Sleep Toolbox: Sleep Diary

Sleep Toolbox is a morning sleep diary with the self-help parts of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBT-I. It’s for people who lie awake for a long time, wake in the night and can’t get back to sleep, or have started to dread going to bed. Use it on your own or with a doctor or therapist.

The American College of Physicians recommends CBT-I as the first treatment for chronic insomnia in adults. Sleep Toolbox puts its self-help parts in one place, in plain language, and leaves every decision to you.

Each morning, the sleep diary asks when you got into bed, how long sleep took to come, how long you were awake in the night, and when you got up. It takes about two minutes, and rough guesses are fine. It isn’t an automatic sleep tracker. A sleep log you fill in yourself is the record CBT-I is built on. You can also answer optional questions about the day before, like caffeine, alcohol, naps, and exercise.

After seven complete nights, you can set up your sleep window, a sleep schedule made from your own nights. It’s the part of CBT-I called sleep restriction, and sleep compression offers a gentler start. Once a week, the sleep window check may suggest moving bedtime 15 minutes earlier or later, or up to 30 minutes later with sleep compression. Nothing changes until you tap, and you can undo the last change. The window never goes under five and a half hours, and the app says plainly that the first weeks are often the hardest.

Quiet a busy mind has twelve guided exercises, narrated in a female or male voice, from slow breathing and progressive muscle relaxation to a body scan, and three are for when you’re awake at night. It also has worry time, a wind-down routine, a gratitude journal, three good things, a way to test beliefs about sleep, and Rewrite a nightmare. Mark your favorites to keep them at the top.

Week by week puts your last 7 nights beside the 7 before in plain numbers, sleep efficiency included, with no grades. Learn has short reads with references on how sleep works, the body clock, sleep hygiene, each part of CBT-I, sleep medicine, nightmares, shift work, and when to see a doctor.

To share your sleep diary, make a report for your doctor or therapist, a PDF of one night up to twelve weeks, or export a spreadsheet. Notes for your doctor puts a checklist of things worth mentioning on the report’s first page. Keeping it going is a plan in your own words for a rough patch later.

Repeating reminders are off until you turn them on, and no reminder shows what you wrote. From bedtime until your wake time, the app turns dark and dim. There’s a home screen widget in two sizes. Quick Settings tiles and app icon shortcuts open the morning diary or play Up in the night with the screen off. Health Connect is optional. It can show the sleep your watch or phone recorded beside each night, fill in your bed times for you to check, and save your diary nights as sleep sessions, and that estimate never changes your sleep window. Help now keeps crisis lines one tap away.

Your diary stays on your phone unless you turn on sync with your own Google Drive, and you can lock the app with your fingerprint, face, or screen lock. In English and Spanish. Free, with no account or ads.

Sleep Toolbox is for education and self-help. It is not therapy or medical care, it is not a medical device, and it does not diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any medical condition. For medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, talk with a healthcare professional, especially before starting a sleep window if you have one of the conditions the app lists. In an emergency, call 911. If you are in crisis in the United States, call or text 988.