Sleep Efficiency Is a Calculated Number, Not a Feeling
Sleep efficiency — the percentage of time in bed actually spent asleep — is the primary metric in CBT-I sleep restriction protocols, and it's the number your CBT-I therapist or sleep medicine consultant will ask about at every review session. It's also a number that cannot be honestly derived from memory. By Thursday, you genuinely don't know what Tuesday's sleep latency was. You think you know. You are wrong.
This template is structured around the exact variables needed to calculate sleep efficiency and track sleep architecture over time. The architecture is deliberate: bed entry time, sleep attempt time, sleep latency, awakening count and total awakening duration, final awakening time, and total sleep duration. From those fields, efficiency calculates directly. What the record shows over four weeks is what the treatment decision will be based on.
What Latency and Awakening Duration Actually Reveal
The 3. Sleep latency duration field is distinct from bed entry time for a reason that matters clinically. Getting into bed at 10pm and attempting sleep at 11:30pm — scrolling, reading, watching something — means the sleep attempt began at 11:30pm, not 10pm. If you use bed entry as the baseline, your sleep efficiency calculation includes that hour and a half of wakefulness as though it were attempted sleep, which understates your actual latency problem and overstates efficiency.
The separation of 4. Awakening count and 5. Awakening total duration is similarly non-trivial. Three awakenings totalling forty minutes is a different picture from eight awakenings totalling forty minutes. The first might be a single post-dream arousal that resolved slowly. The second is fragmented sleep architecture — potentially a completely different underlying problem. Both produce the same total awakening duration. Only the count tells you which one you're dealing with.
Fields 6a through 6d address early morning awakening with a precision that matters for differentiating insomnia subtypes. Whether the final awakening was earlier than planned, and by how much, distinguishes sleep maintenance insomnia from sleep onset insomnia. This distinction has direct implications for what a therapist recommends first.
The Exogenous Factor Timestamps
The 12b. Last drink time and 13b. Last caffeinated drink time fields are where most sleep diaries cut corners by only recording whether alcohol or caffeine was consumed, not when. Alcohol consumed at 6pm has a different impact on sleep architecture than alcohol consumed at 10pm — it may produce rebound arousal during the second half of the night even when the consumption itself was moderate. Caffeine has a half-life of five to seven hours in most adults; a single espresso at 3pm can still be physiologically active during sleep onset.
Without the time of last consumption, the exogenous factor data is almost useless for identifying correlations. With it, you can look back over thirty entries and ask: on nights where the last caffeinated drink was after 2pm, what was sleep latency? That question is answerable. On nights where you only recorded "yes, had caffeine," it is not.
The 14. OTC sleep meds taken boolean is the field most likely to reveal a pattern the person hadn't consciously noticed — a medication use frequency that feels occasional but shows up as twice weekly when the record is reviewed. That frequency matters both for tolerance development and for what it says about baseline sleep quality in the periods without medication.