How to keep a sleep diary

A sleep diary can help you better understand your own sleep behavior and document progress in improving sleep. You can find instructions on how to keep a sleep diary and a practical template to download here.

Table of contents

1. What is a sleep diary?
2. How to write a sleep diary
3. Evaluation of the sleep diary
4. Download template

1. What is a sleep diary?

Diaries are a great tool for sorting out your thoughts, recording memories and better dealing with worries or feelings. A sleep diary is used to document your own sleep behavior in order to better analyze and evaluate your sleep. Because the restfulness of our sleep depends on many different factors, it's not just about how well you slept at night, but also how you behave and feel before going to bed. That's why a sleep diary usually consists of two components: the evening log and the morning log.

In the evening you describe how you felt during the day and before going to bed, whether you did anything special or ate certain foods. In the morning, you record how your night went - for example, whether you felt refreshed and whether you fell asleep quickly or woke up more often during the night.

A sleep diary documents your sleep behavior over several weeks and can then be evaluated by you alone or together with a sleep coach or doctor. In this way, you can see under which conditions or situations you slept well and when you slept worse and draw conclusions about which factors may influence, disrupt or even improve your sleep. Keeping a sleep diary is therefore very helpful in helping you improve your sleep.

2. This is how you write a sleep diary

A sleep diary should be kept for several weeks so that you get a long-term overview of your sleep and can monitor changes.

Here’s how it works:

Take 5 minutes in the evening, fill out the evening log after turning off the lights (!) and then go straight to sleep. The next morning, you pick up the morning log immediately after getting up and fill it out too. You repeat this every evening or Morning

Tips:

• Keep the sleep diary for at least 2-3 weeks.
• Fill out the sleep diary carefully, regularly, completely and of course truthfully, because it is not a control but is intended to help improve your sleep in the long term.
• To indicate your bedtime, wake-up time and get-up time in the morning, you can use a clock and read the exact time. All other time values, e.g. b You should estimate how long it takes you to fall asleep or how long you stay awake at night based on your feel and not use a watch.

3. Evaluation of the sleep diary

When evaluating your sleep diary, you can look at various factors, for example your average time sleeping and falling asleep, or your level of daytime sleepiness over the last few weeks. Of course, it's best if you can discuss the sleep diary with an expert and the results can be evaluated together. This will help you better understand your sleep behavior and find out what measures could help you improve your sleep. A sleep coach can also give you direct recommendations and provide you with individual advice and support.

4. Sleep diary template to download

With our practical template you can easily start keeping your sleep diary straight away. We have prepared the evening and morning log for you and look forward to helping you understand your sleep better from now on with the help of the sleep diary. Simply download the template, print it out and get started!

To the sleep diary template ➨