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 the Athens Insomnia Scale devotes its last three items to daytime well-being, functioning, and sleepiness rather than asking only about the hours in bed. Difficulty is generally considered persistent when it occurs at least three nights a week for three months or more.

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 the scale is probing is whether the pattern has settled in and started charging you for it during the day.

3)How the scoring works

Each of the eight items scores from 0 (no problem) to 3 (serious problem), so your total runs from 0 to 24. A higher total points to more disturbed sleep. Unlike most self-checks, this scale has a validated screening cut-off: a total of 6 or more indicates insomnia. The bands below use that cut-off as their first boundary, and are otherwise guides for reflection rather than clinical thresholds:

One note on the wording: the published scale gives each item its own answer labels, tailored to what that item asks about. This version uses a single problem-severity scale across all eight, which is the common self-check rendering and keeps the totals comparable, but it is a simplification of the original.

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

A single score is a snapshot of the past 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 far 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 entirely.

It is also worth knowing what this scale 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

• Below the threshold or mild: the highest-leverage habits 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.
• Moderate: ask a doctor about cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, known as CBT-I. It is the recommended first-line treatment and outperforms sleeping pills over the long term, with none of the tolerance problems.
• Severe: speak with a doctor. That covers treatment and, just as importantly, checking for the physical causes that imitate insomnia.
• In every case, retake the test 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 test

This test uses the Athens Insomnia Scale, an eight-item instrument developed from the ICD-10 diagnostic criteria for insomnia and validated for screening use. This page is intended for self-check and education only. It does not store your answers and is not a substitute for professional care or diagnosis. Source: Soldatos CR, Dikeos DG, Paparrigopoulos TJ (2000), Athens Insomnia Scale: validation of an instrument based on ICD-10 criteria, Journal of Psychosomatic Research. Last reviewed September 2026.