Keeping a Sleep Diary During Perimenopause: A Practical Guide

Why a Sleep Diary Is Worth Keeping

Sleep during perimenopause is rarely straightforward. The problems, whether difficulty falling asleep, early waking, sweating through the night, or waking feeling unrested, tend to vary from night to night and week to week. Our memory for sleep is also notoriously unreliable. We often underestimate how much sleep we got on a good night and overestimate how bad things are on a difficult one. A sleep diary cuts through this unreliability by creating an accurate, dated record. That record is valuable in two ways. It helps you identify patterns you would not otherwise notice, like whether sleep worsens in the run-up to your period or after alcohol. And it gives your GP or sleep specialist solid evidence rather than a vague sense that things have been difficult.

What to Record and When

Fill in the diary each morning while the previous night is still relatively fresh, and again briefly in the evening to capture daytime factors. Key things to note in the morning include: what time you got into bed, approximately how long it took to fall asleep, how many times you woke and roughly how long each waking lasted, what time you finally got up, how rested you feel on a scale of one to ten, and whether you experienced hot flashes, anxiety, or pain during the night. In the evening, note whether you napped, your caffeine and alcohol intake, your stress level during the day, and any exercise. You do not need precision down to the minute. Estimates are fine and more sustainable than trying to be exact.

Simple Calculations That Reveal a Lot

Once you have a week's worth of data, two simple calculations become useful. Sleep efficiency is the percentage of time in bed that you were actually asleep. Divide total sleep time by total time in bed and multiply by a hundred. A figure above 85 percent is considered healthy. A lower figure suggests your sleep is fragmented or your time in bed significantly exceeds your actual sleep. Total sleep time averaged across the week shows you how much sleep you are actually getting versus how much you feel you are getting, which are often quite different. These numbers are also used clinically to guide CBT-I treatment, so having them ready makes a GP or sleep specialist appointment much more productive.

Spotting Patterns Specific to Perimenopause

A sleep diary is particularly useful for identifying hormonal patterns. Many women notice that sleep quality changes at predictable points in what remains of their menstrual cycle, often worsening in the week before a period when progesterone drops sharply. Others find correlations with alcohol, which disrupts sleep architecture even in moderate amounts. Stress at work, skipped exercise days, and late screen use often have a measurable impact that becomes clear only when looking across two or three weeks of data. If you are trying a new supplement, a change in bedtime, or a lifestyle adjustment, the diary shows you objectively whether it is making a difference.

Using PeriPlan to Track Sleep and Symptoms Together

PeriPlan lets you log symptoms and track how they change over time, which makes it a natural fit for sleep monitoring alongside broader perimenopause tracking. Logging your sleep quality, hot flash frequency, and mood in one place lets you see whether these symptoms rise and fall together, giving you a richer picture than a sleep-only diary provides. The pattern data you build up is also directly shareable or describable to a clinician, turning months of subjective experience into concrete, useful information.

When to Take Your Diary to a Doctor