Are you struggling to get a good night’s sleep? You’re not alone. Sleep is a cornerstone of physical health, emotional well-being, and mental clarity. Yet many find it challenging to get a good night’s sleep. Whether it’s an irregular sleep pattern, trouble falling asleep, or constant tiredness, understanding your sleep behaviors is a good first step toward improvement. Enter the sleep diary.
A sleep diary is a simple yet powerful tool for gaining insights into your sleep routine and identifying what works and doesn’t. By recording your daily sleep-related behaviors and observations, you can identify patterns, behaviors, and potential sleep disruptions. Completing a sleep diary can be particularly effective when paired with sleep scheduling techniques, as it provides personalized data to adjust your sleep routine to enhance your overall rest.
In this blog post, you’ll learn about sleep scheduling techniques and recording your sleep-related behaviors in a sleep diary. Along the way, you’ll learn key terms to build a good foundation for understanding sleep science. By the end, you’ll have a roadmap to track your sleep behaviors and implement proven strategies for creating a personalized sleep schedule that can fit your needs.
Key terms
Let’s start by reviewing some key terms: prior wakefulness and sleep efficiency. Prior wakefulness is the number of hours that accrue from waking up in the morning to turning off the lights at bedtime. Adenosine is a neuromodulator in your brain that accumulates each hour you’re awake. The earlier you wake up and the longer you’re awake, the more adenosine you accrue, which increases the pressure to sleep at night.
Sleep efficiency is the proportion of the time you’re asleep divided by the time you allow for sleep. For example, if your schedule is to turn off the lights at 11 PM and get out of bed at 7 AM, you’ve allowed eight hours of sleep. If you slept 6 of those 8 hours (e.g., took a ½ hour after lights out to fall asleep, woke up a few times during the night, and was awake for about 1½ hours), your sleep efficiency is 6/8, which is .75 or 75%. Sleep efficiency rates vary:
- Good sleepers, around 90% or greater
- Normal sleepers, around 85 to less than 90%
- Poor sleepers, less than 85%
The bed has generally become a strong cue to sleep for good sleepers. Poor sleepers might have learned to associate the bed with wakefulness or arousal.
Sleep scheduling techniques
Sleep scheduling techniques center on when you go to bed, when you get out, and how much time you allow for sleep. You can record these things and other sleep behaviors in the sleep diary, which is available to download in the handouts below.
Schedule a time to wake up. Get up at the same time each morning. Staying in bed later on the weekends, days you’re not working, or after a poor night’s sleep reduces your prior wakefulness and accumulation of adenosine. It decreases the pressure to sleep and can lower sleep efficiency.
Schedule how much time to sleep. To start, consider reducing the time you allow for sleep to match your average sleep time. You can calculate this time by filling out a daily sleep diary. For example, suppose your sleep diary shows you sleep 6 hours on average but spend 8 hours in bed. Your initial goal would be to reduce the time you allow for sleep to 6 hours. You could accomplish this by going to bed later, getting up earlier, or doing both.
Reducing the time you allow for sleep is temporary. It increases your prior wakefulness, adenosine, and sleep efficiency. People tend to go to sleep faster, and their beds have become a more reliable cue for sleep.
Generally, the time you allow for sleep should be between 6 and 7 hours but no less than 5.5 hours. Less than 5.5 hours would result in insufficient core sleep.
Once your sleep efficiency reaches around 85% for a week, you may gradually increase the time you allow for sleep by 30 minutes each week until it no longer yields an increase in your sleep time. Remember to track your sleep efficiency using the sleep diary.
Here are some tips to help initially reduce the time you allow for sleep:
- Use the extra time in the evening or morning to do things you’ve wanted to do.
- Engage in light activities, such as completing a household chore or project, a few hours before bedtime to delay sleepiness. Sitting down and watching TV or being a couch potato in the evening to pass the time can make it harder to delay bedtime.
- Pair getting out of bed earlier in the morning with a pleasurable or exercise activity, such as walking the dog, working out at the gym, or meditating. Having something to look forward to in the morning can help make getting up earlier easier.
Finally, less sleep can make some medical conditions worse, such as bipolar mood or a seizure disorder. Taking some medications can also make restrictions on sleep unsafe to do. Consulting with a medical professional for help is important before restricting sleep.