The sleep diary: what it's for between two appointments
· 2 min read · By The Orekio team
Updated
The sleep diary is one of the simplest tools to set up in a follow-up, and one of the most useful for the session that comes after. It asks the patient for only one or two minutes a day, and it gives the practitioner a concrete picture of what happened between two appointments — where memory alone is unreliable.
What it records
A standard sleep diary logs, day after day:
- bedtime and wake-up time;
- estimated time to fall asleep;
- the number and length of night-time awakenings;
- a free note on how the night felt;
- depending on the case, naps, coffee or alcohol intake, medication taken.
Over two weeks, these lines form a pattern: a phase shift, fragmentation, time spent in bed far greater than time actually asleep. These are markers the patient and practitioner can look at together, from data the patient entered themselves.
Why keep it continuously
Filled in retrospectively, in the waiting room, the diary loses most of its value: it becomes a reconstruction. Kept every morning, it captures the night as it was experienced, without smoothing. That is what makes it a foundation for cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, where the sleep-window calculation rests directly on these records.
For many patients, the act of writing already changes their relationship with sleep: attention shifts from a diffuse feeling ("I slept badly") to a finer observation ("I woke up once, around 4 a.m., and fell back asleep").
What Orekio does with it — and doesn't
In Orekio, the sleep diary is a module the practitioner unlocks when they judge it relevant. The patient fills it in from their phone. At the next appointment, the practitioner finds the full history.
Orekio does not interpret this data. The app shows no "sleep score", triggers no alert if a night is short, does not compare records to a norm. What is displayed is a neutral history: times, durations, the patient's own words. The clinical reading — phase shift, sleep hygiene, whether a specific treatment is indicated — remains entirely with the practitioner.
This is a deliberate distinction: Orekio holds the status of a digital care journal, outside the scope of Regulation (EU) 2017/745 on medical devices. Its role is to make information available, not to draw conclusions.
In practice
To introduce the diary with a patient, it is often enough to explain that it is not a test but a support for the next session, and that a few lines a day are enough. The first weeks serve as a baseline; the rest lets you track the effect of the adjustments decided in session.