How To Get To Sleep Quickly – Use A Sleep Diary

How To Get To Sleep Quickly

In this article I want to address the problem of how to get to sleep quickly, from a personal point of view. I had known about keeping a sleep diary for quite some time before I actually got round to keeping one for myself. I was so used to facing each sleep problem as it arose in my own disorganised way. But I began to see the virtue of keeping a sleep diary as a means of understanding the reason I could not get to sleep quickly. I recommend starting a sleep diary if you do not already have one.

To give me meaningful feedback, the sleep diary has to run for a good period of time, I chose one month. Some people I know get impatient writing diaries of any kind, but if keeping a sleep diary is going to help me understand my sleep pattern better, then I will do it. The sleep diary records information when I wake up in the morning, and last thing at night.

For my morning entry, as an example, I might chose to write down how long it took me to get to sleep last night; when I woke up in the night; how long it took me to get back to sleep again; am I aware of anything in particular waking me up too soon, and how I woke up that morning. And so on.

For the night time entry, I write down what time I ate my last meal of the day, how much or how little exercise I took that day, whether I had a nap in the afternoon, whether it was hot or cold in the bedroom when I got into bed, and any other information I think is relevant. Everybody will have different things to write about.

The thing about keeping a sleep diary which appeals to me most is I can vary different activities from day to day and I can see from my sleep diary what effect, if any, my change of activity has had on my quality of sleep for that night. For instance, I could decide not to drink tea or coffee in the afternoons. I can then look at my diary entry to see of it made a difference to the amount of sleep that night, or series of nights if I repeat the experiment.

This is where a sleep diary can help isolate and overcome the problem of how to get to sleep quickly.

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