Getting more REM sleep comes down to removing the things that suppress it and strengthening the circadian signals that promote it. REM sleep should make up about 20 to 25% of your total sleep time, which means roughly 90 to 120 minutes per night if you’re sleeping seven to eight hours. Most of the actionable levers involve habits you can change tonight.
Why REM Sleep Loads Toward Morning
Your sleep cycles through stages in roughly 90-minute loops. Early in the night, those cycles are dominated by deep sleep. As the night progresses, each cycle contains a longer stretch of REM. Your longest REM periods happen in the final two or three hours before you wake up. This back-loading matters because anything that fragments your sleep or cuts your night short disproportionately steals REM time. Sleeping six hours instead of eight doesn’t just cost you two hours of generic sleep; it costs you the hours richest in REM.
REM percentage also shifts with age. By age 20, most people spend just over 20% of their sleep in REM. By age 80, that drops to about 17%. Some decline is normal, but the strategies below help preserve what your biology can still produce.
Stop Alcohol From Stealing Your REM
Alcohol is the single most common REM suppressor people voluntarily consume. It fragments your sleep by causing brief micro-awakenings throughout the night. Each time your brain stirs, it resets you back into lighter sleep stages instead of cycling into REM. The result is a night that feels long but leaves you groggy because you missed the restorative phases.
The practical fix isn’t necessarily quitting entirely. Finishing your last drink at least three hours before bed gives your body a head start on metabolizing the alcohol. A glass of wine with dinner affects your sleep far less than the same glass at 10 p.m. If you’re tracking your REM with a wearable and wondering why it’s low, alcohol is the first variable to test.
Move Your Caffeine Cutoff Earlier
Caffeine doesn’t just make it harder to fall asleep. It specifically delays the onset of REM sleep, even after you’ve drifted off. Research shows caffeine can shift REM timing by up to two hours, meaning your brain tries to catch up on REM later in the morning, often after your alarm has already gone off. A 2021 study found that regular daytime caffeine intake delayed circadian REM sleep onset in men and worsened how they felt upon waking.
Caffeine’s half-life is about five to six hours, so a coffee at 2 p.m. still has half its punch at 8 p.m. If you’re serious about improving REM, experiment with a noon cutoff for a week and see what your sleep data shows.
Keep Your Bedroom Cool
During REM sleep, your body essentially loses its ability to regulate temperature. It can’t shiver or sweat effectively the way it can in other stages. That makes you unusually vulnerable to a room that’s too warm or too cold. If the temperature pulls you out of REM, you may not even remember waking, but your sleep tracker will show the gap.
The Cleveland Clinic recommends keeping your bedroom between 60 and 67°F (15 to 19°C). That range helps stabilize REM sleep specifically. If that feels cold, a warm blanket you can push off is better than a heated room, because it lets your body self-adjust without fully waking.
Use Morning Light to Set Your Clock
REM sleep is tightly regulated by your circadian rhythm, the internal clock that tells your brain when to sleep and when to wake. That clock is set primarily by light exposure. Direct sunlight delivers up to 10,000 lux of light, a signal powerful enough to synchronize your entire sleep-wake cycle. Getting bright light in the morning anchors your circadian timing so that your body produces melatonin at the right hour in the evening, which in turn sets up the correct architecture for your sleep cycles, including the REM-heavy ones later in the night.
Aim for 10 to 20 minutes of outdoor light within an hour of waking. Overcast days still provide significantly more lux than indoor lighting. On the flip side, bright light at night disrupts transitions between sleep cycles, causes repeated awakenings, and reduces time in deeper stages, including REM. Dimming screens and overhead lights in the hour before bed protects the same circadian signal you reinforced that morning.
Manage Stress Before Bed
Stress hormones and REM sleep have a complicated, bidirectional relationship. Chronic stress disrupts the hormonal feedback loop that governs your sleep architecture. Animal research published in PNAS found that stress-related impairment of the body’s stress hormone regulation was strongly correlated with abnormal REM patterns. In practical terms, going to bed with a racing mind doesn’t just delay sleep onset; it alters which stages you cycle through once you’re asleep.
You don’t need a meditation habit to address this, though that helps some people. The key is creating a buffer between your day and your pillow. Writing a to-do list for tomorrow, reading something low-stakes, or doing 10 minutes of slow breathing all serve the same purpose: they lower physiological arousal so your brain can enter sleep in a state that supports normal cycling through all stages.
Check Your Medications
Several common medications significantly suppress REM sleep. Antidepressants are the most well-documented offenders. SSRIs and older tricyclic antidepressants can reduce REM sleep by as much as 84% in acute doses. This suppression is generally well tolerated, and the mental health benefits of these medications usually outweigh the sleep trade-off. But if you’re on an antidepressant and wondering why your REM numbers look unusually low, this is likely the explanation.
Blood pressure medications, certain antihistamines, and some sleep aids can also alter sleep architecture. If you suspect a medication is affecting your REM sleep, bring it up at your next appointment. Switching to a different drug in the same class or adjusting timing can sometimes help without sacrificing the treatment’s purpose.
Rule Out Sleep Apnea
Obstructive sleep apnea fragments sleep by causing repeated breathing pauses that jolt your brain out of deeper stages. Some people experience apnea events predominantly or even exclusively during REM sleep. Because your muscles relax most during REM, the airway is especially vulnerable to collapse in that stage. The result is a pattern where your body enters REM, your breathing stops, your brain wakes you just enough to restart breathing, and you drop back into lighter sleep before getting any real REM benefit.
Signs that sleep apnea might be eroding your REM include consistently low REM percentages on a tracker despite good sleep habits, morning grogginess no matter how many hours you sleep, and a partner reporting snoring or gasping. A sleep study can identify whether this is the issue, and treatment with a continuous positive airway pressure device often produces a dramatic rebound in REM sleep once the airway stays open.
Prioritize Total Sleep Time
The simplest way to get more REM is to sleep longer. Because REM periods grow longer and more frequent in the second half of the night, even 30 extra minutes of sleep in the morning can add a meaningful chunk of REM. If you’re consistently sleeping under seven hours, no amount of temperature optimization or caffeine timing will fully compensate. Protect the last hour or two of your sleep window. That’s where most of your REM lives.
Consistent timing matters as much as duration. Going to bed and waking up at roughly the same time every day, including weekends, keeps your circadian rhythm stable. A stable rhythm means your brain knows exactly when to schedule its longest REM periods, and those periods actually happen instead of getting cut short by an alarm that lands at a different time every morning.