Compare your sleep patterns when you are on vacation to when you are not.
Compare your sleep patterns between summer and winter
See how medication or a change in sleep hygiene (new pajamas, darker shades) affects your sleep.
Evaluate the effect of room temperature on your sleep
Evaluate the effect of over-the-counter antihistamine sleeping pills

How long should you keep the diary? Again: No right answer. The most important thing is to keep the record every day during the period you are keeping the diary. A minimum of a week is probably necessary to see any pattern (two weeks is more likely), but after a month or so there is little point to continuing unless there are ongoing changes or things you are testing.

Interpreting a sleep diary

Even with no formal training or experience, a reasonably intelligent person can use a sleep diary to find patterns and make useful observations. The benefit of having a sleep professional (doctor, psychologist, nurse, sleep technician) look at the diary is that they have experience looking at the diaries of a lot of people and have developed an understanding of what clinical sleep disorders correspond to what sleep diary entries.

Sample Diaries

Here is a Sleep Diary in PDF form: Sleep Diary - PDF

In Rich Text Format: Sleep Diary - RTF