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Sleep Logs: Helpful Tool or Another Reason to Stress About Sleep?
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’But I’m not spending that much time in bed’’
Oh, but she was.
Jacqueline, 51, came to me after struggling with insomnia for years. She had been taking strong sleeping medication for about two years, but her sleep was still disrupted, and she wasn't feeling particularly wonderful during the day either.
She had recently started a stressful new job, moved to a different community, and was living far away from her family. Life had changed quite a bit, and her evenings had become very quiet.
During one of our early coaching sessions, I started asking some basic questions.
What time do you get into bed? What do you do in the evenings? When do you get up for work?
She told me she usually climbed into bed around 7 or 8 p.m. She'd watch Netflix, read, relax, eventually take her sleeping pill, and try to sleep.
By 6 a.m., she was up getting ready for work.
When I pointed out how much time she was spending in bed, she wasn't convinced.
"But I'm not sleeping all that time!"
Exactly!
And that's when I suggested something I don't automatically use with every client.
A sleep log.
What Are Sleep Logs, and Can They Help With Insomnia?
A sleep log, sometimes called a sleep diary or sleep journal, is a simple way to record your sleep patterns. It might include when you get into bed, when you actually fall asleep, how often you wake during the night, and when you get up in the morning.
Sleep logs are commonly used in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I), an evidence-based treatment that looks at the thoughts and behaviors that can interfere with sleep.
And yes, they can be incredibly useful.
But here's where I sometimes do things differently.
I don't believe every person struggling with insomnia needs to start tracking their sleep.
I want to understand what we're hoping to learn from that information and whether keeping a log will actually help that particular person. For Jacqueline, I had a very specific reason.
"Let's keep track for a week and see what we discover."
Discover we did!
What Jacqueline's Sleep Log Revealed
At our next session, Jacqueline looked at her journal and said, "Wow. I really am getting into bed at seven. And I'm not even tired!"
But what came next was far more interesting.
She was bored.
And lonely.
She didn't have much of a social life in her new community. Her family was far away, and after a stressful day at work, there wasn't much happening in the evenings.
So she went to bed.
Not because she was sleepy, but because she didn't know what else to do. She also believed something I hear quite often from people struggling with insomnia: if I'm not getting enough sleep, I should spend more time in bed to make up for it. But spending more hours in bed when you're wide awake doesn't necessarily lead to more sleep.
Sometimes it just means spending more hours awake in bed.
Now we had something to work with!
For the following week, we focused on bringing a little more life into her evenings.
Nothing complicated. Grocery shopping. A community challah bake. Dinner with a friend. Even a concert!
When we spoke again, she told me how much she'd enjoyed having things to plan and look forward to. And after those evenings out, she was actually coming home feeling tired.
Something else happened that I loved.
Jacqueline began adding things to her sleep journal herself. What she was eating, how much she was exercising, and other details she wanted to understand about her days.
The journal had become a tool for curiosity and discovery.
Not another rule she was terrified of breaking.
When Sleep Logs Can Make Sleep Anxiety Worse
Now, imagine giving that same sleep journal to someone whose entire day already revolves around worrying about sleep.
Someone who checks the clock constantly, calculates how many hours are left before morning, and wakes up immediately wondering whether last night's sleep was good enough.
Or someone who has already tried CBT-I and become so attached to following every instruction perfectly that bedtime feels like an exam.
Did I get into bed at exactly the right time?
Did I stay awake too long?
Did I ruin everything by taking a nap?
What if I fill out my sleep log incorrectly?
For that person, asking them to record every detail of their night may add another layer of pressure. Instead of helping them understand their sleep, the journal can become one more thing to monitor, analyze, and worry about.
When someone is already terrified of doing sleep "wrong," more tracking isn't necessarily what they need.
For some people, sleep has already become a full-time job. They're constantly checking, measuring, and evaluating whether they're doing everything correctly. I've written more about this in my blog, Is Checking Your Sleep Making It Harder to Sleep?, because sometimes all that checking becomes part of what keeps us so focused on sleep in the first place.
Sometimes the first step is helping them loosen their grip on all those rules.
That doesn't mean CBT-I is bad or that sleep logs should never be used with anxious people. CBT-I is an effective treatment for chronic insomnia, and a thoughtfully used sleep diary can be helpful even when anxiety is present.
But the way we introduce and use a tool matters just as much as the tool itself.
So, Should You Keep a Sleep Log?
My answer?
It depends.
If you're genuinely curious about your sleep patterns, a short period of tracking might help you notice something you've been overlooking.
Maybe you're spending far more time in bed than you realized. Maybe your evenings have become very sedentary. Maybe certain daytime habits are worth exploring.
But if the thought of recording your sleep makes your stomach tighten, or you're already spending your days calculating and analyzing every minute, we may need a different starting point.
For Jacqueline, the sleep log wasn't really about counting hours.
It helped us discover that her evenings had become empty and that bed was filling a space in her life that had very little to do with being tired. And that's what I want people to understand about my approach to insomnia.
We're not just looking at what happens after your head hits the pillow. We're looking at the whole person, the whole day, and what might be keeping natural sleep from happening.
Sometimes the most useful thing a sleep log reveals has very little to do with sleep.
If you're exhausted from following sleep rules, tracking every hour, and still wondering why you're awake, I'd love to help you understand what's really going on.
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