Does More REM Sleep Mean You're Less Anxious, or Is It the Other Way Around?

Covers one study relating trait anxiety scores to wearable-measured sleep-stage proportions in a non-clinical adult population. Does not cover clinically diagnosed anxiety disorders, treatment effects, or night-to-night anxiety fluctuations.

If someone runs anxious as a general personality trait, it's easy to picture their sleep as worse across the board, lighter, more fragmented, less of the deep, restorative stages. Measuring actual sleep-stage proportions against a standard anxiety measure tells a more specific and less intuitive story. People with higher trait anxiety spent a larger share of their sleep in REM, not less, and a smaller share in light sleep, while deep sleep showed no relationship to anxiety at all.

The Direction Nobody Expects

The common mental picture of an anxious sleeper is someone whose sleep is thin and disrupted everywhere, not someone getting more of any particular stage. Researchers recorded sleep stages in 128 non-clinical adults recruited from a university setting, using Fitbit Charge 5 devices, while participants also completed a standard trait anxiety questionnaire (the STAI-T).

Higher trait anxiety scores correlated positively with the proportion of sleep spent in REM and negatively with the proportion spent in light sleep, deep sleep showed no relationship either way. Women in the sample scored higher on trait anxiety than men and also showed greater REM proportions, the same direction as the main finding. Participants 50 and older showed lower trait anxiety scores than younger participants. That part stands alone.

Why REM Might Move With Anxiety Instead of Against It

A correlation. Between a personality trait and sleep-stage proportions, nothing about which one drives the other. It doesn't establish that higher trait anxiety causes more REM sleep, that more REM sleep causes higher trait anxiety, or that either direction is mechanistically true rather than both being driven by something else entirely.

What REM sleep actually does for the brain is itself a live scientific question, and this finding adds a specific, measurable data point without resolving what the underlying mechanism might be. And it comes with the same accuracy caveats as any consumer sleep tracker, since that's what measured the sleep stages here too.

What This Study Doesn't Establish

This was a non-clinical, university-recruited sample of 128 adults, with sleep measured on a consumer wearable rather than full polysomnography for the whole group, which leaves some real gaps.

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