Sleep Diary – How to Keep the Essential Journal

Woman writing her sleep diary.
Reading Time: 8 minutes

We need to sleep. We sleep to recover from each day’s mental and physical demands so that we can wake up feeling ready to attack the day ahead. Fresh and alert — that is the plan.

Unfortunately, sometimes we do not sleep well. When that happens, we struggle to concentrate, think clearly, and generally function. If this happens a lot and you sleep poorly every night, you should consider keeping a sleep diary.

What is a sleep diary? We will discuss in this post how to create a sleep diary, what to put in it, and how keeping a sleep diary can help you. We start by answering the initial question of what a sleep diary is.


What is a Sleep Diary?

In a nutshell, a sleep diary is a record of sleep patterns and habits. This record can help doctors and other medical specialists when it comes to determining treatments and other courses of action for sleep disorders.

An additional course of action might be to recommend a sleep study or give the technical term “polysomnography” — a comprehensive test to diagnose a sleep disorder. This test measures the body’s activity while sleeping and will include brain waves, heart rate, blood oxygen levels, breathing, and eye and leg movements. Doctors may also use the test result, a “polysomnogram,” to decide whether to adjust any current treatment you might be receiving for a sleep disorder.

Woman sleeping on a bed.
A sleep diary can help with restorative sleep, preventing the need for a nap throughout the day.

Four Important Reasons to Keep a Sleep Diary.

The sleep diary can help medical professionals perform their duties is one good reason to keep a sleep diary or journal. Below are a few more:

  1. The sleep diary will give you a clearer picture of your sleep habits and patterns.
    Just because you do not sleep well or do not function during the day, don’t leap to conclude you have a sleep disorder. Sometimes, bad habits are the underlying cause of the problems. Drinking too much caffeine, drinking alcohol in the evenings, and similar unhelpful behaviours can all affect how well you sleep.

The good news is some simple lifestyle changes can help you correct them so you start getting the right amount of sleep again. You have got to get that sleep diary going first, though. Then you can identify the patterns. If you make the changes and, after a week, notice a significant improvement, you can keep applying them and spare yourself an unnecessary trip to a sleep clinic.

  1. The sleep diary will make you proactive about your sleep.
    When you start keeping your journal, gradually, you begin to think about the importance of good sleep in your life. Rather than indulge in sleep-depriving habits, you edge away from them and towards behaviours that promote sleep, not subtract from it. Perhaps that could be drinking chamomile tea instead of alcohol in the evenings, for instance, or choosing to eat lighter meals at night than heavy ones or greasy foods.

Ultimately, keeping a sleep diary improves your attitude towards sleep. You care more about it and do more things that can help you sleep better.

  1. The sleep diary helps doctors diagnose the issue.
    Doctors are not necessarily sleeping specialists; sometimes, they can get things wrong. They can prescribe the wrong course of action because they have assumed certain things about the patient or have misreported what is happening. The patient might have mentioned moodiness, fatigue, or problems staying asleep, which have led the doctor to diagnose the issue as insomnia when it could be something else.

The sleep diary gives doctors a detailed account of what is going on. The journal can make all the difference between diagnosing the problem correctly and getting it wrong.

  1. To monitor the effectiveness of treatment.
    Let us suppose your doctor diagnoses the problem and prescribes a treatment. Then it would help if you keep your sleep journal to compare the results. Looking at your record before and after the treatment will help you spot changes easily and understand whether the treatment is working.

How to create a sleep diary and keep track of your sleep.

Girl Writing a Sleep Diary.
Create a sleep diary and keep track of your sleep,

Creating your journal is easy.

Just follow the steps below:

  • Take a notebook and create a grid.
  • List the days of the week across the top.
  • At the side, create the following fields:

The time you went to bed

  1. The time you woke up.
  2. How you fell asleep — did you fall asleep as soon as your head hit the pillow, or did you spend some time tossing and turning?
  3. The way you felt when you woke up – tired? Refreshed? Indifferent?
  4. Food and drink during the day – alcohol? Heavy meals? Caffeine?
  5. Did you experience any sleep disturbances – a partner snoring, for instance?

Other fields you could include:

  • Any medication you took (how much and when)
  • Any exercise you performed.
  • Any nicotine you consumed.
  • Emotions or stress felt.
  • Did you take any naps?

It would help if you filled your sleep log in as soon as possible the next day while still remembering the facts from the night before. Make it part of your morning routine. Keep the sleep diary for a week, and then look for any patterns so you can act.


Using Tech to Track your Sleep.

Pictured: Prince Harry wearing the Oura sleep tracking ring, the latest tech in sleep tracking technology.

