Insomnia Sleep Diary + First-Step Planner

If you lie awake wondering whether your broken sleep is “bad enough” to worry about, the Sleep Diary Analyser below gives you a concrete answer. Enter last night’s details — bedtime, how long it took you to drift off, any time you spent awake during the night, and your rise time — and you’ll see your estimated sleep efficiency measured against the clinical benchmark, with a plain-language result and a printable summary you can take to a doctor.

This is an educational tool, not a clinical diagnosis — a healthcare provider is needed to evaluate your sleep and rule out other conditions.

How to use the Sleep Diary Analyser

Work through the six steps in order — each one asks for a single detail about last night’s sleep — and the tool calculates your estimated sleep efficiency as soon as you submit step six.

1. Bedtime — Enter the time you got into bed, not the time you eventually fell asleep. This anchors your total sleep window.
2. Time to fall asleep — Drag the slider to your best estimate of how many minutes passed before you drifted off. A rough guess is fine; clinical sleep diaries work the same way. If you’d like to understand why this matters for diagnosis, the insomnia diagnosis section of the full guide explains how clinicians use sleep onset latency.
3. Number of wakings — Tap the stepper to count each time you fully woke during the night. Brief stirrings don’t count.
4. Time awake during the night — Drag the slider to your best estimate of total minutes spent awake after first falling asleep. If you had no wakings, leave this at zero.
5. Rise time — Enter the time you got out of bed for the day. Together with your bedtime, this gives your total time in bed.
6. Morning refresh score — Tap a number from 1 (completely exhausted) to 10 (well-rested). This is a daytime impairment indicator only; it is not a health rating and does not change your efficiency figure.

Once you hit Calculate my sleep efficiency, your result appears instantly. Use the print button to save a summary for your doctor, or the save button to keep the data in your browser for next time. Your data never leaves your device.

What your result means

✓ Within the typical healthy range (≥85%)

Your estimated sleep efficiency is in the range clinicians generally consider healthy. This doesn’t mean every night will look like this — one difficult night can pull the number down, and that’s normal. The most useful thing you can do is keep tracking for a week or two to see whether this pattern holds. If you’re still curious about what insomnia actually is and how it differs from ordinary bad nights, the what is insomnia section of the full guide explains the distinction clearly.

⚠ Slightly below the typical benchmark

Your estimated sleep efficiency is in the 75–84% range — below the clinical benchmark of 85%, but not sharply so. A single night in this range isn’t cause for alarm. What matters is the pattern: if this is where your number sits most mornings, it’s worth tracking consistently for one to two weeks and then discussing the results with your GP. When to seek help in the full guide gives you a clear list of signals that make a GP visit the right call. This tool produces estimates from self-reported data, not a clinical sleep study, so treat the number as a useful prompt rather than a verdict.

↓ Below the typical benchmark

Your estimated sleep efficiency is below 75%. If this is consistent across several nights — rather than one bad night after a stressful day — it’s worth raising with a GP or sleep specialist. They can rule out other conditions that affect sleep and talk through treatment options. The most evidence-supported first-line treatment for chronic insomnia disorder is CBT-I (cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia). When to seek help in the full guide explains what to expect at that appointment. This tool does not diagnose insomnia or any other condition. A clinician evaluation is needed to rule out contributing causes. Cullen et al., Journal of Sleep Research, 2025

What the infographic shows

The infographic above maps the six-stage cycle that keeps insomnia going long after the original reason for poor sleep has passed.

1. The trigger — Stress, illness, or a life event triggers initial sleep difficulty. This is the precipitating factor in the three-P model of insomnia: the thing that starts the problem. PMC / Klin Spec Psihol, 2022
2. Coping behaviours — Extended bed time, late naps, and compensatory sleep begin. These feel logical — you’re exhausted, so you spend more time in bed — but they are the primary perpetuating factors that keep insomnia going. PMC / Klin Spec Psihol, 2022
3. Bed association — The bed becomes associated with wakefulness and arousal, not rest. The more hours you spend lying awake in bed, the more your brain learns that bed is a place to be alert, not to sleep — the mechanism that stimulus control therapy directly targets. PMC / Klin Spec Psihol, 2022
4. Sleep worry — Worry about sleep itself becomes a primary driver of arousal. Once you start watching the clock, calculating how many hours remain, or dreading the next night, the anxiety becomes its own cause of wakefulness — independently of the original trigger. PMC / Klin Spec Psihol, 2022
5. The cycle persists — The cycle continues even after the original trigger has resolved. This is why insomnia that began during a stressful period can last for months or years after the stress has passed: the coping behaviours and the bed association have taken over as the maintaining cause. PMC / Klin Spec Psihol, 2022
6. Breaking the cycle — CBT-I targets each link directly to restore healthy sleep patterns. Rather than treating a symptom, CBT-I works on the coping behaviours, the bed associations and the anxious thinking that keep the cycle running. PMC / Klin Spec Psihol, 2022 · Cullen et al., Journal of Sleep Research, 2025

“Insomnia persists because of what we do to cope — and those coping behaviours are exactly what CBT-I is designed to change.”

Sources checked September 2026 · Next review due March 2027