Getting more REM sleep comes down to protecting the conditions your brain needs to enter and sustain it: enough total sleep time, a cool bedroom, limited alcohol, and a consistent schedule. REM makes up about 25% of a healthy night’s sleep, with most of it concentrated in the final hours before you wake up. That means the single most effective thing you can do is sleep long enough to reach those later cycles.
Why REM Sleep Matters
REM sleep is when your brain does its most active overnight work. Your eyes move rapidly, your muscles go temporarily limp, and your brain becomes nearly as electrically active as when you’re awake. This is the stage most closely linked to dreaming, emotional processing, and memory sorting.
Research from the National Institutes of Health has shown that during REM sleep, specific neurons in the brain’s memory center activate to help you forget unimportant information. This filtering process appears to be exclusive to REM, not other sleep stages. Without enough of it, your brain struggles to clear out the noise from the day, which can leave you feeling mentally foggy and emotionally reactive.
How REM Sleep Is Structured
You don’t enter REM right away. Your brain cycles through lighter and deeper stages of non-REM sleep first, then transitions into REM. This full cycle repeats roughly every 80 to 100 minutes throughout the night.
Your first REM period is typically the shortest, around 10 minutes. Each subsequent period gets longer, with the final ones lasting up to an hour. This back-loaded pattern is why cutting your sleep short by even an hour can disproportionately reduce your REM time. If you normally need eight hours but consistently get six, you’re not losing 25% of your REM. You’re losing a much larger share, because you’re trimming the richest REM periods at the end of the night.
Keep a Consistent Sleep Schedule
Your brain’s internal clock governs when it’s primed for REM sleep. When your sleep and wake times shift from day to day, that clock drifts, and the timing of your sleep stages becomes less predictable. Keeping a steady wake-up time, even on weekends, helps anchor your circadian rhythm so your brain can reliably reach those longer REM cycles in the early morning hours.
This doesn’t mean you need to be rigid to the minute. But a wake time that varies by more than an hour from day to day can meaningfully disrupt the stability of your sleep architecture.
Cool Your Bedroom to 60–67°F
Temperature plays a surprisingly direct role in REM sleep. The Cleveland Clinic recommends keeping your bedroom between 60 and 67°F (about 15 to 19°C), a range specifically shown to help stabilize REM sleep. Your body needs to drop its core temperature slightly to maintain this stage, and a warm room works against that process.
If you tend to sleep hot, lightweight bedding, breathable fabrics, or a fan can help. The goal isn’t to feel cold when you climb into bed. It’s to keep the room cool enough that your body doesn’t overheat during the second half of the night, when REM dominates.
Limit Alcohol Before Bed
Alcohol is one of the most common and underestimated REM suppressors. It acts as a sedative during the first half of the night, which may help you fall asleep faster, but it directly suppresses REM sleep in a dose-dependent way. As your body metabolizes the alcohol in the second half of the night, REM can rebound in fragmented, lower-quality bursts.
Chronic alcohol use compounds the problem, leading to increasingly fragmented REM sleep over time. Even after someone stops drinking, reduced REM can persist during the withdrawal period before gradually returning to baseline. If you’re trying to improve your REM sleep, cutting off alcohol at least three to four hours before bed, or skipping it on weeknights entirely, is one of the highest-impact changes you can make.
Reduce Screen Light in the Evening
Evening light from phones, tablets, and laptops suppresses melatonin, the hormone that signals your brain it’s time to sleep. In one study, just two hours of reading on an LED tablet reduced melatonin production by 55% and delayed the body’s natural melatonin onset by an hour and a half compared to reading a printed book under dim light. Another study on university students found that two hours of evening light exposure shifted the entire circadian clock by an average of 1.1 hours.
That delay doesn’t just push back when you fall asleep. It compresses the time available for the longer REM periods that occur in the final sleep cycles. If your alarm goes off at the same time regardless, you lose the most REM-rich portion of the night. Dimming screens, using night mode, or switching to non-screen activities in the last hour or two before bed helps preserve your melatonin timing.
Time Your Exercise Carefully
Regular physical activity improves sleep quality overall, but the timing and intensity matter for REM specifically. A large meta-analysis found that high-intensity exercise performed within four hours of bedtime reduced REM sleep by about 2.3%. Even when done between 4 and 8 p.m., vigorous exercise still decreased REM by roughly 1.9%.
The effect was most pronounced in people who were habitually sedentary and in sessions lasting 30 to 60 minutes at high intensity. Exercise at more than 80% of maximum capacity tended to increase deep sleep at the expense of REM. Moderate exercise earlier in the day, by contrast, supports healthy sleep architecture without cutting into REM time. If you’re a morning or lunchtime exerciser, this likely isn’t an issue. But if you do intense evening workouts and feel mentally groggy the next day, shifting your session earlier could help.
Check Your Medications
Several common medications suppress REM sleep, sometimes dramatically. Antidepressants are the most well-studied culprits. Tricyclic antidepressants are potent REM suppressors that delay the transition into REM and shorten the time spent there. SSRIs reduce the number of transitions from non-REM into REM sleep. Monoamine oxidase inhibitors can eliminate REM sleep entirely in some patients.
Not all antidepressants affect REM equally. Trazodone, for instance, increases deep sleep and delays REM onset but doesn’t eliminate it. Nefazodone has shown little to no effect on REM sleep at all. If you suspect a medication is affecting your sleep quality, it’s worth discussing alternatives with your prescriber. Don’t stop or change a medication on your own, but know that options with different sleep profiles exist.
Prioritize Total Sleep Time
Because REM periods grow longer as the night progresses, no single hack can replace simply sleeping enough hours. Someone sleeping five hours a night could optimize every other variable on this list and still get less REM than someone sleeping seven or eight hours with mediocre sleep hygiene. The architecture of sleep is designed so that deep sleep dominates the first half of the night and REM dominates the second half. You need to be asleep long enough to reach those later, longer REM windows.
For most adults, that means seven to nine hours of total sleep. If you’re currently getting less than seven, extending your sleep by even 30 minutes, especially on the morning end, can meaningfully increase your REM percentage. Setting a consistent bedtime that allows for a full night, rather than relying on weekends to “catch up,” gives your brain the best chance to complete its full cycle of REM-heavy sleep in the early morning hours.