Editorial policy

Self-help, not medical care

Sleep Tools publishes self-help information. Our pages are not written or reviewed by doctors or sleep clinicians, and we don't describe them as medically reviewed. The tools don't diagnose sleep conditions and don't replace care from a clinician.

Where our information comes from

• Clinical practice guidelines, such as the American Academy of Sleep Medicine guideline on behavioral and psychological treatments for chronic insomnia (2021).
• Peer-reviewed reviews and trials, such as reviews of sleep restriction therapy in Sleep Medicine Reviews and the HABIT trial in The Lancet (2023).
• Standard research instruments, such as the Consensus Sleep Diary.

Each page lists its sources with links to PubMed or the publisher. When sources disagree, we say so rather than picking one number and presenting it as the rule.

How we check what we publish

• Citations: every PubMed ID and DOI on a page is looked up and matched to the cited title and authors. An automated check stops a page from being built if it contains an ID we haven't matched.
• Numbers: thresholds, minimums and other treatment numbers appear only with the named source they come from, and never as a universal or “safe” value.
• AI assistance: drafts of text and code may be prepared with AI assistance. A draft is not treated as finished until a team member has checked it against the cited sources.

When a tool may show a sleep window

Sleep-restriction protocols differ from study to study. The sleep window page can only show an estimate based on one named protocol, and only after our team has checked that protocol against its sources. That check isn’t finished yet, so the page doesn’t show an estimate.

Even then, the estimate is shown only after a week of sleep-log nights, and only to people whose answers to a short set of questions match the adults the approach was tested in. Those questions follow the exclusions of the HABIT trial and the cautions in the AASM guideline. Your answers stay on your device.

Corrections

When we find an error, or someone tells us about one, we correct the page and its source list. A corrected number or citation goes through the same checks as new content.

Independence

This site doesn't show advertising or use affiliate links. See the privacy policy for what the tools store and what they never send.