Is it bad sleep, or insomnia?

1)What is insomnia?

Insomnia is persistent difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking too early, despite having adequate opportunity to sleep. That last part is what separates it from simply not getting enough sleep: someone working two jobs may be exhausted without having insomnia at all, because the problem is time in bed rather than the ability to use it. Insomnia is the opposite situation, where the opportunity is there and sleep still will not come.

The second defining feature is daytime impact. Insomnia is not diagnosed on nights alone; the nights have to cost you something in the day, whether that is tiredness, poor concentration, low mood, or irritability. This is why several questions in this self-check ask about tiredness, concentration and mood during the day, and not only about the hours in bed. ICD-10 counts difficulty as insomnia when it happens at least three nights a week for at least a month. DSM-5 uses three months.

2)Signs of insomnia

Insomnia is easiest to recognise when you look at the nights and the days together, because the daytime half is what most people underestimate.

• At night: lying awake for more than about half an hour, waking repeatedly, waking hours before your alarm and not getting back to sleep, and sleep that feels unrefreshing even when the hours look adequate.
• In the day: tiredness, poor concentration and memory, low or irritable mood, and errors or near-misses in things you normally do easily.
• Around sleep: dreading bedtime, watching the clock, and a mind that switches on the moment the light goes off.
• Behaviourally: long naps, early bedtimes to make up losses, and rising reliance on caffeine, alcohol, or sleep aids.

Almost everyone has some of these after a stressful week. What this self-check looks at is whether the pattern has settled in and started to affect your days.

3)How this self-check works

Each of the 9 questions scores from 0 (not at all) to 3 (very often), so your total runs from 0 to 27. A higher total means these signs of insomnia happen more often for you. The bands below are our own grouping to help you read your result. They are not clinical cut-offs, and a band is not a diagnosis.

4)What your result means, and what it doesn't

A single result is a snapshot of the last month, not a label and not a diagnosis. Sleep responds quickly to stress, illness, travel, alcohol, and life events, so the direction your score moves over time matters more than any one number. A score of 9 during a hard fortnight and a score of 9 that has held steady since spring are different situations.

It is also worth knowing what this self-check cannot see. Several conditions produce insomnia-shaped answers without being insomnia: sleep apnoea, restless legs syndrome, thyroid problems, chronic pain, and the side effects of common medications all fragment sleep. Anxiety and depression are especially entangled with it, and the relationship runs both ways, with poor sleep worsening mood and low mood disrupting sleep. Loud snoring, gasping or choking at night, or heavy daytime sleepiness despite apparently long sleep all point towards apnoea specifically and are worth mentioning to a doctor rather than treating as ordinary insomnia.

5)What to do next

• Few or some signs: the habits that help most are a consistent wake time seven days a week, getting out of bed if you have been awake roughly twenty minutes, keeping the bed for sleep only, and pulling caffeine back to the morning.
• Many signs: ask a doctor about cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, known as CBT-I. It is the recommended first-line treatment and does better than sleeping pills over the long term, with none of the tolerance problems.
• Strong, frequent signs: speak with a doctor. That covers treatment, and also checking for the physical causes that look like insomnia.
• In every case, retake the self-check in a few weeks. The trend tells you whether what you changed is working.

Sleep and anxiety keep each other going, and a racing mind at bedtime is one of the most common reasons people cannot drop off. If that sounds familiar, the free anxiety test (GAD-7) and the free overthinking test are useful companions here. Our guide on sleep and mood tracking covers how the two move together week to week.

If you are struggling to cope, or you are having thoughts of harming yourself or feel in immediate danger, please contact local emergency services or a crisis line you trust right now. You do not have to manage this alone, and reaching out is a sign of strength, not weakness.

6)Why tracking sleep over time helps

Sleep is remarkably hard to judge from memory. Ask most people how they slept last Tuesday and you get a guess shaped by how today is going, which is exactly the wrong instrument for spotting a pattern. A record fixes that. Tracking your sleep alongside mood and everyday factors like caffeine, alcohol, exercise, and stress tends to surface connections that are invisible night to night, that the bad nights follow the days with an afternoon coffee, say, or that your worst weeks for anxiety start with two short nights rather than end with them. Those connections are where change becomes possible, because they turn a vague sense of sleeping badly into specific, addressable causes. Andy is built around exactly this loop: a quick daily check-in, and a clear view of how your sleep and mood move over the weeks.

7)About this self-check

This is Andy's own self-check. We wrote its 9 questions in plain words, based on the description of insomnia disorder in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5 (2013). It is not a validated scale or a diagnostic tool, and the bands are our own grouping. It does not replace professional care. Treatment: Qaseem A, Kansagara D, Forciea MA, et al. (2016), Management of chronic insomnia disorder in adults, Annals of Internal Medicine. Last reviewed September 2026.