Journaling to Sleep Better

by Ruth Folit
written May, 2007

If you suffer from insomnia, keeping a journal may help you get more sleep. Sleep researchers* tell us that some insomnia occurs because people process the day's unfinished business at bedtime, interfering with their sleep.

One solution is to consciously process your thoughts and feeling earlier in the day, writing in your journal with enough time before bedtime to move onto more relaxing thoughts prior to sleep.

Another form of insomnia is sleep interruption: After going to sleep some people wake up feeling stressed and unable to go back to sleep. When that's the case, get out of bed, write non-stop (perhaps giving yourself a proscribed time period of 15-20 minutes) about concerns and issues and then, with those worries drained from you, you can more easily fall back to sleep.

If insomnia is an on-going concern, rather than an occasional irritant, then you can include some related Daily Pulse scales:

• the number of hours that you sleep each night
• a subjective rating system about how fatigued/refreshed you feel when you awake the next morning
• the number of minutes you exercised that day
• your energy level during the day
• perhaps even the number of minutes you write in your journal before you go to bed, to determine how long you need to settle down enough to fall asleep
  

Also write in journal entries what you ate during the six hours before you went to bed, whether you napped that day, how much and when you ate caffeinated foods, drank alcoholic beverages or ingested any medication. Armed with a week or two of detailed information, you may be able to track down some of the causes of your insomnia--and see if changing some of these habits increases your ability to sleep.

*Bootzin, R. R. and Rider, S. P. (1997) Behavioral techniques and biofeedback for insomnia. In M.R. Pressman & W. C. Orr (eds.), Understanding sleep: The evalution and treatment of sleep disorders (pp. 315-338). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association