Summary: To keep a sleep diary to improve your mental health, you can keep a notebook next to your bed and make journal entries every morning that record details about your sleep you may forget as you get busy with your day, then use your entries to identify what factors help you get good sleep and what factor prevent you from getting good sleep.
Key Points:
- Alongside healthy eating and daily exercise and activity, getting good sleep every night is a foundational pillar of mental and physical health.
- When you keep a sleep diary, you can assess how sleep affects your mental health by comparing daily symptoms with the quality of sleep the night before.
- You can look for short-term, daily outcomes related to your previous night of sleep or look for long-term outcomes related to the quality of your sleep over weeks and months.
- If you’re in treatment for a mental health disorder, your sleep diary can be a valuable resource, which we encourage you to share with your treatment team.
The Importance of Sleep Hygiene for Physical and Mental Health
Over the past several years, we’ve published several articles on the relationship between sleep and mental health. In order to get a basic understanding of how good sleep can promote good mental health, you can visit our blog and read these two:
Sleep and Mental Health: What’s the Relationship?
Does Lack of Sleep Increase Risk of Depression?
In those articles, we talk about the fact that sleep can create challenges for people in mental health treatment. The relationship and challenges aren’t always simple. In fact, different mental health disorders can have opposite and contrasting effects on your sleep. Some people can’t sleep at all, others sleep too much, and for still others it’s hit or miss: they have good nights and they have tough nights.
One thing that helps, no matter what your sleep issues are, is developing good sleep hygiene. Sleep hygiene involves a variety of things, but they’re all designed with one goal in mind, which is to improve overall quality of life – and thereby improve your mental health – by improving your quality and consistency of sleep.
And if you’re having a tough time getting your sleep hygiene in order, then one thing sleep experts recommend is keeping a sleep diary, which some people call a sleep journal. Whatever you call it, writing down notes about your sleep hygiene can help you identify the things that may impact your sleep either positively or negatively.
When you can do that, you can improve your sleep. Which, in turn, improves overall health and wellbeing, which, in turn, can help improve your mental health.
How to Keep a Sleep Diary
Some of us have a great memory and can remember details about almost everything, from what they did yesterday to what they did on a random Tuesday when they were in 10th grade. On the other hand, some of us can’t remember what shirt we put on this morning without checking.
The truth is, though, that most of us are somewhere in between.
We may know we had a sleepless night one night last week, but can’t remember which night it was, and we definitely can’t remember if we drank a cup of coffee that afternoon, which may have caused the sleepless night.
The purpose of a sleep diary is to take the guesswork out of the equation and keep a record of all the things that can impact your sleep – positive and negative – so you can connect the dots between your habitual behaviors, your sleep patterns, and your mental health. You can go out and buy a specific sleep journal – like this one – or you can download one of several available for free online, like this one from the National Sleep Foundation.
You can go that route, or you can use a simple notebook from the school supply section at the grocery store. The packaging isn’t important – it’s the content that counts. If you buy a sleep journal, it will have a daily template with a list of questions. If you make your own, use it to answer the questions below every morning when you wake up.
Sleep Diary Questions
- What time did you go to bed?
- How long did it take to fall asleep?
- Did you wake up during the night?
- If so, how many times?
- How many hours total did you sleep?
- What time did you get up?
- How did you feel when you got up?
- Great
- Just okay
- A little tired
- Very tired
- If you didn’t sleep well, do you know why?
- Did you have a stressful day?
- Did you take a nap late in the day?
- Did you drink caffeine after 3:00 pm?
- Did you drink alcohol close to bedtime?
- Did you eat a big meal close to bedtime?
- Did you do a hard workout close to bedtime?
- Think about the hour before bedtime. Were you:
- Watching TV?
- Surfing the internet?
- Texting?
- Playing a game on a tablet?
- Reading on an e-reader Kindle-type device?
The goal is to track your progress over a month, but when you keep a diary, you’ll learn about your habits quickly. After a week to ten days, the habits that have either a positive or negative impact on your sleep will reveal themselves. And when you use your sleep diary to help improve your mental health, you add a section to your diary where you track the symptoms associated with your disorder.
Sleep Diary for Mental Health: Add Questions About Symptoms
This is where you can collaborate with your therapist to decide exactly what you should keep a record of, which should align with what you’re working on in treatment. For instance, if you have depression, you focus on symptoms like sadness, motivation, and self-esteem, whereas if you have anxiety, you may focus on symptoms like fear, worry, and nervousness.
Your therapist can help you decide what to track, and can work with you to identify the relationship between answers to your general sleep hygiene questions and the answers to your disorder-specific symptom questions, with the overall goal of understanding – and improving – the connection between your sleep patterns and your mental health.
Translating Knowledge to Action
Once you track your habits and understand how they affect your mental health, the next step is to apply what you learn. You probably notice, for instance, that screen time before bed can keep you awake, caffeine late in the afternoon can keep you awake, and exercising too close to bedtime can keep you awake.
However, those are only rules for you if they apply to you. If doing an intense exercise class at 8:00 pm followed by a big dinner at 9:30 pm puts you down like a baby – and you sleep through the night and wake up refreshed, there’s your answer. Make that part of your routine. But if going for a walk before bed and then having a snack energizes you and prevents you from falling asleep, there’s another answer. Don’t make that part of your routine.
Your sleep diary will help you determine what’s right for you. Use it like a scientist uses a lab book. Experiment, keep good records, check your results, revise, experiment more, learn what works – and do more of it. That way, you can create the perfect sleep routine for you: one that improves overall health and wellbeing, but most importantly, promotes long-term, sustainable, and positive improvements in your mental health.
Gianna Melendez
Jodie Dahl, CpHT