Of course, we live in the digital world, and an old-school notebook journal is not the only way to record how we sleep. If doing things the old-fashioned way doesn’t float your boat, you can call upon traditional and specialised sleep tech to give you a helping hand. Below are a few suggestions:

iPhone
Okay, your iPhone will not offer you the detailed analysis your notebook will, but it can undoubtedly monitor the hours you sleep. That comes from the “Bedtime” feature in the “Clock” app. Set the time you go to bed and the time you want to wake up. The phone then calculates how many hours you sleep and logs any disturbances you experience during the night.

The phone will help you track your sleep, but it is not a perfect solution. The Mattress movement can mislead the app if you share the bed. The phone could also fall off the bed. If the phone is under sheets or blankets, it could also overheat. All these things could skew the tracking and cause the phone to register them as disturbances or interruptions to your sleep.

Fitness trackers
A fitness tracker will give you a good idea of how well you sleep. You can tell how long you were in a REM cycle sleep and whether you move around a lot while resting. These devices track sleep by recording all your movements throughout the night.

If you use a Fitbit, the device will give you a sleep score based on your heart rate, the time you spend awake or restless, and sleep stages. According to the device, anything between 80 and 89 is a good score. Above that is excellent, and less than 60 is poor.

Note that Fitbits and other fitness trackers did not design them specifically to measure sleep, so double-check whether your fitness tracker is accurate if you use one. Back your sleep logs up using an app and that good old notebook.

Smart beds and sensors
Investing in an intelligent bed or sensors is getting serious about tracking your sleep.

Sensors will fit on or under your mattress and track your movements, heart rate, and respiratory rate while you sleep. They will then use this data to inform you how long you fell asleep and spent in each sleeping cycle that night.

Innovative mattresses will perform the same tasks and include other technologies, such as heating or cooling technologies. The benefit of an innovative bed or sensor is that the manufacturers have made them mainly to track sleep. You do not have to worry about them being as inaccurate as fitness tracker apps can be or about whether they’ll slip off your wrists while you sleep.


The Various Stages and Cycles of Sleep

There are four stages of sleep. The two main categories are Light and Deep.

There are two main categories of sleep: light and profound.

Light sleep consists of two stages:

Stage 1 is a short, choppy stage, and you do not feel asleep.
● Stage 2 is slightly more profound, but you still do not feel as if you are asleep. This second stage takes up around half of the night and is when your body regulates the metabolism and processes emotions.

Deeper sleep also consists of two stages:
Stage 3 is the first of the two phases of deeper sleep and is generally referred to as “deep sleep.” Your muscles relax, your breathing slows down, and your heart rate becomes more regular. You become less responsive to outside stimuli.
Stage 4 is the rapid eye movement (REM) stage, and your brain is at its most active. It’s when dreaming occurs, and your eyes move quickly in many directions, which is why we call it “rapid eye movement.”

Going through the cycles

The body goes through several cycles of sleep each night. Each cycle lasts up to around 90 minutes. In the first cycle, you will go through stage one, a transition to stage two; move quickly into a deep sleep, and then move into 10 minutes of REM.

The second cycle will take you through a little lighter sleep, a lot of deep sleep (but less than before), and a bit more REM, whereas the third cycle will involve a lot lighter sleep, a little deep sleep, and more REM.

That is the first half of the night. During the second half, your body will cycle mostly between light sleep and REM.

Write before you go to bed.

We have already touched upon habits that damage the ability to get a good night’s sleep, including drinking alcohol in the evenings, eating heavy meals late at night, or drinking a lot of caffeine after lunch. Cutting these behaviours out and replacing them with more positive habits and lifestyle changes will help you sleep better.

Is there anything else that can help and isn’t medical? One thing you could try is practicing gratitude by writing down a few things that you are grateful to have, be or experience in your life. Practicing gratitude reduces stress and anxiety, making it harder to sleep and focus your thoughts more positively.

Gratitude allows us to recognise the good in our lives. Focusing on and appreciating the good in our lives constantly reminds us of the great things around us.

Another thing you should do is write down anything you need to remember, even if it’s just a simple task or errand you have to do the next day. Get it out of your mind and onto a piece of paper. By doing this, you are permitting yourself to stop thinking about it. The task is down somewhere, and you will not forget it, so now you can relax.

A few final words

A little like keeping track of your finances or your health and fitness activities so you can make changes for the better, keeping a sleep diary is the same. Once you can see where you are at, you (or your doctor) can analyse what is going wrong or right and take appropriate steps.

Sometimes, it is a question of unhelpful lifestyle choices. Other times, you could be experiencing a sleep disorder of which you are unaware. Either way, the way you are going to start getting to the bottom of it all is to keep a sleep diary.

The sleep diary does not call for a considerable commitment. A week or more is enough to collect the data and get an idea of your sleeping habits. Then you can take things from there. If you make changes, carry on maintaining your sleep diary. Then you compare the situation to how it was before and identify any improvements.

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