Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index Calculator

Where the PSQI comes from and what it captures

Buysse and colleagues published the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index in 1989 at the University of Pittsburgh, and it has since become one of the most cited self-report tools in sleep medicine. The original instrument asks about the past month and folds nineteen self-rated items into seven components: how you would rate your sleep overall, how long it takes to drift off, how many hours you actually sleep, how efficient that time in bed is, how often specific disturbances wake you, whether you lean on sleep medication, and how much your days suffer as a result. This page is a shorter PSQI-style screener rather than the validated questionnaire. It borrows the same 0-to-3 way of scoring the patterns most people can recall without a diary, but it will not stand in for the full instrument or for a clinician's read.

Think of the number it returns as a conversation starter, not a verdict. A low total lines up with the kind of answers people give when sleep is going reasonably well. A higher total is worth noticing, particularly when the same pattern has held for several weeks, when it bleeds into your work or your commute, or when it comes with witnessed breathing pauses, loud snoring, chest discomfort, or a growing reliance on pills to fall asleep.

Answering the six questions for a typical month

Each question asks about your last four weeks or so, not about a single rough night after a red-eye flight or a sick child. Pick the frequency that matches your ordinary week, then type in the hours you actually sleep rather than the hours you spend lying in bed hoping to. The screener adds up the five frequency answers and converts your sleep hours into a sixth component. Zero is always the healthiest response; a 3 flags the most frequent or most severe version of that difficulty.

When the result appears, read the total and the per-component list side by side, because two people can land on the same number for very different reasons. Six hours of sleep with no other complaints points toward a duration problem; a full eight hours paired with morning grogginess and reported gasping points somewhere else entirely. If your total is high, the most useful thing to do is carry the component breakdown to a clinician instead of trying to diagnose yourself from it.

How the components add up to a score

The full PSQI global score is simply the sum of its seven component scores:

Each component ranges from 0 to 3, so the full questionnaire ranges from 0 to 21. This page uses six quick inputs and produces a simplified 0 to 18 score. The sleep-duration component adds 0 points for 7 or more hours, 1 point for 6 to under 7 hours, 2 points for 5 to under 6 hours, and 3 points for under 5 hours. The other five questions add their selected 0 to 3 values directly.

Walking one honest month through the screener

Picture a month of shift work. You call your overall sleep fairly bad (2), you fight to fall asleep once or twice a week (2), you average about 5.5 hours a night, which lands in the 5-to-6-hour band (2), you nod off during the day less than once a week (1), you take nothing to help you sleep (0), and you notice no breathing trouble (0). Adding those gives a total of 7. That sits squarely in the middle band: nothing here is an emergency on its own, but 7 is a nudge to look hard at when you go to bed, how late your caffeine runs, how much stress you carry into the dark, and whether the short nights keep repeating once the shift rotation eases.

What each score band is telling you

What a self-report screener cannot see

Everything here rests on your own recollection, so the usual caveats about memory apply: most people underestimate how long they lie awake and overestimate total sleep. The screener never measures blood oxygen, apneas, periodic limb movements, circadian misalignment, drug interactions, pain, anxiety, or depression, and it flattens the official scoring, especially the sleep-efficiency math and the long list of nighttime disturbances the real PSQI asks about. Read the number as a rough screen, not a diagnosis or a treatment plan.

Seek qualified medical advice if high scores persist, if you regularly feel dangerously sleepy, if another person notices gasping or breathing pauses during sleep, if you fall asleep while driving, or if you are changing sedatives, stimulants, alcohol use, or other medications. Official questionnaires, sleep diaries, actigraphy, or a sleep study may be needed for a complete evaluation.