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Your Very Own Sleep Diary

© James Foster Robinson

Are you getting your forty winks? Are you waking up refreshed in the morning? Or is your sleep pattern shot all to pieces? You do not have to be already diagnosed with a sleep disorder to worry about your quantity and quality of sleep. Poor sleep patterns and sleep disorders often go unrecognized and treated. There is one way you can find out. You can start your very own sleep diary.

What is a sleep diary? It is simply a record of your sleep. The record can be a simple one recording the times you go to bed and wake up to much more complicated ones used by sleep medicine specialists to check a patient's sleep patterns and diagnose possible sleep disorders. The diary is maintained by the person being studied usually over a ten day period. While they may not be accurate, these diaries can point out some general areas of concern such as irregular patterns of going to bed and waking up, lack of refreshing sleep, unusual number of awakenings and other possible disturbances depending on what the sleeper is recording in the diary.

You do not have to be a sleep doctor to set up and maintain your own sleep diary. All you need is a notebook, pen or pencil and the determination to follow through to the end of the time period in which you have decided to do the diary. It is easy.

A simple diary would consist of entries that record the date, the time you go to bed and the time you wake up. You might also want to record how you felt before and after sleeping, what activities you did in the hours before going to bed, what food you ate and drinks like alcohol and coffee you had before retiring, any medication you took, etc. One page per day should be enough but use more if you need to. You do not have to be accurate in the times. Rounding the times off to half hours is sufficient for now.

Do your diary for ten day and then take a look at the results. You might be surprised what you find. For instance, you might see that you are going to bed at different times and getting different amounts of sleep each night. You may also realize that you are getting enough rest when you do sleep. That is, you find that you felt groggy many mornings and had not realized how bad it was until you saw it in black and white in your diary.

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