How To Measure Your Sleep Quality — The Key To Improving Your Sleep

There are many things that add to proper sleep

We all want good sleep. It sets our day. Good sleep keeps our body healthy and provides a break for our busy minds. We process our day in dreamland while preparing ourselves for another. We thrive on energy.

You’ll be able to read a dozen articles on how to improve your sleep. While trying out many different practical tips is great, there is one thing many overlook.

Improving our sleep starts with measuring what our sleep is like right now.

Sure, you could stick to a strict sleep schedule, but if the amount of caffeine you consume during the day makes you wake up all the time, you won’t be able to improve much.

People that are in therapy for insomnia or any other sleep disorders will always have to start by structurally measuring their sleep. It’s the foundation we build on towards recovery.

Measuring our sleep will uncover what it is exactly that we should improve upon. It’s underrated — perhaps because people don’t really see the point, but perhaps because people don’t know what there is to measure besides the number of hours we sleep.

A guide to measuring our sleep quality

Measuring our sleep is about discovering unhealthy patterns. A one-night-measurement won’t do. Keeping track over a longer period of time will allow us to connect the dots and discover what’s holding us back from good sleep.

Get yourself a notebook, (sleep) tracking app, create a file on your phone, or bullet board and track the following things every day, for at least one week:

• The amount of time you spent in bed (sleeping and awake)
• The amount of time you sleep
• What time you fall asleep and what time you wake up
• The amount of time you can recall waking up during the night (some sports watches can track this for us as well)
• Whether you snore during the night (in some cases impossible to know, however, note things like whether you had a stuffed nose)
• Whether you feel safe and comfortable in your environment while falling asleep
• How energized you feel when you wake up in the morning on a scale from 1–10 (morning mood much?)
• How tired you feel when going to bed on a scale from 1–10
• Whether you take naps during the day (and how energized you feel after them on a scale from 1–10)
• The amount of caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine (or any other type of drug) you had during the day
• Whether you work out during the day and how you feel about the amount of energy certain activities consume
• How content you are with your sleep and how you feel during the day

It’s quite a lot, and not everything may seem relevant to you. Tracking just a few of the above could already provide you with valuable insights, although I recommend doing it as extensively as possible — you never know what you’ll find out.

In need of more things to track? Sure, here are some additional questions you can answer for yourself:

• What did you do in the 2 hours before falling asleep?
• What did your bedtime routine look like?
• Was your room completely dark and silent?
• Did you have any nightmares, strange dreams, or stressful thoughts?
• Did you overthink before falling asleep?
• What has your sleeping position been like for most of the night?

Connecting the dots

After one week, you should have an overview of the quality of your sleep per night. Take the time to evaluate what might have contributed to the good nights, and what might have influenced the bad nights. Do you see any patterns? Does anything stand out? Are there things you weren’t very aware of before?

After this week, you might decide to change your evening routine and experiment with different things. Great! Continue to track the exact same aspects of your sleep and see how the quality changes. If you expect it to improve but it doesn’t, you’ll immediately be able to see what has stopped you from improving (a stressful week, for example).

As another example, you might find out that everything you do during the evening and day should be contributing to good sleep, but nightmares are more of a disturbing factor than you were initially aware of. Learning how to cope with nightmares might be the key to improving your sleep in that case. Keep tracking your sleep, and find out if the coping mechanisms are working for you.

In any case, I recommend doing research on healthy sleep. If you snore nearly every night and you suspect it’s affecting your sleep quality, you might want to acquire some knowledge on the reasons why people snore and how you can prevent it from happening so often.

No matter what your situation might be, becoming more aware of everything involving our sleep is important. Measuring the quality of sleep will 100% pay off — if you decide to act upon it, of course. Check out my list of articles on better sleep if you’re interested in more help with that 👇🏻

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