If you’re getting the recommended amount of sleep, seven to nine hours every night, you are spending about one-third of your life asleep.

Although that might seem like lots of time, your body and mind are relaxed during this time, so you can be productive, energetic, and healthy once you’re awake.

There are five stages of sleep which rotate between non-rapid eye movement (NREM) and rapid eye movement (REM) and include drowsiness, light sleep, moderate to very deep sleep, deeper sleep, and dreaming.

Experts have recommended that adults get about 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night. New study aims to identify not just how much total sleep you desire, but also how much of each stage of sleep you need.

Though there’s no official consensus on how much REM sleep you should get, dreaming is most common in this stage.

For many adults, REM takes up about 20 to 25 per cent of sleep, and this appears to be healthy during normal sleep cycles. One recent study indicated that high levels of REM sleep might be related to depression. But do not go making abrupt changes in your sleep habits. It isn’t clear, which is the cause and which is the result.