Sleep

Is your sleep worth a doctor's time?

Twelve questions covering what a clinician screens on. It will not score you, will not name a condition, and does not reproduce any of the instruments a doctor actually uses. What it does is hand you the words to describe your sleep at an appointment, which is the part that is genuinely hard.

Sleep-science pages summarise published research for general education. They are not a substitute for a clinician. If a sleep problem is affecting your health, speak to a doctor, and never change prescribed medication because of something you read here.

Nothing here is a diagnosis and nothing is stored: there is no account, and no answer leaves your browser except into the address bar of this page. If something about your sleep is worrying you, that on its own is reason enough to see a doctor, whatever this or any other page says.

The questions

1. How long does it usually take you to fall asleep?
2. Do you wake in the night and struggle to get back to sleep?
3. Do you wake earlier than you meant to and find you cannot get back off?
4. If any of that applies, how long has it been going on?

The three month mark is one of the things a clinician asks about.

5. Is your sleep affecting your days?

Mood, concentration, work, or how you are with people.

6. Do you doze off during the day when you did not intend to?

Reading, watching something, sitting talking to someone, after lunch.

7. Have you ever felt yourself falling asleep while driving, or nearly done so?

Or operating anything else where it would matter.

8. Have you been told you snore loudly?

Loudly enough to be heard through a door, or to bother somebody.

9. Has anybody seen you stop breathing, gasp or choke in your sleep?
10. Do you wake up feeling unrefreshed even after a full night?
11. Do any of these happen?

Tick anything that is a real pattern rather than a one-off.

12. If you could sleep on any schedule you liked, would it look like the one you keep?

Shift work, or being naturally very late or very early, is its own category.

What this is, and what it deliberately is not

The questions cover the domains a clinician screens on: how long you take to fall asleep, whether you stay asleep, whether you wake too early, how long that has been going on, what it is doing to your days, how sleepy you actually are, whether anybody has noticed your breathing, and a short group of things that are recognisable by description alone.

They are written in our own words. The Epworth Sleepiness Scale, the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, the Insomnia Severity Index and the STOP questionnaire are the real instruments, and they are named here and deliberately not copied. Partly because they are proprietary, and a site with a shop reproducing one is a licensing question. Mostly because a paraphrase of a validated instrument is not that instrument: the thresholds are validated against the exact wording, so an approximation carrying the real cut-off would look authoritative and mean nothing. That is a worse failure than an obviously made-up quiz, because it is much harder to notice.

So there is no number here, and the output is a description rather than a verdict. If you want to know what your sleep is doing over weeks rather than in one sitting, the sleep log records it night by night, and it says plainly that it is not polysomnography either.

Questions people ask

Is this a diagnosis?
No, and it is not built to approximate one. It reports which of the recognised domains your answers fall into and hands you a description in your own reported terms. Whether that adds up to a disorder is a clinical judgement made with a history in front of you, and it is not something a web page can do responsibly.
Why is there no score?
Because a number implies a validated threshold, and there is not one here. The instruments that do have validated thresholds are validated against their exact wording, so we would have to reproduce one exactly to use its cut-off, and we have chosen not to reproduce any of them.
Why not just use the Epworth Sleepiness Scale?
Two reasons, either of which would be enough. It is proprietary, and reproducing it on a site with a shop and a paid tier is a licensing question rather than a design choice. And paraphrasing it destroys it: the cut-off is validated against the exact wording, so an approximation carrying the real threshold looks validated and is not, which is harder to spot than an obviously invented quiz. It is named here so you know what you are likely to be given.
What will a doctor actually do?
Probably ask you a version of these questions properly, possibly hand you one of the standard questionnaires, and if breathing is a concern, arrange a sleep study. Most people with obstructive sleep apnoea have not been diagnosed, and the usual reason is that nobody ever asked them the four questions.
Nothing was flagged. Does that mean my sleep is fine?
It means twelve questions did not flag anything, which is a statement about twelve questions rather than about you. If something is bothering you that this page did not ask about, that is a good reason to raise it rather than a reason not to.