How to Get More Deep and REM Sleep: What Actually Works

If you're reading this, there's a good chance you glanced at your smartwatch or ring this morning, saw a disappointing "deep sleep" or "REM" number, and went looking for a way to raise it. That's an understandable instinct, and a healthy one, because deep and REM sleep genuinely matter. But it also runs into an uncomfortable truth that most "boost your deep sleep" articles skip past: you cannot consciously command your body into more of either stage. There's no button, no breathing trick, no supplement that reliably forces it.

What you can do, and this is the honest and more useful framing, is remove the common things that suppress deep and REM sleep, and strengthen the natural signals that promote them. Think of it less as forcing more deep sleep and more as clearing the obstacles out of its way. This guide covers what deep and REM sleep actually do, what steals them, what genuinely helps, and, importantly, when a stubbornly low number is a sign to stop optimizing and get checked.

A quick primer: what deep and REM sleep do

You don't need an encyclopedia here, just enough to know what you're aiming for.

Deep sleep (also called slow-wave sleep or N3) is your body's physical restoration stage. It's when tissue repair ramps up, growth hormone is released, and, as newer research shows, the brain clears out metabolic waste. It's the hardest stage to be woken from, and it's concentrated in the first half of the night. Most healthy adults spend roughly 15 to 20 percent of the night in deep sleep, though sources put the normal range anywhere from about 10 to 25 percent.^1,2

REM sleep (rapid eye movement) is your brain's processing stage, when it consolidates memories and works through emotions. Unlike deep sleep, REM is concentrated in the second half of the night, with each REM period getting longer toward morning. Healthy adults spend about 20 to 25 percent of the night in REM.^1,3

Two useful implications fall out of this timing. Going to bed very late tends to cost you deep sleep (you miss the front-loaded window), while cutting your morning short with an early alarm tends to cost you REM (you trim the longest REM period of the night). And both stages decline naturally with age, which we'll come back to.

The honest reframe: you can't force it, but you can stop sabotaging it

Here's the spine of this whole guide. Deep and REM sleep are governed by your circadian rhythm, your sleep pressure, your body temperature, and your brain chemistry, none of which respond to willpower. You can't decide to have more deep sleep any more than you can decide to digest faster.

So the entire game is indirect. Every genuinely effective strategy works by one of two mechanisms: removing something that's suppressing your deep or REM sleep, or reinforcing the natural biological signals that trigger it. That's it. Anything promising a direct "hack" is overselling. With that frame set, here's what's actually stealing your deep and REM sleep, and what actually helps.

What steals your deep and REM sleep

If your stages are low, the fix usually starts here, with removing a suppressor rather than adding a booster.

Alcohol. This is one of the biggest and most common culprits. Alcohol suppresses REM sleep in the first part of the night, and as it wears off it causes a fragmented "rebound" later, disrupting your sleep architecture even if you fall asleep faster.³ A nightcap is one of the most reliable ways to wreck your REM.

Inconsistent sleep and wake times. An irregular schedule, including sleeping in on weekends, throws off the circadian timing that organizes your sleep stages, altering the balance of deep and REM you get.³ If your schedule is dictated by rotating shifts, see our guide to shift work and circadian rhythm sleep disorders.

Late caffeine. Caffeine has a long half-life, so an afternoon or evening coffee can reduce your total deep sleep even if you still manage to fall asleep.^1,3

A warm bedroom. Your body has to drop its core temperature to enter and maintain deep sleep, so a too-warm room physically works against it, one of the most direct and overlooked saboteurs.¹

Light and screens late at night. Evening light exposure, especially from screens, suppresses the melatonin signal that helps time your sleep, and late mental stimulation keeps arousal high when it should be winding down.

Undiagnosed sleep apnea. This is the important one. Obstructive sleep apnea repeatedly interrupts breathing during sleep, pulling you up into lighter stages every time, often without fully waking you, and stripping out deep and REM sleep in the process. Someone with untreated apnea can spend eight hours in bed and get very little restorative sleep, which is exactly the pattern that shows up as chronically low deep sleep plus daytime exhaustion. More on this below, because it's the scenario where "sleep tips" aren't the answer.

