Are Your Habits Helping You Sleep?
Your routine, your hours in bed, and how awake you feel the next day
Most advice about sleep is about habits: go to bed at the same time, skip the late coffee, keep the phone out of the bedroom. Researchers turned those habits into a short questionnaire and found they are strongly tied to how well people say they sleep. But habits are only part of the picture - you also need enough hours, and the real test is how you feel the next afternoon. This test looks at all three, and tells you which one is worth fixing first.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about a normal month, not about a holiday or a week with a newborn, a deadline or an illness.
What it measures
Three things: sleep hygiene, the everyday habits covered by the Sleep Hygiene Index (regular times, caffeine, screens, the bedroom, winding down); sleep time, meaning whether you regularly give yourself the seven or more hours recommended for adults; and daytime alertness, how awake you feel during the day. It is not about when you prefer to sleep - that is chronotype, which has its own test on this site - and it does not assess sleep disorders.
Based on: Sleep Hygiene Index (Mastin, Bryson & Corwyn, 2006), with the AASM/SRS adult sleep duration consensus (Watson et al., 2015)
Possible results
Sleep hygiene
Whether your daily habits make good sleep easier or harder.
Sleep time
Whether you regularly give yourself enough hours of sleep.
Daytime alertness
How awake and clear-headed you feel during the day.
Common questions
How much sleep does an adult need?
The joint consensus of the two main American sleep societies is seven hours or more per night, on a regular basis, for adults aged 18 to 60. It notes that more than nine hours may be appropriate for young adults, people recovering from sleep debt and people who are ill, and that for others it is unclear whether regularly sleeping longer carries any risk.
Is sleep hygiene the same as chronotype?
No. Chronotype is when your body prefers to sleep - early bird, night owl or in between - and it is largely biological. Sleep hygiene is what you do around sleep, whatever your chronotype. A night owl can have excellent sleep hygiene; the trouble usually starts when their schedule forces early starts on an owl's body clock.
Can this test tell me if I have a sleep problem?
No. It describes habits, hours and how rested you feel, which is useful for everyday adjustments, but it cannot detect sleep disorders. Signs that deserve a doctor's attention include loud snoring with pauses in breathing, trouble falling or staying asleep most nights for months, and falling asleep in situations where you should be awake.
Sources
- Mastin, D. F., Bryson, J., & Corwyn, R. (2006). Assessment of sleep hygiene using the Sleep Hygiene Index. Journal of Behavioral Medicine. doi:10.1007/s10865-006-9047-6
- Watson, N. F., Badr, M. S., Belenky, G., Bliwise, D. L., Buxton, O. M., Buysse, D., Dinges, D. F., Gangwisch, J., Grandner, M. A., Kushida, C., Malhotra, R. K., Martin, J. L., Patel, S. R., Quan, S. F., & Tasali, E. (2015). Recommended amount of sleep for a healthy adult: A joint consensus statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research Society. Sleep. doi:10.5665/sleep.4716
An honest note The statements are Quinthea's own wording, adapted from the Sleep Hygiene Index, so scores are not comparable with its norms. Only the first bar corresponds to that scale; sleep time and alertness are related measures, the first based on the adult consensus of seven hours or more. Sleep hygiene evidence is mostly correlational. This is not a sleep-disorder assessment: if you snore loudly, stop breathing in your sleep, sleep badly for months or feel drowsy while driving, see a doctor.
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