Fourteen-Day Sleep Diary
What a fourteen-day record of sleep timing, awakenings, naps, caffeine, exercise, and morning alertness can show you, and what it deliberately does not score.
What it measures, what it assumes, and where that breaks down
What it records
A few entries a day, most of them one tap. When you went to bed, roughly when you think you fell asleep, when you woke, how many times you remember waking, whether you napped, when you last had caffeine, when you exercised, and how alert you felt in the late morning.
Fourteen days is the target because that is roughly the span over which a pattern becomes visible above ordinary night-to-night variation. A shorter record is still usable; it is just noisier.
What it gives back
Your own entries, read back: the nights you recorded, the gaps in the span you covered, and the time between the two times you entered for getting into and out of bed. That last figure is time in bed, and it is labelled as one entered time subtracted from another rather than as sleep.
The output is descriptive by design. It shows you your own fortnight. It does not grade it, and there is no score to improve. Reading the pattern out of it is the Sleep Regularity Report’s job, and that report will not grade it either.
Where your data lives
In your browser, on your device, under one key. Entries are stored locally, nothing is transmitted to Restadian, and there is no account to create.
The practical consequences are worth knowing in advance. Clearing your browser storage clears your diary. Your entries do not follow you to another device unless you export them. Export writes a CSV or a JSON file your own browser generates, and import reads the JSON one back. Delete removes the key rather than blanking it, and then checks that it is gone before telling you so.
The assumptions it rests on
- Self-report is imprecise and still useful. Nobody can report their own sleep onset accurately. The diary is built around patterns across days, where that imprecision mostly averages out, rather than around any single night’s numbers.
- Consistency of recording matters more than accuracy of recording. Estimating your sleep onset the same rough way each night produces a usable trend even if every individual estimate is off.
- The reader is the analyst. The diary surfaces the pattern; it does not interpret it for you.
Where the prompts come from
The Consensus Sleep Diary. Carney and colleagues assembled it from an expert panel with patient input, and the seven core items here are theirs, in the order that panel put them: into bed, tried to sleep, how long it took, how many times you woke, how long those wakings lasted, final waking, out of bed.
Five items from its expanded version follow, because the other Restadian tools use them: naps, caffeine, alcohol, exercise, and your own rating of morning alertness. Every one of those is optional, and a blank is stored as a blank rather than as a zero.
What it does not do
- It does not assess, score, diagnose, or label you or your sleep. There is no total, no average and no efficiency figure anywhere in it, on purpose.
- It does not tell you how long you slept, because it cannot know.
- It does not detect breathing, movement, or sleep stages. If something happens in your sleep that you are unaware of, a diary will not find it. That is what another person’s observation, or a sleep study, is for.
- It does not require an account or an email address.
Why it is still worth keeping
Because the questions a clinician asks are almost exactly the questions a diary answers, and almost nobody can answer them accurately from memory. Two weeks of imperfect records beats a confident summary of a fortnight you cannot recall.