So you lead a sleeping diary

A sleep diary can help you better understand your sleep habits and document your progress in improving your sleep. You can find instructions on how to keep a sleep diary and a handy 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. Template for download

1. What is a sleep diary?

Diaries are a great tool for organizing your thoughts, recording memories, and better dealing with worries or feelings. A sleep diary is used to document your sleep behavior in order to better analyze and evaluate your sleep. Because the restorativeness of our sleep depends on numerous different factors, it's not just about how well you slept during the night, but also about your behavior and well-being before going to bed. Therefore, a sleep diary usually consists of two components: The Evening minutes and the Morning protocol.

In the evening, describe how you felt during the day and before going to bed, whether you did anything special or ate certain foods. In the morning, record how your night went—for example, whether you felt rested 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 with a sleep coach or doctor. This allows you to identify under which conditions or situations you slept well and when you slept worse, and to draw conclusions about which factors may be influencing, disrupting, or improving your sleep. Keeping a sleep diary is therefore very helpful in supporting you in improving your sleep.

2. How to write a sleep diary

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

Here's how:

Take five minutes in the evening, fill out the evening log after turning out the lights (!), and then go straight to bed. The next morning, immediately after getting up, pick up the morning log and fill it out as well. Repeat this every evening and morning.

Tips:

• Keep a 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.
• You can use a clock to record your bedtime, wake-up time, and get-up time in the morning, and read the exact time. All other time values, such as the time it takes to fall asleep or the duration of nighttime waking phases, should be estimated based on your gut feeling rather than using a clock.

3. Evaluation of the sleep diary

When evaluating your sleep diary, you can consider various factors, such as your average sleep duration and the time it takes to fall asleep, or your level of daytime sleepiness over the past few weeks. It's best, of course, if you can discuss your sleep diary with a professional and evaluate the results together. This will help you better understand your sleep behavior and determine which 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 right away. We've prepared the evening and morning log for you and hope you can better understand your sleep with the help of the sleep diary. Simply download the template, print it out, and get started!

To the sleep diary template ➨