Assessing Your Sleep Hygiene
“No sleep till, No sleep till Brooklyn!” Beastie Boys, No Sleep till Brooklyn
Raise your hand if you consistently get good quality sleep… Most likely only a few of us can make that claim. Sleep is an essential part of our health and mental health, yet we seldom consider what habits and hygiene we maintain around our sleep. If your head doesn't spend enough time on the pillow, you typically have bags under your eyes and your caffeine addiction is thriving - then you might benefit from a sleep hygiene review.
In therapy we define sleep hygiene as habits, routines, behaviors, and environmental factors which impact sleep. Your quality of sleep hygiene will impact the quality of your sleep and tweaks to that hygiene can improve or harm your sleep quality. Your sleep hygiene is ESSENTIAL to your:
Physical Wellness (everything from energy, to alertness, to workout recovery)
Mental Awareness (attention, ability to retain info, to learn, to memorize, to problems solve and process)
Emotional Health (ability to cope, capacity to manage challenging emotions, and ability to experience pleasant emotions).
Clients often seek therapy from Future Full of Hope to address problems with sleep quality and sleep hygiene. Poor sleep quality manifests through insomnia (difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep), hypersomnia (problems with oversleeping), or frequent and intense nightmares or night terrors. Clients also seek support through sleep disruptions, nightmares, or night terrors.
Our holistic approach to our work will often include an assessment of your sleep quality as it relates to physical, emotional, and mental health, even if you don’t specifically identify that as an issue. This approach is intentional since your sleep impacts your mental and emotional health, and therefore can exacerbate or ameliorate presenting symptoms. For example, if your hardest days always follow the worst nights of sleep, then getting better sleep can help manage depressive or anxious symptoms. Or if you always struggle to sleep before a workday, that may be an indicator of work related stress and burnout. Or if you’re always exhausted Saturday that might be a sign that Friday night party habits are impairing your sleep quality the night before.
There’s so much to learn about the impact of your sleep on your general well being, and therapy with Future Full of Hope typically includes a baseline assessment of sleep quality. Are you curious what constitutes good or bad sleep habits? Check out our list below for trackable sleep hygiene habits, routines, and environmental factors.
Factors Worth Tracking (for at least a week) to Help Assess Your Sleep Hygiene
Here’s a challenge: Use the reference list below to track your sleep hygiene during a 1-week period and look for correlations between nights of high-quality sleep vs nights of low-quality sleep. And stayed tuned for a future update for the free download of our Sleep Hygiene Assessment Tool!
What time did I last watch a screen before heading to bed? Include computers, tablets, phones, videogames, TV, etc.
What time did I go to bed?
What time did I last check my phone before falling sleep?
What time did I go to sleep?
Is this the night before a day off or a work day?
What time did I wake up?
How many alarms did it take to get out of bed?
How much time did I stay in bed after waking up?
What were my social interactions like on the days of a good night’s rest? What about on bad night's rest?
How many times did I wake up during the night?
How long did it take me to fall back to sleep after waking up?
What are 3 things I was feeling before falling asleep?
What are 3 things that I was feeling when I woke up?
Are there any significant stressors in my life right now? If so, what?
What are my dreams like?
Am I having any nightmares? And if so, what’s the subject matter?
How is my health? And when was the last time I had a medical check up?
How much alcohol (and at what time of day) did I drink?
How much (and at what time of day) weed did I smoke?
How much (and at what time of day) caffeine did I consume?
How much screen time do I estimate that I have today?
How much outside time and/or sunlight exposure am I getting daily?
What’s my exercise routine been like?
How has my diet been?
How much water did I drink today?
Did I use my bedroom for anything other than sleep today? If so, what?
How cozy is my bedroom?
When’s the last time I’ve cleaned my sheets?
Was my sleep disrupted by noises, lights, company, etc in my bedroom?
What can you learn from your Assessment?
Look for any patterns over the last week - do you notice any similarities from nights of poor sleep quality? What about night’s of good sleep quality? Use that information to measure your baseline sleep hygiene. After you understand your baseline, you can make adjustments until your sleep quality improves.
As a reminder - this blog is not exhaustive and is not a replacement for therapy or for medical intervention for sleep disruption. However, gathering baseline data regarding your sleep hygiene (like those items listed above) can be helpful information to take to your therapy appointment and for processing with your therapist.
Future Full of Hope Can Help:
At Future Full of Hope, we specialize in helping our client’s to process their past, embrace their present, and to create their future. Processing the past might mean exploring other factors impacting your sleep quality, from anxiety, to trauma impact, to addiction behaviors among other conditions. Embracing the present may look quite a bit like today’s post - learning to recognize sleep hygiene habits and to plan to adjust accordingly. And creating your future means developing a sustainable plan for supporting sleep hygiene and putting that plan into action. If you’re ready to start therapy with Future Full of Hope or are curious if therapy might be right for you, follow the button below to schedule 15 minute free phone consultation with Kevin!
If you’re ready to start therapy to work on your sleep hygiene, follow the link below to schedule a free 15-minute phone consultation with Kevin
AI Disclaimer: This post is original and written by Kevin Boyd of Future Full of Hope, PLLC. No AI tool was leveraged in the development of this post
