Use of a Sleep Diary

Abstract

A sleep diary is an important instrument to log both daytime activities and sleep over a period. Preferably the sleep diary should be maintained for 14 days. In follow-up cases, it may be done for 7 days. The most important aspect of a complete sleep diary is the motivated person who fills it. The primary care physician or the therapist needs to spend time making the patient understand the need to fill out the diary regularly in order to get a complete diary, and if the patient does miss a day due to some unavoidable reason, it may be left blank rather than trying to complete it by retrospective recall. A sleep diary requires prospective recall, and hence it should be filled twice daily, once just before sleep time when the patient writes about the daytime activities and then immediately after waking up when the patient gives details about the nighttime sleep pattern. The sleep diary is recommended to be used throughout an intervention or therapy session to understand the changes in habits and in sleep-wake and thus to study the effect of the intervention. This chapter discusses the methodology of using a sleep diary and the sleep diary of a case of chronic insomnia.