Sleep Diary Template

One row per night, filled in the next morning — everything a clinician needs and nothing they don't:

Too many columns? Cut it down — a five-column diary you keep for fourteen days beats an eleven-column one abandoned on day four. Non-negotiable: lights out, final wake time, and a quality rating.

Fill it in within half an hour of rising, before the night blurs.

• To bed vs lights out — two different times; forty minutes of nightly scrolling in bed is itself a finding.
• Asleep by — a guess is fine; clinicians expect one.
• Wake-ups — how many, and roughly how long in total; "3 (~40 min)" is enough.
• Final wake and out of bed — a long gap between them is one of the habits that keeps insomnia alive; see insomnia causes.
• Time slept — time in bed minus time awake in it; the number that gets averaged.
• Quality 1–5 — how restored you felt, not how long you slept; subjective is the point.
• Naps — length and time; late or long ones cut the next night's sleep pressure.
• Notes — where the answers hide: caffeine, alcohol, exercise, medication, stress, next-day sleepiness, morning headaches, snoring your partner mentioned.

One rule: don't clock-watch — checking the time repeatedly makes both your sleep and your diary worse. Turn the clock away; estimate in the morning — that's how clinicians read it.

Fourteen consecutive nights is the standard ask, and not for roundness:

• Single nights are noise — a pattern needs enough nights to separate itself from a stressful Tuesday.
• It captures weekdays and weekends, twice — the weekday-weekend gap (social jetlag) is one of a diary's most common, most fixable findings.
• It gives a baseline — a credible "before" for whatever you change next.

Include the bad nights — a diary edited to look respectable sends your clinician down the wrong path. Missed a morning? Leave the row blank: a gap is honest data, an invented row isn't.

At the end, work out average time slept, average time in bed, and sleep efficiency (time asleep over time in bed). Above roughly 85% is considered healthy; much lower means too much time in bed for the sleep you're getting — the pattern behavioral treatment targets.

Clinics ask for a week or two of diary alongside testing — it answers questions no single lab night can.

Before a sleep study, it establishes your normal: a study measures one or two nights; the diary says you average five and a half hours, or that your bedtime swings by three hours.

To tell conditions apart. Insufficient sleep: too few hours at normal quality. Circadian disorder: good sleep at the "wrong" clock times. Insomnia: long sleep-onset or long awakenings. Unexplained awakenings plus daytime sleepiness suggest a breathing problem — see sleep apnea signs.

To run treatment. Behavioral insomnia treatment runs on diary numbers — prescribed time in bed is set from your average sleep time and widened as efficiency improves. On CPAP therapy, the diary sits beside the machine's usage data: hours run versus how you slept and felt.

Bring the whole thing, not a summary — your clinician wants the spread and the outliers.

Paper works: this template by the bed, a pen, two minutes a morning. The cost comes after the fourteenth morning — nobody averages fourteen nights by hand or computes efficiency twice, patterns hide inside columns of times, and three months later the sheet is gone.

Sleep & CPAP Feeltracker is this template, automated. A manual diary, not a sleep-stage tracker — it doesn't listen to the room or guess your stages: sleep and wake times with time slept calculated, quality ratings, notes and dreams, CPAP usage logging, charts and trends, and export to PDF, XLSX, CSV or JSON for the clinic. Reminders, widgets, Apple Health sync, iCloud sync with no account, and AI insights on your history (free, with optional premium).

Start tonight, not on a "normal" week — there's no such thing, and the diary you begin today is two weeks ahead of the one you're waiting to start.