What Is REM Sleep and Why Is It So Important for Your Mental Health?

REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep is the final stage of the sleep cycle. It is the stage most associated with dreaming, it’s believed to stimulate areas of the brain used for learning, and it is an essential part of the picture when it comes to maximizing your mental and physical health. Ideally, a person should reach REM sleep between four and six times per night. 

That said, finding it difficult to achieve REM sleep is an issue that affects about one percent of the population. What’s more, risk factors for this issue increase with age, with a notable increase in sufferers over the age of 50. Here’s what we know: all sleep disorders have the potential to trigger emotional instability, anxiety, cognitive dysfunction, and more. If you’re worried about your sleep disorder and how it is affecting your mental health, you’re not alone. 

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Why REM Sleep Matters

REM sleep is the stage of sleep in which the eyes move rapidly from side to side, and other brain and body activities ramp up to similar levels as those achieved during waking hours. This sleep stage was discovered in the 1950s and has been of great interest to scientists (and the public) ever since.

Over the decades, we’ve come to understand REM sleep much better, and the stage is universally acknowledged to be of great importance to a person’s mental and physical health. It has both short and long-term benefits, including:

  1. Removing cellular waste in the brain, which improves brain function and development.
  2. Improving one’s ability to process emotions and respond to difficult situations.
  3. Sharpening one’s working memory by consolidating what’s been learned in a day.

Interestingly, newborns spend about half of their sleep time in the REM stage. Over time, the need for REM sleep lessens, with the average adult requiring around two hours per night. Interestingly, those who struggle to achieve necessary hours of REM sleep are also at a higher risk of developing dementia.

How It’s Known to Affect Mental Health

We all know that sleep is a time for taking a break from all of life’s demands and activities. But the relationship between sleep and wellness is more complicated than you might assume. There is a bit of a paradoxical relationship between sleep and mood, with one having the ability to negatively affect the other and vice versa. 

Difficulty sleeping is often listed as a symptom of both anxiety and depression, but this can actually be a bit of a chicken-or-egg question. In some cases, a sleep disorder is the cause of one’s mental health disorder, not the other way around. 

Regardless of which issue comes first, the cycle between mood and sleep can become a vicious one without treatment. Here are a few other sleep-related facts that further complicate the mental health and sleep relationship:

  • Research shows that after midnight, the brain is more likely to make poor decisions, react emotionally, and feel stressed.
  • Lack of sleep is associated with cognitive decline, including difficulty concentrating and remembering.
  • Severe lack of sleep can cause paranoia, delusions, and hallucinations.

At the end of the day, it’s clear there is a strong link between your sleep habits and your mental health. Fortunately, this means that treating one issue can have a positive effect on the other. 

Common Disturbances to Healthy REM Sleep

We’ve talked generally about sleep disorders, but not specifically about the kinds of disturbances that can cause issues with REM sleep. Here’s a helpful list of the substances and behaviors that can lead to problems:

  • Caffeine
  • Alcohol
  • Nicotine
  • Certain medications – like sedatives and antidepressants
  • Stress
  • Irregular sleep patterns
  • Blue light from screens
  • Chronic sleep deprivation

Counseling Helps

Counseling, particularly Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), is a proven way to improve one’s overall sleep quality. And, as sleep quality and stability improve, the architecture of healthy sleep improves as well, meaning achieving REM sleep becomes much more likely.

Many sufferers of sleep disorders find that CBT helps them establish healthy sleep habits. Whether you have a tendency to look at handheld devices, drink coffee, watch the news, or do all of the above right before bed, breaking those late-night habits can be difficult. CBT will help you identify the negative thought patterns at the root of those habits and turn them on their head. 

As for other sleep disorders that can affect your ability to reach the REM stage, counseling can help you see improvement there as well. Remember, your mood and your sleep are intrinsically linked. Because CBT and other forms of counseling can help you stabilize your mood, you can expect to see positive results at bedtime as well.

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