A Simple Sleep Diary: What to Record and Why
A two-minute morning and evening template, four rules for keeping it honest, and how to read two weeks of entries without over-interpreting them.
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A sleep diary is a few lines written each day about when you slept and what happened around it. It takes about two minutes. After a week or two it shows you something memory cannot: what your nights actually look like, as opposed to how the worst one felt.
It is also one of the first things a clinician may ask for. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says a health care provider may ask you to keep one, and the US National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) suggests keeping a diary for one to two weeks before an appointment about sleep.
What to record
The lists published by the CDC and the NHLBI overlap closely. Between them they cover: when you go to bed, when you wake in the night, when you get up, naps, how sleepy you feel during the day, exercise, alcohol and caffeinated drinks, and medicines.
The template below turns those items into two short sets of questions: one for the morning, about the night just gone, and one for the evening, about the day.
The template
Morning: fill in soon after getting up
| Question | How to answer | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Went to bed | Clock time | 23:10 |
| Fell asleep after about | Rough estimate | 40 min |
| Woke in the night | How many times; roughly how long in total | Twice; 30 min |
| Woke for the day | Clock time | 06:20 |
| Got out of bed | Clock time | 06:50 |
| How rested I feel | 1 (not at all) to 5 (very) | 2 |
Evening: fill in before your wind-down
| Question | How to answer | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Daytime sleepiness | 1 (alert) to 5 (struggled to stay awake) | 4, worst at 15:00 |
| Naps | Time and length | None |
| Caffeine | What, and time of the last one | 3 coffees; last 16:30 |
| Alcohol | What and when | 1 glass wine, 20:00 |
| Exercise | What and when | 30 min walk, 12:30 |
| Medicines taken | Name and time | None |
| Anything unusual | A few words | Late deadline |
Copy it into a notebook, a notes app or a spreadsheet with one row per day. The NHLBI also publishes a printable one-page sleep diary designed to be taken to a doctor.
Four rules that keep it useful
Estimate; do not measure
“About 40 minutes” is good enough. Do not check the clock during the night to make the diary more exact. Healthdirect, Australia’s government health information service, advises against clock-watching in bed because it can increase anxiety, and suggests removing the clock from the bedroom if possible. Make your best guess in the morning.
Write it at the same two points each day
Morning entries made at 4pm are mostly guesswork. Keep the notebook where you have breakfast, and do the evening half before your wind-down so it does not become a screen task in bed.
Record the ordinary days
The diary is only informative if it includes unremarkable nights. A record of bad nights alone tells you what you already know.
Do not change things halfway
If the aim is to see your current pattern, live normally for the first week. If you then want to test a change, such as an earlier caffeine cut-off, change that one thing in week two. Our article on caffeine and sleep timing walks through that kind of test.
Reading it back after two weeks
Lay the pages side by side and look for patterns, not for a verdict. A diary cannot diagnose anything. It can show you where to look.
- Timing. How far apart are your earliest and latest bedtimes and get-up times? The NHLBI suggests keeping weekday and weekend schedules within about an hour of each other.
- Time in bed against time asleep. Are you regularly in bed for much longer than you sleep?
- Where the wakefulness falls. Mostly at the start of the night, in the middle, or early in the morning?
- Days that precede a worse night. Late caffeine, alcohol, a long nap, an unusually stressful evening? One coincidence means little; the same thing four times in a fortnight is worth testing.
- Daytime. Does the “rested” score follow the hours slept, or not? Feeling unrested after what looks like enough sleep is worth noting.
Be careful about cause and effect. A poor night after a late coffee does not prove the coffee did it; a hard day may have led to both. The difference between association and causation applies to your own notes as much as to published studies.
If you use a sleep tracker
A tracker and a diary record different things. The device estimates sleep from sensors; the diary records your experience and the context around it, such as caffeine, alcohol, naps and how you felt. If you use both, keep the diary going. What sleep trackers can and cannot tell you explains the limits of the device’s numbers.
Taking it to an appointment
The NHS advises seeing a GP if changing your sleep habits has not helped, if you have had trouble sleeping for months, or if it is affecting your daily life in a way that makes it hard to cope. If you make that appointment, bring the diary itself, not a summary, plus two or three lines on what you have already tried. Preparing to talk to a clinician about ongoing sleep problems covers the rest.
Sources
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (US) About Sleep
- National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NIH) (US) Insomnia - Diagnosis
- National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NIH) (US) Sleep Diary
- healthdirect (Australian Government) (Australia) Sleep - stages, tips, disorders, apnoea
- National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NIH) (US) Sleep Deprivation and Deficiency - Healthy Sleep Habits
- NHS (UK) Insomnia
How this guide was prepared
Written by Meetis Editorial with AI assistance, using the sources listed above, and checked against them before publication. It has not been reviewed by a doctor or other health professional. It is general information, not personal medical advice — for questions about your own health, speak to a qualified professional.
