A free sleep diary you can print

Download the sleep diary (PDF). There's a page for each week and one more to add it all up, and it prints on US Letter or A4. No sign-up.

Sleep diaries are a standard part of CBT-I, and a clinician will usually ask you to keep one. Ours uses the core questions of the Consensus Sleep Diary, which a panel of sleep researchers published in 2012: when you got into bed, how long it took to fall asleep, how long you were awake in the night, when you got up, and how well you slept. We also kept naps, caffeine, alcohol and how rested you feel from its longer version, since they're among the easiest things to change.

How to fill it in

Each morning, within an hour of getting up, fill in one column: yesterday at the top, last night below. Guesses are fine, so there's no need to check the clock in the night, and clock-watching tends to make nights worse.

Each column is one day and the night after it, so yesterday's coffee and last night's sleep sit together and you can see whether one goes with the other.

Keep going for two weeks, weekends included. In one week, a single bad night moves the averages a lot.

What to look for after two weeks

When the two weeks are up, start with how long you took to fall asleep and how long you were awake in the night. Sleep researchers often use more than 30 minutes of either, on three or more nights a week, for months, as a line for insomnia. It's a yardstick for studies, not a diagnosis, so if you're under it and still struggling, or you wake too early and can't get back to sleep, that counts too.

Look at how much your get-up time moves around. If it shifts by more than an hour, especially on weekends, that's worth working on, and there's a page on keeping it steady.

Compare the nights after a nap, late caffeine or a drink with the rest. If they look worse, try two weeks without. If you drink most days, cut down slowly instead and talk to a doctor, since stopping suddenly can make you unwell and sleep often gets worse before it gets better.

You can also work out your sleep efficiency: the hours you slept divided by the hours you were trying to sleep. That runs from when you tried to go to sleep to when you woke for the day. Time spent reading or scrolling in bed doesn't count, and time up in the night does. Six hours asleep out of eight spent trying is 75%. Please don't cut your time in bed just to push the number up. If you want to try that part of CBT-I, use one of the programs on our free CBT-I page, or see a clinician.

A diary or a ring?

A diary records what the night felt like, which is what insomnia is about. A ring or a watch estimates sleep from movement and heart rate. In a study that tested seven consumer trackers, wristbands and bedside devices but no rings, against a sleep lab in healthy young adults, they were good at spotting sleep but missed much of the time people lay awake, and did worse on disrupted nights. In people with insomnia, a Fitbit did the same, counting more sleep and less time awake than the lab.

If you have both, expect the ring to show more sleep than you felt. Part of that is the ring counting still, quiet time awake as sleep, and part is real: many people with insomnia do sleep more than it feels like. A gap between the two is normal, and neither one is the whole story of your night.

Taking it to a doctor

If you've slept badly three or more nights a week for three months, take the diary to your doctor and ask about CBT-I. Two weeks of it on paper saves a lot of explaining.

Don't wait if you snore loudly, stop breathing or wake gasping, nod off in the day without meaning to, get an urge to move your legs in the evening, or your mood has dropped a long way. See a doctor sooner for those. If you're having thoughts of suicide or harming yourself, call or text 988 in the US, or call Samaritans on 116 123 in the UK.

The diary in Goodmorrow

Goodmorrow's morning note is a spoken version of the diary's yesterday rows and how the night felt. You say how yesterday went and things like late caffeine or a night awake come out as tags. It doesn't log times, so for the numbers above, use the paper one.