How to Use a Diary to Figure Out Why You Have Insomnia

Mar 2018

Today you will learn about a tool called a “Checklist Diary”. A “checklist diary” is a tool that you can use to help you find the reason for your problem when you don’t know why it is occurring.

In fact, my crazy Aunt Mary recently used it to cure her insomnia problem; let’s hear her story.

I must warn you though before you read on, my Aunt Mary is a little ‘out there’ and she really has no filter, and as you will see a lot of times she tells me stuff that I really wish she would keep to herself.

So, without any further ado, here is how she used a checklist diary to cure her insomnia:

(1) First, she needed to figure out some potential reasons for her insomnia happening.

The first thing I had Aunt Mary do was some research, and in her case she went to the public library. Many of you millennials may not know what a library is, so you will probably just want to ‘Google’ your problem to find out common reasons.

Some of the common reasons for insomnia she came up with were:

Not enough exercise
Room temperature
Having naps during day
Snoring spouse
Hormones change
Using bedroom for activities other than sleep and sex
Drinking caffeine too close to bedtime
Light coming in
Bad mattress
Bad pillow
Medication affecting sleep
Stomach growling
Allergies
Stress
Depression
Consuming alcohol
Eating too late in the day
Using electronics such as cellphone before bed
Letting dog in room

Okay, remember when I said she has no filter? Here is a perfect example, she had just got back from the library when she decided to call me and give me all the details about her trip including how grateful she is that my Uncle George is always taking care of her needs:

“Earlier today, I got a bit delayed in going to the library. You see, I had to yell at your Uncle George while dropping an uncharacteristic curse word in the process:

“Give it to me George, give it to me right now” I screamed, “I’m so f***ing wet, I need it NOW!”

Sensing my desperation, George swiftly performed his husbandly duties and came quickly……………with the umbrella. You see I hadn’t realized it was raining when I stepped outside to go to the library.”

Anyways, back to the important part of the story…

(2) Next thing I had her do was to eliminate the reasons for insomnia that she knew for sure did not apply to her.

Aunt Mary was able to eliminate the reasons for insomnia that didn’t apply to her below and she also added the reasons why they didn’t apply to her:

Hormones change – yeah right! that ship sailed a long time ago

Using bedroom for activities other than sleep and sex – unfortunately all we use it for is sleeping, the hanky-panky ship sailed a long time ago as well, at his age your Uncle George has trouble keeping his mast straight, and we don’t use the bedroom for any other activities

Stress – aw shucks, none at my age

Depression – I’m as happy as a damn clam

Using electronics such as cellphone before bed – I just learned what a dadgum cell phone is, let alone own one, so cross that off the list

Medication affecting sleep – gee whiz, other than my Flintstone chewable multi-vitamins which my doctor says won’t affect my sleep, I’m not taking anything

Bad mattress and bad pillow – that cheapskate George finally splurged on a new mattress and new pillows last year, so it’s not this. All those years of making ‘hanky-panky’ like rabbits in our younger years really did a number on our previous mattress, and come to think of it it’s probably also the reason we both now have artificial hips

Not enough exercise – I walk three miles a day with my best friend Helga, she likes to chit chat about utter nonsense a bit much, but alas this is not the reason

(3) Then I had her take all the potential reasons that were left and list them out.

In her case these were the reasons left that could be the possible cause of her insomnia:

Room temperature
Having naps during the day
Snoring spouse
Drinking caffeine too close to bedtime
Light coming in
Stomach growling
Allergies
Consuming alcohol
Eating too late in the day
Letting dog in room

(4) Next up was to have her create a Checklist Diary which is a simple matrix where you list the reasons down the first column and the days across the top.

Then for the next 2 weeks I had her keep track of each time one of the reasons happened during her daily sleep period to find out the reason for her insomnia by putting an ‘x’ in the appropriate cell as you can see below:

(5) After completing her diary, I had her summarize it by counting the number of occurrences each reason happened:

Note: You can also use the Pareto Principle here to figure out which 20% of your reasons account for the 80% of occurrences. For example, light coming in (14 times) and allergies (12 times) accounted for 26 out of the 37 total occurrences in that column. Meaning 26/37 or approximately 69% of all the occurrences were caused by those 2 reasons. It’s not quite 80%, but it is close and gets at the majority of your problem.

(6) Lastly, she came up with solutions for the top reason(s) and tested them out.

In Aunt Mary’s case light coming in and allergies from not having a good mattress cover which causes a breeding ground for allergy causing dust mites, occurred much more than anything else on the list. So, she tested out the two solutions below which solved her problem:

Light coming into room

We went and bought some blackout shades for the bedroom, they did the trick blocking out most of the light, however for some reason a tiny bit of light was still seeping in. I decided to grab a pair of eye shades as well and wore them to bed.

Allergies

Then we went to our local department store and bought a mattress cover to see if it would help with the allergies that were keeping me up.

Luckily the solutions worked and her insomnia was cured.

If these solutions didn’t work, she could have tried another solution or gone back and looked closer at the diary and make sure she had the right reason. There is a bit of trial and error in this.

(7) Oh yeah, I forgot one thing, and this is very important, you need to celebrate your success!

I knew it was a dumb question as soon as I asked it…when I asked her how she celebrated her success, my Aunt Mary’s reply: “I don’t want to get into the details too much dear but let’s just say it involved a bottle of wine, some baby oil, a sex swing and your Uncle George”.

Ay yi yi!

Too much information for you? Me too, but if I had to hear it, so do you!

Use It or Lose It!

To figure out the reason for your problem using a checklist diary you need to take the following steps:

Do research and come up with a list of potential reasons for it happening
Eliminate obvious reasons that do not apply to you
List out the potential reasons that remain
Turn them into a checklist diary and keep track for 2 weeks or however long it takes you to get an idea of the most obvious reason
Summarize your results by adding up the number of times each reason occurred
Come up with solutions for the top reasons and test them out. If they work skip to #7 and celebrate success, otherwise try another solution or see if there is another reason.

When to Use A Checklist Diary

When you have a problem where you don’t quite know the potential reason for.

Discuss…

What other applications can you think of for a checklist diary other than insomnia?

Thanks for reading and until next time, remember…PYMFP!
Rick

Note, if you believe your insomnia is medical-related, see your physician.

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2 Replies to “How to Use a Diary to Figure Out Why You Have Insomnia”

Micaela Stavrinos says:

March 27, 2018 at 3:53 pm

This is great- will def share with my friends who are plagued by insomnia!

1. Rick says:
  
  March 28, 2018 at 5:22 am
  
  Thanks Mica! Sharing is caring!