Am I Sleep Deprived —
free, 15 questions
Not whether you sleep badly — whether you sleep enough. Fifteen questions over the last two weeks on the hours themselves, what your body does about them, and what they cost.
Classic Quiz
15 quick questions · 3 min
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The science behind it
Sleep deprivation is the plainest sleep problem there is: the hours were not given. It is measured in three places at once, and this check follows that shape — the hours themselves, the pressure the body puts behind them, and the cost paid in attention, memory, mood and safety. Two things make it unusually hard to self-diagnose. The first is that a genuine short sleeper — someone whose genetics finish the job in five or six hours, associated with rare variants such as DEC2 and ADRB1 — is far rarer than the number of people who describe themselves that way; most people sleeping six hours and feeling fine have simply lost the contrast. The second is the reason that happens: sleep loss impairs performance and impairs the judgement of performance together, so confidence recovers long before capacity does. That is why this check asks about the clock and the body rather than asking you to rate how tired you feel. It is a screening-style read on a five-point frequency scale over the last two weeks, written for MoodyWonder. It is not the Epworth Sleepiness Scale or any licensed instrument, and it cannot diagnose anything. Read the full methodology →
This is a screening-style questionnaire, not a diagnosis. It reads how often certain experiences happen to you and compares that with other people; only a clinician can assess what it means for you. If the result worries you, take it to one.
What you get — free
- ✓Your three scores against other people's — the hours, the body's signals, the cost
- ✓Whether what you have is a duration problem at all, or something the hours cannot explain
- ✓What a score at your level usually means, and the one thing that is safety rather than advice
A sample from Attachment Style — the layout is the same for every test.
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Common questions
You have several sleep tests. Which one is this?
This is the one about amount. Five sit next to each other and they are genuinely different questions. The Insomnia Check is for wanting to sleep and not being able to — you are in bed and it will not come. The Sleep Quality Check is for when you did sleep and want to know how good it was. Why Am I Always Tired sorts tiredness into its four usual sources, of which short sleep is only one. Why Do I Stay Up When I'm Tired asks why you are not going to bed. This one asks something blunter than all of them: are the hours there. It is the most common answer and the one people check last.
I only need about six hours. Doesn't that just vary between people?
It varies, but much less than people think, and true short sleepers — the ones whose genetics really do finish in five or six hours — are rare enough that almost everyone who believes they are one is not. The reason the belief is so stable is worth knowing, because it is not about willpower or honesty. Sleep loss damages performance and damages the judgement of performance at the same time, and the second one recovers faster. So a person three weeks into short nights feels roughly normal while measuring well below their own baseline. Feeling fine is exactly what being used to it feels like. That is why this check asks about hours and about what your body does at two in the afternoon, rather than asking you how tired you think you are.
Can I catch up at the weekend?
Partly. Recovery sleep is real and it is worth having — some of what short nights cost comes back after a couple of long nights, and it comes back faster than people expect. But not all of it, and not immediately: sleeping until noon on Saturday does not settle the week's account, and it shifts your clock far enough that Sunday night is harder and Monday morning is worse. The version that works better is dull. Add the time back across several nights rather than in one block, and keep your wake time inside a couple of hours of its usual place even on the days you could sleep on. Catch-up is a repair, not a plan.
My short sleep isn't a choice. I have a newborn / I work shifts. Is this test any use to me?
Yes, and the result page has a section written for exactly that. What it will not do is tell you to go to bed earlier, which is useless advice to someone whose nights are not theirs to schedule. What a score is still good for is naming the size of what you are carrying, so that the forgetting, the short fuse and the fog get attributed to a sleep debt rather than to you becoming a worse person. The things that help under those constraints are different ones: splitting the night with someone if there is anyone to split it with, twenty minutes in the afternoon, moving the tasks that need judgement away from your worst hours, and being deliberate about driving. This is a period of depletion, not a personal failure, and it is worth saying that in those words.
I get eight hours and still score high on the signals. What then?
That is the useful pattern this check can find, and it points away from duration. Falling asleep instantly, not being able to get up, and being drowsy during the day after nights that were long enough is the profile of sleep apnoea, and also of anaemia, thyroid trouble, low iron or B12, several medications and depression. None of those respond to an earlier bedtime and all of them respond to being looked at, so that is a doctor's appointment rather than a schedule change. If you snore and anyone has ever seen you stop breathing or gasp in your sleep, say so when you go — that one is worth ruling out first.
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