Aging. Deep sleep declines substantially with age, beginning in early adulthood, and older adults spend less time in both deep and REM sleep and more in lighter stages.^2,4 If you're wondering how to increase deep sleep as an older adult, the same evidence-based levers below still help, but it's worth knowing that some decline is normal physiology, not a problem to be fixed. The goal is optimizing what you can, not chasing a 25-year-old's sleep architecture.

What actually helps

These are the evidence-backed levers, and notice that they mostly work by removing suppressors or reinforcing natural signals, exactly as the reframe predicts.

A consistent wake time, above all. This is the single most powerful lever. Waking at the same time every day, including weekends, anchors your circadian rhythm, which in turn stabilizes the timing and quality of your sleep stages. If you change one thing, change this.

Morning light exposure. Getting bright light (ideally sunlight) soon after waking reinforces your circadian rhythm from the other end, strengthening the day-night signal that organizes deep and REM sleep that night.

A cool, dark bedroom. Because your core temperature needs to fall for deep sleep, keeping the room on the cool side, commonly cited as roughly 60 to 67°F (15 to 19°C), supports it directly. Dark and quiet protect against the arousals that fragment sleep.¹

Exercise, timed sensibly. Regular physical activity increases deep sleep, with resistance and aerobic training both well-supported. The one caveat is timing: intense exercise too close to bed can raise core temperature and arousal, so earlier in the day is generally better for most people.

Winding down and lowering evening arousal. Deep sleep comes more easily when your nervous system is calm. A genuine wind-down routine, dim light, no screens, no stressful inputs, slow activities, lowers the arousal that competes with sleep. This matters more than any gadget. If your problem is falling or staying asleep rather than stage percentages, the structured version of this work is CBT-I, the first-line treatment for chronic insomnia.

Cutting alcohol before bed. Since alcohol is such a reliable REM suppressor, simply avoiding it in the hours before sleep is one of the faster ways to protect your sleep architecture.

You'll notice supplements aren't the headline here. That's deliberate: the behavioral levers have far stronger and more consistent evidence than any pill, and leading with them is both more honest and more effective. For an evidence-based look at where supplements like melatonin and magnesium do and don't fit, see our guide to sleep aids and medications.

The tracker caveat: don't let the number run your life

Since most people reading this were sent here by a wearable, this part matters. Consumer sleep trackers, Oura, Apple Watch, Whoop, Fitbit, estimate your sleep stages; they don't measure them the way a clinical sleep study does. Research consistently shows these devices are noticeably less accurate at breaking sleep into precise stages than they are at tracking total sleep or regularity. So your exact "deep sleep: 47 minutes" reading is an approximation, not a lab result. We go deeper on this in what your wearable's sleep data can and can't tell you.

Two consequences follow. First, watch trends over weeks, not single nights. Deep sleep in particular is one of the most naturally variable measurements from night to night, so one low reading is usually just noise. Second, and this is a real phenomenon, don't let the number itself become a source of stress. There's a recognized pattern called orthosomnia, where anxiety about optimizing tracker sleep scores actually worsens sleep, because the worry raises the very arousal that suppresses deep sleep. If chasing your deep-sleep number is making you anxious at bedtime, the healthiest move may be to glance at it less. The goal is how you feel, not the score.

When low deep sleep is a medical issue (and worth getting checked)

Here's the responsible bottom line, and the point at which "sleep tips" stop being the answer. If you're consistently getting enough hours, doing the fundamentals right, cool room, consistent schedule, no late alcohol, and you still feel unrefreshed, foggy, and exhausted, or your sleep quality stays stubbornly poor, that pattern itself is meaningful. It can signal an underlying sleep disorder that no amount of sleep hygiene will fix on its own.

The most common culprit is obstructive sleep apnea. Because it fragments sleep and strips out deep and REM stages without fully waking you, it produces exactly this picture: adequate hours, poor-quality sleep, persistent daytime tiredness, sometimes alongside snoring, gasping, or morning headaches and other morning symptoms. If that sounds like you, the useful next step isn't another sleep hack, it's getting evaluated. This is easier than it used to be: a home sleep test can assess for apnea in your own bed, and if testing points to apnea, CPAP therapy is the treatment that restores the sleep architecture you've been trying to optimize.

This article is for general education and isn't a substitute for individual medical advice. If you consistently wake unrefreshed despite adequate sleep, talk with a qualified clinician about whether an evaluation for a sleep disorder makes sense.