Sleep is essential for good health and even survival, but most people aren’t getting enough. In general, this is because people have busy lives and want to prioritize other things over sleep, either due to choice or necessity. For some people, however, not getting enough sleep is due to some type of disorder that needs to be treated.

The best way to get a real diagnosis of a sleep disorder is to talk to your doctor and get a referral to a sleep specialist. They have the proper tools and equipment to evaluate your sleep and help to pinpoint exactly what is going on so that you can get the necessary help to improve your sleep.

For those who are just curious about whether they are sleeping properly or not, the “spoon test” might be a good option. This test has been making its rounds on the internet, with some people claiming that it is an essential way to determine how quickly you are falling asleep, and therefore how well your sleep begins.

Performing the spoon test is relatively simple:

• Grab a spoon and a tin pan or other object that will make noise if a spoon is dropped on it.
• Place the tin pan on the floor near your bed.
• Look at the time or start a stopwatch.
• Close your eyes and try to fall asleep while you hold the spoon over the tin pan.
• When you are startled awake by the dropped spoon, take note of the time.

This will tell you how long it took you to fall asleep from the time you closed your eyes until your muscle tension was relaxed, which is one indicator of sleeping.

It is often recommended that you do this experiment in the middle of the day so that your nighttime sleep is not interrupted, and so that you get an accurate reading and not one based on being extremely tired.

But does this actually work to provide good information? Katherine Sharkey is an associate professor of Medicine and Psychiatry and Human Behavior, and Medical Director of the Sleep for Science Research Laboratory at Brown University. She talked with IFLScience about this, saying:

“I have only heard of the spoon test being used to enforce brief daytime naps by famous creatives like Salvador Dalí and Thomas Edison. Legend holds that they would nap with a spoon in their hand and a metal pan underneath – so that when they fell asleep and their muscle tone decreased, the spoon would drop and the clatter of the spoon hitting the pan would wake them up.”

So, you won’t be surprised that this spoon test is not used by medical professionals or sleep experts. There are many reasons for this, not the least important is the fact that falling asleep is not an event, but a process. Different areas of the brain and body ‘fall asleep’ at various points in the process. Sharkey explains:

 “The transition from wake to sleep is not perfectly synchronized across different brain networks. We tend to think that falling asleep is like flipping a ‘brain off’ switch, but the spoon test illustrates that the sensation of cognitive disengagement from environmental stimuli that occurs at ‘sleep onset’ precedes the decrease in muscle tone that causes the person to drop the spoon.”

For this reason, it is not recommended that you try to use the spoon test as any type of diagnostic tool. Instead, see your doctor and try to get to the root of the problem.

If you do use the spoon test, however, and you find that you are falling asleep very quickly (less than 5 minutes) it may mean that you are not getting enough sleep. If it is taking more than 30 minutes to fall sleep, there may be an issue with insomnia. Either way, these clues should just be seen as a first step that will hopefully lead you to seeing a medical professional to help you improve the quality of your sleep.

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