King of Spades - Keep a Sleep Diary
What to do?
Keep a sleep diary. This week, take a moment to write about how you slept. As Peter Drucker famously said, “What gets measured, gets managed.”
How to do it?
Write about your sleep in a notebook, on a piece of paper, or in your smartphone or computer. Include responses to questions such as:
- How do you feel this morning?
- How well do you feel that you slept?
- What time did you go to bed?
- How long did it take you to fall asleep?
- Did you wake up in the night? How many times? For how long?
- What did you do before sleeping?
- Did you wake up naturally or by your alarm?
- Were you warm enough? Too warm?
Why do it?
Sleep diaries are the gold-standard method of self-reporting sleep used by researchers and doctors to assess the sleep of their participants and patients (Mallinson et al., 2019). So, why not use one to assess your own sleep? If you wake up one day feeling fantastic, well-rested, and ready to tackle the day, you can record that in your sleep diary. Now you know what variables came into play to create an amazing sleep for you. In the same way, if you wake up feeling weary and worn, record the details of the variables surrounding that sleep to better understand what behaviours to avoid.
Small changes CAN make a big difference – that’s what the 1% club is all about.
References
Mallinson, D. C., Kamenetsky, M. E., Hagen, E. W., & Peppard, P. E. (2019). Subjective sleep measurement: Comparing sleep diary to questionnaire. Nature and Science of Sleep, Volume 11, 197–206. https://doi.org/10.2147/nss.s217867
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