Sleep Quality Index

For the vast majority of troubled sleepers, the Sleep Quality Index is the single most important way to analyze your sleep problems.  While no written survey is comparable to actually testing your sleep quality in a sleep lab, these brief questions pinpoint  the most common symptoms in those people suffering from sleep quality problems.  Test yourself now and in seconds you'll receive revealing feedback



Click here to learn about your results

The questions on this survey speak to many different areas of sleep quality.  The more questions you mark in the medium to high range, the more severe the sleep quality problem.

Some questions reveal things about your sleep based on simple facts about sleep behavior.  If you cannot sleep well on your back or cannot sleep well in a warm or stuffy room, you would be describing two problems commonly reported by people with sleep breathing problems.

If your sleep is restless, you can't get comfortable, you move a lot, or you feel worse after a nap, then you are not describing yourself as a normal sleeper. You might be suffering from general sleep quality problems or something specific like a leg movement disorder .

If you think of your sleep as broken, too light, and you can't sleep through the night, then your sleep quality problems again are probably severe and strongly suggest the presence of insomnia.  In the worst case, you may have grown dependent on sleep aids or prescription sleeping pills , which usually turns out to be a very poor choice for insomnia treatment.

All these examples highlight sleep quality as the critical factor that underlies most sleep problems.  Whether it be sleep breathing or sleep movement problems or whether it's insomnia or other interruptions in your sleep, sleep quality is most often the underlying cause.  When you learn to think in the dimension of sleep quality, you will find solutions to your sleep problems much faster.   

 



Why Pills Can't Improve Quality

It's important to understand that your body is designed to sleep well and all through the night.  The notion that a pill could fix a sleep problem such as insomnia is not illogical; it's simply irrational if the real cause is an underlying sleep quality problem.  If you could fix your sleep quality problem and eliminate your insomnia, it would be very clear you don't need pills. 

In our view, most insomniacs do not benefit from sleep medications except in the very short-term.  Indeed, to quote the Food & Drug Administration's mandated warning that was sent out to healthcare professionals by the pharmaceutical manufacturers of prescription sleeping pills:

"The failure of insomnia to remit after 7 to 10 days of treatment [i.e., drug treatment] may indicate the presence of a primary psychiatric and/or medical illness that should be evaluated."

In our experience the single most common missing element is a sleep quality problem, which requires much more evaluation and usually overnight testing in a sleep lab.  In all your efforts to resolve your sleep problems, we believe sleep quality is "where it's at" more than 80% of the time.

 

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