Sleep Regularity Report
See how much your bedtime and wake time move across a week, including the gap between your weekdays and your weekends.
The method is published. The tool is not built yet.
A calculator that will not show its arithmetic is not evidence-first. The assumptions behind an estimate are the part you most need in order to judge whether the estimate is worth anything, so on Restadian they are published first and separately.
That is what this page is. It sets out what the tool will measure, what it will ask you for, what it will assume, and where the method is still being specified. When the tool ships it will do what is described here — and if the method changes while it is being built, this page changes with it.
There is nothing to run on this page. Nothing written below depends on the tool existing yet.
The method
What it will measure
Variation in the timing of your sleep, expressed three ways: how much your bedtime moves from night to night, how much your wake time moves, and how far your weekend timing sits from your weekday timing.
That third figure is the one most people find useful, because it is the gap that most often explains a difficult Sunday night.
What it will ask you for
Your sleep and wake times across a week or more. You will be able to enter them directly, or carry them over from a sleep diary you have already kept.
What it will give back
Three views of the same week, shown as a shape rather than a score: where your timing sat each night, how wide the spread was, and where the weekday and weekend patterns diverge.
The report describes. What to do about what it describes — if anything — depends entirely on why your schedule looks the way it does, which the report cannot see.
The assumptions it will rest on
- Variation is descriptive, not evaluative. The report starts from the position that an irregular schedule is a fact about your circumstances rather than a failing.
- The midpoint of sleep is a more stable summary than bedtime alone. Bedtime is noisy; when the whole window shifts, the midpoint captures it more cleanly.
- A week is the minimum useful window and a fortnight is better. Anything shorter is mostly noise.
Where the method is still being specified
Which summary statistic to lead with is not settled. Several measures of sleep regularity exist in the research, they are defined differently, and they do not always agree with one another — a point the accompanying research brief covers directly.
We will state plainly which definition the report uses, and why, when that choice is made. What the report will not do is invent a proprietary “regularity score” and present it as though it meant something established.
What it will not do
- It will not label you with a disorder, a syndrome, or a sleep type. No output will say or imply that your schedule is disordered.
- It will not give you a score out of anything, or compare you to a population norm.
- It will not recommend a target level of regularity, because whether regularity matters independently of sleep duration is still an open question and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Limitations
It cannot tell whether your variation is chosen or imposed. A schedule that moves because of a rotating rota and one that moves because Friday nights run late produce identical numbers and call for completely different responses.
It also cannot tell you whether regularity is the thing worth working on in your case. That question is genuinely open, and we have a research brief tracking it rather than an answer.