If you suspect that you're oversleeping or spending too much time in REM, using an at-home sleep tracker can help you get a better sense of your sleep habits. And regularly spending too much time asleep has been linked with an increased risk of all sorts of more serious health issues 7. Signs of oversleeping include headache upon waking 8, trouble falling asleep when you need to, and mental fogginess. So if you spend your morning snoozing in REM during a time when your body increases levels of energizing hormones like cortisol, it could throw off your hormonal balance, which has downstream effects. One reason could be that going against your body's natural sleep-wake cycle-either by sleeping too much or too little-throws off your circadian rhythm, explains integrative medicine physician Dana Cohen, M.D. " The epidemiology 7 indicates that there's an optimal amount of sleep-about seven hours, eight hours for most people-but people who sleep longer than that actually do worse than people who sleep less than that," he notes.
We all know that getting too little sleep is not healthy, but what about too much? "There is an optimal amount of sleep, just like there is for many other physiological functions," says Siegel, who for the sake of this example likens sleep to blood pressure: You don't want it to be too low, but you don't want it to be too high either. Signs that you're not sleeping enough-and therefore, probably not spending enough time in REM-include problems concentrating and remembering 6, poor mood 6, low sex drive 6, lack of energy 6, food cravings 6, weakened immune function 6, trouble losing weight 6, and balance issues 6. But again, it depends on the person and their unique sleep needs. But generally, Girardin Jean-Louis, Ph.D., professor of population health and psychiatry at New York University previously told mbg, "Healthy sleepers might spend approximately 20% of their sleep time in the REM sleep stage." Given that most people need between seven and eight hours of sleep a night, that means around 90 minutes of REM sleep a night will be a sweet spot. The amount of time we spend in REM will vary depending on our age, with babies typically spending more time in this sleep stage 5 than older adults. The last stage of REM can get up to an hour in length, so most of our REM time happens during the back half of our sleep. As the night goes on, we phase in and out of REM cycles, and the time spent in each gets longer and longer. With this in mind, researchers have found 2 that the first stage of REM sleep typically starts about 60 to 90 minutes after we fall asleep, and it lasts around 10 minutes. This means that it's important to make sure you're getting enough total sleep each night before you worry too much about time spent in REM vs.
"I don't think you can separate REM sleep and sleep in general," he tells mindbodygreen. Jerome Siegel, Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, notes that REM-while important-is just one component of the larger sleep picture.
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