About

Sleepvue helps people with insomnia better understand their sleep, find patterns, and make day‑to‑day changes that improve how they feel. By turning a sleep diary into a powerful, searchable record, Sleepvue aims to help you uncover root causes and measure what actually works—so you can improve your daytime functioning.

Mission

Allow people to take their health in their own hands, which is why Sleepvue is fully open source.

Why keep a sleep diary?

  • Build awareness of your sleep and daytime functioning
  • Recognize patterns and triggers
  • Identify recurring problems
  • Track progress over time
  • Communicate clearly with healthcare providers
  • Monitor the effects of lifestyle changes and treatments
  • Improve sleep hygiene with feedback from your notes

About me

Hi, I'm Chris. I've had insomnia since I was a teenager. For years I avoided taking notes about my sleep because I worried it would make me even more anxious about getting to bed. Wearables like Fitbit did allow me to do some sleep tracking, but they often missed awakenings or said I was awake when I was not, and they couldn't capture how I felt during the day—what I actually care about.

I started keeping a detailed sleep diary in 2021 and began very seriously tracking my sleep and going as far as using a security camera and other apps to track how much I snored. Instead of making me more nervous, it reduced my anxiety. I finally had a baseline to work with: what happens when I take certain meds or none at all, how much I typically sleep, and which habits help or hurt.

The diary also gave me the confidence that there was something wrong with how I felt and the evidence I needed to redo a sleep study (it's daunting to talk about sleep problems with your health provider), where I was diagnosed with almost severe sleep apnea on my back. While insomnia and daytime sleepiness are a lifelong struggle and are rarely caused by a single factor, I've found ways to improve my functioning and make my life more liveable:

  • Tuned my sleep medication doses to reduce next‑day sedation as well as getting off of sleep meds on some days
  • Compared different treatments and how they affect my sleep and daytime functioning
  • Built confidence about my nights without sleeping meds by seeing that I eventually was able to fall asleep when extremely tired.
  • Noticed a mismatch between my how many hours I slept and how bad days felt, prompting me to redo a sleep study and look into other causes of my sleep problems
  • Reduced sleep anxiety by having objective notes to look back on because it's easy for me to catastrophize when I'm having troubles falling asleep
  • Created a more consistent bedtime routine based on what I noticed helped me fall asleep faster
  • Tracked other environmental and behavior triggers (noise, temperature, constant scratching throughout the night from eczema) and took interventions
  • Communicate with my healthcare provider more effectively using my notes

A sleep diary isn't going to solves all of your problems, but gathering information is the first step to making progress and it's helped me more than I expected. And I hope it can help you as much as it has helped me.