Marguerite Oyelowo reported four hours a night. The diary and the actigraph agreed with each other and disagreed with her by roughly ninety minutes.

The diary runs for two weeks before anything is changed. Retrospective estimates of sleep are unreliable in both directions, and the diary is the correction.

Week two is the worst week

Sleep hygiene alone has a poor evidence base as a standalone treatment, which is awkward, because it is the most widely distributed sleep advice in existence.

Misperception is a real and treatable finding. It is not the same as being wrong about being exhausted.

Dr. Helena Braddock, sleep medicine

After the course

Adherence to therapy is reviewed at two weeks, six weeks and three months, because almost all abandonment happens inside the first month.

“I was still tired,” she says. “But we were treating the right thing, which we hadn’t been.”

Contributing writer

Dr. Helena Braddock

A demonstration byline created for this prototype. Not a real writer, and not a clinician.

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