The test presented here is the Glasgow Sleep Effort Scale (GSES), developed by Broomfield and Espie (2005) to measure "sleep effort" — the conscious mental and behavioral effort people put into trying to fall asleep, based on the idea that sleep should happen naturally and that trying too hard is itself counterproductive. It consists of 7 statements about putting excessive effort into sleeping, feeling you should be able to control your sleep, delaying bedtime out of fear of not sleeping, and worrying about sleep before and during the night, for which you rate how much each one applies to you.
Unlike scales that catalogue habits or count symptoms, the GSES targets a single underlying process: trying, monitoring, and worrying about sleep instead of letting it happen. This maps onto the psychobiological inhibition model of insomnia, in which the very act of striving for sleep keeps the nervous system too activated to fall asleep. It takes about 2 minutes to complete. The total score ranges from 0 to 14 points, with higher scores indicating greater sleep effort. In the original validation study, people with insomnia scored 7.06 points on average, compared to 1.22 points among good sleepers, and a score of 2 or more points already identified insomnia with over 90% accuracy. The result is not a medical diagnosis and does not replace consultation with a specialist.
Insomnia, anxiety, and depression are often intertwined in practice and can reinforce one another. If you are more concerned about anxiety, tension, or worry in general, our anxiety test may help. If you are more concerned about low mood, loss of interest, or lack of energy, our depression test may help.