Here’s something that might surprise you: the way you remember your sleep is probably wrong.
Not because you’re lying or exaggerating, but because memory is a remarkably unreliable narrator—especially when you’re tired, anxious, or caught in the grip of chronic insomnia.
Recent research has revealed something fascinating: when we measure how people with insomnia feel in real-time throughout their day, we see patterns that traditional sleep questionnaires completely miss. Patterns that might change how we think about treating insomnia altogether.
Let me explain why this matters to you.
The Problem With Memory
When you visit a GP or sleep specialist, they’ll typically ask you to fill out questionnaires about your sleep over the past week or month. How tired have you been? How’s your mood? Can you concentrate?
These seem like reasonable questions. But here’s the catch: your brain doesn’t store experiences like a video recorder. When you try to recall how you felt last Tuesday, your brain takes shortcuts.
It gives extra weight to the worst moments. It lets your current mood colour past experiences. If you had one dreadful night this week, your brain might convince you the entire week was terrible—even if the other nights were merely mediocre.
Researchers call this recall bias, and it’s a significant problem in sleep research.
What Real-Time Tracking Reveals
A recent study from the University of Maryland did something clever. They gave 40 older adults with chronic insomnia a smartphone app that pinged them four times daily, asking: How do you feel right now?
Not how they felt yesterday. Not how they felt this week on average. Right now, in this moment.
Half the participants took a sleep medication (suvorexant), and half took a placebo. Both groups also filled out traditional retrospective questionnaires.
The traditional questionnaires detected an improvement in overall insomnia severity, but found no difference in daytime symptoms between the medication and placebo groups.
Case closed, right? Medication helps sleep but doesn’t do much for how you feel during the day.
Except the real-time tracking told a completely different story.
The Pattern That Changes Everything
The real-time data showed that people taking the medication felt more fatigued in the morning—but significantly less fatigued in the afternoon and evening. Their alertness followed the same pattern: lower early in the day but normalising by afternoon.
This matters enormously.
If you’re someone who needs to be sharp first thing in the morning, knowing about that early fatigue might change your treatment decision. If you struggle most with afternoon and evening functioning, this pattern might be perfect for you.
But here’s the crucial bit: the traditional questionnaires averaged all of this out and reported “no significant difference.”
The nuance—the pattern, the timing, the trade-offs—was completely invisible until someone measured it in real-time.
What I See in Practice
This research validates something I witness constantly in my work with clients.
People will come to a session convinced they’ve had a terrible week. “I can’t function,” they’ll say. “I’m useless. I can barely think straight.”
Then we’ll look at what they actually did that week. They went to work every day. They had dinner with a friend. They helped their kids with homework. They went to the gym twice.
“But I felt awful the whole time,” they’ll insist.
Did you, though? Or did you feel awful some of the time, and your brain has now convinced you it was constant?
When we start tracking in real-time—how you actually feel at different points throughout the day—patterns emerge. Yes, mornings are rough. But by mid-afternoon, you’re often functioning better than you think. Your catastrophic predictions about being “unable to cope” don’t match what’s actually happening.
This shift in perspective is transformative.
Why Daytime Functioning Matters More Than Sleep Quantity
I spend a lot of time pulling people away from obsessing over sleep metrics. How many hours. How many wake-ups. How long it took to fall asleep.
Those numbers have their place, but they’re not what determines whether you can live a rich, meaningful life.
What actually matters:
- Can you focus at work?
- Can you be present with your family?
- Can you engage in activities that matter to you?
- Are you able to tolerate the discomfort of a rough night without it derailing your week?
These are the real markers of success. And often, they improve well before sleep itself does.
And, focussing your attention to the daytime often improves sleep too!
That’s not to say sleep doesn’t matter—of course it does. But you can have a rough night and still have a productive, meaningful day. And you can sleep seven hours and still feel dreadful if you’re caught in an anxiety spiral about whether that seven hours was “good enough.”
The Hopeful Bit
One of the things I love about this research is how it validates what I see every day in practice.
People often start feeling better—less anxious, more capable, more engaged with life—well before their sleep “normalises.”
Traditional questionnaires would miss that improvement entirely. They’d say “insomnia severity unchanged” whilst overlooking the fact that you’re back at work, socialising with friends, playing with your kids, pursuing hobbies you’d abandoned.
Real-time awareness—whether through formal tracking or simply paying attention—captures those changes. It shows you that progress is happening, even when it doesn’t feel linear or dramatic.
That’s the shift I want people to make: from “I’m still not sleeping well” to “I’m living well despite imperfect sleep along this journey”
Because ultimately, that’s what this work is about. Not just sleeping better, but reclaiming your life from insomnia’s grip.
This research shows we now have better tools to measure that journey—tools that capture what actually matters to you, in real-time, throughout your day.
That feels like progress worth celebrating.
Want to know more? Check out the full Sleep Learning Centre Article on Memory and Assessment.
