What does it sound like? It's not really RMS that causes the problem you are seeing, it's just how many meters seem to have rubbish ballistics. Back in the days of meters that moved, this was really important because you needed a peak and an average - for very different things. The BBC put's entire faith in PPMs, because transmitters didn't like peaks, and neither did recorders, so their engineers learned to read these meters. At the same time, other people were introduced to VU meters, and you often squashed the peaks, and kind of learned to work to the meter's sluggishness.
Nowadays, we have meter ballistics that seem to encourage you to avoid the top bit - your average levels are quite low on the display, but suddenly burst into the top area and scare you. You seem to have two options, work close to the top and worry about the peak light suddenly coming on, or work much lower where the levels hardly register People obsess about levels. Distortion is bad. Noise is bad. However, once out of the noise, even visually very low signals are solid and pretty well noise free, yet they seem to only just tickle above the noise floor.
I've never really seen the point in having an inch of the available meter range taken up with a raging river of the noise floor - I'd prefer this to be adjustable off the display, so anything I see is usable signal - yet everything nowadays shows you the entire range from nothing to maximum. If your monitor system can let you hear the noise at the bottom, then use your ears and just use the good bit. I get really fed up with shoving a fader and seeing a meter level go up near the top end, and not actually hear it because everything is just too high, and the range so compressed it makes no sense. What you are doing is what the meters encourage you to do - spend your time watching, not listening!