A sleep diary is a record of your sleeping. It includes many aspects of your actual sleep experience as well as the factors that may influence sleep. Sleep diaries can be an extremely important exhibit for your doctor or a sleep specialist to aid in identifying and diagnosing sleep conditions. For these reasons, they might be requested of you by your doctor or a sleep center in order to get more accurate data about your sleeping.
Sleep diaries are generally kept over a period of at least two weeks, but the longer the better. Let's look at the top reasons to keep a sleep diary, as well as other important information.
Why keep a sleep diary? A sleep diary is generally kept for the following top five reasons:
Sleep diaries are easy to keep, only taking about 5-10 minutes per day.
The quality and usefulness of your sleep diary will depend entirely on what you keep in it, and how detailed you are. Here are the basic things to include in your sleep diary:
It's common to keep information about exercise, alcohol/coffee drinking, and screen habits in a sleep diary
Sleep tracker apps or fitness tracker apps can be useful aids to a sleep diary for gaining additional information about your sleeping.
Analyzing your sleep diary is important. Generally what you want to look for are negative patterns that often recur, such as:
Your doctor or sleep specialist may have additional parameters for how you should evaluate your sleep diary depending on the reason for keeping a diary.
Fortunately, there aren’t many tips for keeping a sleep diary because they are easy to keep. Here is basic advice:
If you are struggling with sleep and are considering starting a sleep diary to track your sleep, please take this online sleep test.