Health & Wellness
Supercharge Your Mind: How to Increase REM Sleep (Tonight!)
How to Increase REM Sleep
Have you ever woken up on the wrong side of the bed; feeling tired or irritable?
I think most of us can answer yes to those questions.
If so, then our bodies may be telling us it’s time we learned how to increase REM sleep.
Rapid eye movement or REM sleep is the period of sleep where our brain is the most active. You may have heard that this is where our most vivid dreams occur. It’s also theorized that REM sleep helps us process our emotions and retain our memories.
Interestingly enough, low REM sleep has been associated with difficulty learning and remembering, and some studies have even associated REM sleep with the ability to solve complex problems.
This is mysterious because it means that our dreams play a huge role in the way we psychologically and physiologically function.
It might very well be the case that we sleep so that we can dream…
But before unraveling that mystery, let’s get to the motivational part: Everyone has the power to get the best quality rest and to increase the quality of their sleep.
We’re going to show you 4 cool ways to make that happen by increasing REM sleep.
But first, it’s important to understand what happens during sleep for you to get a clear picture.
The Sleep Cycle: Understanding How to Get More REM Sleep
When you first sleep, you are in non-rapid eye movement. NREM has 3 stages:
- N1: This is very light sleep and is the shortest stage. You can easily be woken up at this point.
- N2– You remain in this stage the longest, and from here you go into deep sleep, or N3.
- N3– This is where deep sleep occurs, and it is the last stage before reaching REM sleep.
From deep sleep, you go into REM. It takes approximately 90 minutes to get from N1 to REM, and from there, sleeping patterns switch between REM and the cycles of NREM every 90-120 until we wake up.
Now that you understand the sleep cycle, let’s get into the 4 ways you can increase REM sleep.
Practice Sleep Hygiene to Get More REM Sleep
The last stage of the NREM cycle before reaching REM is deep sleep, so it’s important to stay asleep throughout the night because anything that gets you up will interrupt this crucial cycle. We can’t reach our much-needed REM sleep unless we’re able to complete the NREM cycle. It becomes important to then practice good sleep hygiene to ensure we stay asleep throughout the night, and to complete each cycle of NREM.
Sleep hygiene means:
- Keeping a solid routine: By going to bed around the same time every night, you remind your body that it’s time to rest.
- Put away the electronics: Electronic devices emit blue light which inhibits the body’s release of melatonin, affecting both the quality and quantity of sleep. Studies have shown that using electronics for more than 30 minutes within two hours before bedtime will affect sleep.
- Take a lukewarm shower: Your body temperature lowers as you reach bedtime. It drops during NREM, and slightly raises during REM, so regulating your body temperature before sleep is beneficial to increase deep sleep and get more REM sleep, and lukewarm showers are the best way to do that. Both cold and hot showers trigger extreme responses. With cold, your body temperature decreases but will have to increase rapidly afterward to offset the drop. Conversely, hot showers increase body temperature, but your body will have to decrease rapidly to offset the spike. Lukewarm is the best balance.
Maintain Your homeostatic Sleep Drive
The quality of our sleep is affected by more than just the act of sleeping. What we do during the day has a direct relationship with how we rest at night.
Our circadian rhythms— our body’s internal clock—are most affected by our homeostatic sleep drive. This is our body’s desire to rest the longer we stay awake. Our circadian rhythm is only as strong as the balance we have between sleeping and waking.
We can maintain our homeostatic sleep drive by spending more time outside. The amount of melatonin our body produces is directly related to how much time we spend in daylight, and melatonin heavily influences our circadian rhythm.
Become a Lifelong Learner
Even the activities we choose to engage in throughout our day affect the length of our REM sleep. It turns out that the most effective way to increase time spent in REM is to learn something new.
The more we engage our minds, the more time the brain will need to process the information—or even dream about it—and the more time spent processing information means more time spent in REM sleep.
The most effective types of learning are tasks that test our procedural memory and motor coordination. Procedural memory involves doing something for the first time, such as learning a new language or a new skill.
Our need for REM sleep increases even more when procedural memory is tied to a complex motor skill like jumping on a trampoline or playing a sport.
Interestingly enough, low REM sleep has been shown to impair procedural memory performance. This means that when you learn something, you will literally have to sleep on it for you to retain what you have learned in the form of an effective memory.
Who knew something like learning a new sport could help us get more REM sleep, and have such a profound impact on our brain?
Try Non-Sleep Deep Sleep Rest (NSDR)
So far, we’ve explained the sleep cycle, and have shown how to practice sleep hygiene to increase REM sleep. But this still leaves out what many find to be the most difficult part of the whole process of sleep: actually falling asleep.
The time it takes to fall asleep can interfere with our circadian rhythms. If we need to go to bed at 10 to complete the NREM cycles necessary for REM sleep, but it takes us an hour to fall asleep, then we run the risk of oversleeping or interrupting our circadian rhythm.
If you’re still having trouble getting to sleep after practicing good sleep hygiene and attending to your homeostatic sleep drive, try what Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman calls NSDR or non-sleep deep rest.
NSDR is not a meditation. It is a form of guided relaxation that involves breath control and concentration. The basic protocol only takes 10 minutes to complete, so it’s a practical way to prepare our bodies for sleep. And believe us, it’s pretty wild!
The Mystery of Sleep and Dreaming
Have you ever thought about the difference between a memory and a dream?
Think back to your earliest memories for a moment. Is there anything that differentiates a dream from a memory?
Both appear like visions in our minds; like movies played back. You may say that the difference between the two is that your memories actually happened in reality, but the question remains:
how different can dreams and memories really be if they both appear like memories?
Although the benefits of sleeping are understood, why we sleep remains a mystery to scientists. There are only theories, and a very common one is that sleep consolidates memories. Studies suggest that dreams strengthen memories by getting rid of unimportant ones. Without dreams, we may not be able to remember anything new because we would be remembering too much, and that would be too much for the mind to handle.
Interestingly enough, low REM sleep has been associated with trouble remembering, and even an increase in the risk of dementia. So I pose a fun theory:
We sleep so that we can dream, and we dream because we hold on to things that we remember. Even deeper than this is that DNA is a form of memory, so could part of the reason that we sleep be that we hold the memory of everything before us?
You may have heard the phrase “Tomorrow is a brand-new day.” Well, yesterday only exists because you remember it, and feeling like tomorrow is different than today only happens if you’ve slept, because if you haven’t slept, then tomorrow still feels like today.
And maybe that’s why dreams feel like memories, and memories feel like dreams… because without sleep we would have neither memories nor dreams, and we need one to complement the other.
If you would like to read up on an interesting correlation between dreams and goals, check out my article 3 Cool Quotes for Success and Their Powerful Meaning for some more inspirational insights.
A Review of How to Increase REM Sleep
Sleeping and dreaming may be a mystery, but knowing how to get the best quality sleep doesn’t have to be!
If you want to learn how to increase REM sleep, just remember these 5 things:
- Practice good sleep hygiene
- Get plenty of natural light outdoors to maintain your homeostatic sleep drive.
- Increase your brain’s need to process information by learning new skills.
- Try a technique like non-sleep deep rest to get to sleep faster.