Sleep Quality
Four questions adapted from the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index give a score from 4 to 20. Mean is 14 with an SD of 3; roughly 35% of adults fall into the poor-sleep range.
Four items in the spirit of the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, not the full PSQI. Each scores 1 to 5; higher is better sleep. The mean of 14 and SD of 3 are our estimate.
Better sleep than
25%
of people, on our estimated curve. Score 12 of 20; the mean is 14.
Your score
12 / 20
Global avg
14 / 20
Sleep quality score, our estimate
Around the middle. One slow item usually drags the score; falling asleep slowly and waking at night are the two that respond most to a fixed wake time.
In context
The full Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (Buysse et al., 1989) has 19 questions and is scored the other way round: 0 is perfect and anything over 5 counts as a poor sleeper. By that cut-off, a large share of adults, often a third or more in surveys, are poor sleepers. Quality and duration are separate: eight hours broken into fragments can leave you more tired than six hours in one block, because deep slow-wave sleep comes mostly in the first half of the night.
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About this test
Four questions: how quickly you fall asleep, how often you wake, how rested you feel in the morning and how rested you feel overall. Each scores 1 to 5 for a total out of 20. The items follow the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (Buysse et al., 1989); the curve, mean 14 and SD 3, is our approximation of a general-population spread.
A 17 is better than about 84% of people; an 11 worse than about 84%. Sleep Cycle's 2023 app data (not peer-reviewed) suggests roughly a third of adults report poor sleep, which roughly matches the share scoring 12 or below on this scale.
What is a good sleep quality score?
16 or above out of 20 on this module, which is about the 75th percentile (mean 14, SD 3). On the full PSQI, which runs the other way, a global score of 5 or less counts as a good sleeper.
How long should it take to fall asleep?
10 to 20 minutes is typical. Under 5 minutes usually means you are short on sleep; over 30 minutes on most nights is one of the PSQI markers of poor sleep. The module scores onset time as one of its four items.
How many people have poor sleep?
About 35% of adults report it, in the figure the module quotes. The PSQI validation study (Buysse et al., 1989) found its cut-off separated good from poor sleepers with 89.6% sensitivity and 86.5% specificity, so self-report tracks the clinical picture fairly well.
Percentiles above come from the same parameters the Sleep Quality module uses. See the methodology for how they are calculated.