Printable sleep diary: a two-week sheet from the consensus diary

How to fill it in

1. Keep the sheet next to the bed with a pen. Write the date of the evening you went to bed on the line for that night.
2. Fill in a row every morning, within an hour of getting out of bed. The paper asks for exactly that, because memory of the night fades fast.
3. Write a clock time in columns 1, 2, 6 and 7 and circle am or pm each time. Write minutes in columns 3 and 5 and a plain count in column 4. The paper recommends marking am or pm and the unit for this reason: those are the entries people most often get wrong.
4. Guess; do not look at a clock in the night. The diary records how the night felt to you, which is the point of it.
5. Rate the night in column 8 by circling one number, and use column 9 for anything that stands out: a late meal, a noisy night, a nap, an unusual day.
6. If a night has two sleep periods, or you work shifts, write the main one and use the comments column for the rest.

What to look for after two weeks

The paper names the numbers that sleep diaries are expected to give: sleep onset latency, wakefulness after sleep onset, total sleep time, time in bed, sleep efficiency and a rating of sleep quality. Sleep efficiency is the percent of the time in bed that you were asleep. The others you read straight from the columns, or work out from them. The paper itself calculates total sleep time from the other items rather than asking you to estimate it, and notes that researchers have defined some of these measures in different ways, for example whether the final waking counts as a night waking. So read the sums below as one reasonable convention, not the only one.

Take the sample row. Time in bed runs from 10:30 pm to 6:30 am, which is 8 h 0 min. The sleeper tried to sleep at 11:00 pm, took 30 minutes, and woke at 6:15 am: that is 6 h 45 min between falling asleep and the final waking, less 20 minutes awake in between, so about 6 h 25 min of sleep. Sleep efficiency is 385 ÷ 480, or 80%.

Do the same for each night, then average the two weeks. Three questions are worth answering. Is the average time asleep under seven hours, the floor in the AASM and Sleep Research Society recommendation for adults? Is most of the gap between time in bed and time asleep spent falling asleep (column 3) or awake in the night (column 5)? And do the clock times in columns 1 and 7 stay within an hour or so of each other from night to night? The comments column and the quality ratings will show which nights stood out. The paper's optional items, such as naps, alcohol, caffeine and medication, are not on this sheet; if you want them, add them in the comments column. Bring the sheet to a clinician if the pattern troubles you.