The Consensus Sleep Diary was the result of collaborations with insomnia experts and potential users. The adoption of a standard sleep diary for insomnia will facilitate comparisons across studies and advance the field. The proposed diary is intended as a living document which still needs to be tested, refined, and validated.

These updated findings provide additional evidence in support of the original review's conclusions as to the efficacy and generalizability of psychological and behavioral therapies for persistent insomnia. Nonetheless, further research is needed to develop therapies that would optimize outcomes and reduce morbidity, as would studies of treatment mechanisms, mediators, and moderators of outcomes. Effectiveness studies are also needed to validate those therapies when implemented in clinical settings (primary care), by non-sleep specialists. There is also a need to disseminate more effectively the available evidence in support of psychological and behavioral interventions to health-care practitioners working on the front line.

Adoption of a standard research assessment of insomnia disorders will facilitate comparisons among different studies and advance the state of knowledge. These recommendations are not intended to be static but must be periodically revised to accommodate further developments and evidence in the field.

Insomnia is a highly prevalent, often debilitating, and economically burdensome form of sleep disturbance caused by various situational, medical, emotional, environmental and behavioral factors. Although several consensually-derived nosologies have described numerous insomnia phenotypes, research concerning these phenotypes has been greatly hampered by a lack of widely accepted operational research diagnostic criteria (RDC) for their definition. The lack of RDC has, in turn, led to inconsistent research findings for most phenotypes largely due to the variable definitions used for their ascertainment. Given this problem, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) commissioned a Work Group (WG) to review the literature and identify those insomnia phenotypes that appear most valid and tenable. In addition, this WG was asked to derive standardized RDC for these phenotypes and recommend assessment procedures for their ascertainment. This report outlines the WG's findings, the insomnia RDC derived, and research assessment procedures the WG recommends for identifying study participants who meet these RDC.