So you lead a sleeping diary

A sleep diary can help you better understand your own sleeping habits and document your progress in improving your 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. template for download

1. What is a sleep diary?

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

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 then 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 sleeping habits over several weeks and can then be evaluated by you alone or together with a sleep coach or doctor. This allows you to see under which conditions or in which situations you slept well and when you slept worse, and to draw conclusions about which factors may influence, disturb or improve your sleep. Keeping a sleep diary is therefore very helpful in helping you improve 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 5 minutes in the evening, fill out the evening log after turning off the lights (!) and then go straight to sleep. The next morning, immediately after getting up, take 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 tell you when you go to bed and when you wake up and get up in the morning and read the exact time. All other time values, such as the time it takes to fall asleep or the length of time you are awake at night, should be estimated based on your gut feeling and not using a clock.

3. Evaluation of the sleep diary

When evaluating your sleep diary, you can look at various factors, such as the average length of time you sleep and fall asleep, or the level of your daytime sleepiness over the last few weeks. Of course, it is best if you can discuss the sleep diary with an expert and evaluate the results together.This will help you better understand your sleeping habits and find out 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. We have prepared the evening and morning log for you and we hope that you will be able to 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 ➨