How to fill it in
- Fill in the row for last night soon after you get up, while you still remember it.
- Write down your best estimate. Round numbers are fine; a sleep diary tracks patterns across nights rather than laboratory-exact minutes.
- “Final wake-up” is the last time you woke. “Got out of bed” is when you got up for the day. The gap between them counts as time awake in bed before rising.
- Use the final column for optional context that might affect your sleep: daytime naps, late caffeine, alcohol, or illness.
Where the columns come from
This template is informed by the Consensus Sleep Diary (CSD), a consensus-based sleep diary developed by sleep researchers to standardize prospective sleep self-monitoring (Carney et al., 2012).
Most of the sleep-timing columns are based on the Core Consensus Sleep Diary items (bedtime, sleep latency, number and duration of awakenings, final wake-up time, and rising time). We also include a combined notes column for optional context such as naps, caffeine and alcohol, which are drawn from expanded CSD versions. The wording here is our own and adapted to fit a clear, single-page printable format.
Turning the diary into numbers
A sleep diary provides self-reported estimates of your sleep timing rather than direct physiological measurements of sleep stages. Three primary metrics are derived from each entry:
- Time in Bed (TIB): The total elapsed duration between settling into bed intending to sleep and getting out of bed for the day.
- Total Sleep Time (TST): Estimated time actually asleep, calculated as Time in Bed minus the time it took to fall asleep (sleep latency) and any time spent awake during the night (WASO and awake before rising).
- Sleep Efficiency: The estimated proportion of time in bed spent asleep (TST ÷ TIB × 100).
You can calculate these values by hand, or enter your nights into the online sleep log. The online calculator computes multi-night aggregate sleep efficiency (ΣTST ÷ ΣTIB × 100), summarizes average durations across your nights, displays a night-by-night bar chart, and can print a completed summary table for your records. Everything is processed locally in your browser—nothing you enter leaves your device.
A diary is a structured personal record, not a clinical assessment or diagnosis. If persistent sleep difficulties are interfering with your daytime alertness or health, consider taking your completed diary to a physician or sleep specialist to provide an objective starting point for your discussion.