A sleep journal may help you identify your positive and negative sleep patterns. For great results, use one for at least a week.
Tracking your habits can be great for almost any health area, especially sleep. A sleep journal allows you to log bedtimes, duration and quality of sleep, and how factors like caffeine- and alcohol-containing drinks, medications, and exercise affect sleep.
Using a sleep journal for at least a week can help you identify patterns affecting your rest. The data it provides can help you and your doctor understand sleep problems. In fact, a 2022 study found that sleep tracking was a meaningful way to assess insomnia from the participants’ perspectives and resulted in useful information.
Learn more about sleep disorders.
Though you can purchase entire book-bound diaries created for tracking sleep, a sleep journal doesn’t have to be fancy (or even particularly long). It can be any digital or physical record of your sleep and the influences affecting it.
Some people may prefer to write a sleep journal as a narrative, writing sentences or paragraphs describing each day’s sleep patterns. Others may like the convenience of a graph or chart with simple boxes to check and numbers to fill in.
For example, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) has a free downloadable
Other useful diaries are available from the National Sleep Foundation (NSF) and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
Consider using a sleep-tracking app and a wearable device such as Oura, Calm, or SleepWatch to simplify things even further. A small 2023 study found that sleep-tracking apps helped people maintain consistent usage.
Sleep journal templates may include many factors that influence sleep. In general, though, some elements to track include:
- total sleep hours per 24-hour period
- sleepiness level…
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