Six quick questions show how your sleep is doing, and they work
☕ Includes a question for the family ↓
Sleep healthPart of a story we are following · 11 articles · See every update
Good news for your mornings: you can check how well you sleep in a few minutes, with just six questions. And you can use the result today to pick one thing to work on this week.
The questions come from a tool called Ru-SATED 4.0. It looks at sleep as more than the number of hours you get. In a study of 2,000 US adults, the six questions worked well, and they clearly told apart people who have a sleep disorder from people who don’t.
How the study worked
Researchers first talked with 23 people to make sure the questions were easy to understand. Then they gave the scale to 2,000 adults aged 18 to 89, chosen to match the US population by age, sex, race and education, along with other well-known questionnaires. Some people answered again a month later. The study was published Oct. 29, 2026, in Sleep, and it relied on an online panel and on people reporting their own sleep problems.
What they found
The six questions fit together well as one measure of sleep health. Each question covers one part of sleep, and together they give a fuller picture than hours alone.
Scores lined up with other sleep questionnaires, which is what you want to see when a new tool measures the same thing. They were less tied to depression and anxiety scores, so the scale is picking up sleep and not just mood. People’s scores also held fairly steady when they answered again a month later.
The biggest result: people who said they had a sleep disorder scored very differently from people who didn’t. The researchers measured that gap at 0.93, which counts as a large difference.
What are the six parts?
The name Ru-SATED is a memory aid. Each letter stands for one part of sleep health:
- Regularity: Do you go to bed and get up at about the same times?
- Satisfaction: How happy are you with your sleep?
- Alertness: Do you stay awake and sharp during the day?
- Timing: Do you sleep at night, when your body expects it?
- Efficiency: Do you fall asleep and stay asleep without much trouble?
- Duration: Do you get enough hours?
The tool uses one question for each part.
What you can do today
Give yourself a score from 0 to 2 on each of the six parts, where 0 is rarely, 1 is sometimes and 2 is most nights. Add a note about how last week went. Then pick the part with the lowest score and make it your one goal this week. If it’s regularity, try getting up at the same time every day. If it’s alertness, step outside for a few minutes of daylight in the morning. Check in again next Sunday and see how it moved.
Talk about it at home
Sleep isn’t only about how long you stay in bed. It’s also about how regular it is, how rested you feel and how easily you fall asleep. Scientists wrote six short questions to cover all of that, then tested them on 2,000 people to see if they worked.
Question for the table
Here is something to try this week: have everyone in the family give themselves 0 to 2 on each of the six parts, then guess which part is the lowest for each person. Check at the end of the week. How could you tell if your guess was right?
Keep exploring
Copies this article and its questions so you can paste them into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or the AI you use, and keep the conversation going.
Questions and answers
- What does Ru-SATED measure?
- Six parts of sleep health: regularity, satisfaction, alertness, timing, efficiency and duration.
- Did the six questions work?
- Yes. In 2,000 US adults they fit together well, matched other sleep scales and held fairly steady a month later.
- Can it tell if I have a sleep disorder?
- It rates your sleep health. Scores were clearly different for people with and without a sleep disorder, but it does not diagnose anything.
- Is it only about how many hours I sleep?
- No. Hours are one of six parts. The others cover your schedule, how satisfied you feel, how alert you are, when you sleep and how easily you sleep.
