Nightmares can literally scare the life out of people, new research suggests.
Frequent unpleasant dreams and nightmares are being linked with accelerated biological aging and an untimely death.
According to a British team, people who experience weekly distressing dreams are three times more likely to die before they reach age 70 than people who rarely or never report experiencing nightmares.
Researchers said the finding held even after they accounted for smoking, obesity, unhealthy diets and other risk factors for an early death.
The study can’t prove causation — that nightmares are premature killers.
However, one theory implicates the stress hormone cortisol. Higher levels of cortisol are associated with shorter telomeres, tiny caps at the end of chromosomes, like the tip of a shoelace.
Telomeres get shorter every time a cell divides, and shorter telomeres are considered a sign of accelerated aging of the body’s cells.
Cortisol is present at high levels during nightmares.
“For those who frequently experience nightmares, this cumulative stress may significantly impact the aging process,” the study’s lead author, Dr. Abidemi Otaiku, of the UK Dementia Research Institute and Imperial College London, said in a statement released this week.
What’s more, nightmares mess with how well and how long people sleep, “impairing the body’s essential overnight cellular restoration and repair,” Otaiku said. “The combined effects of chronic stress and disrupted sleep likely contribute to the accelerated aging of our cells and bodies.”
Nightmares are common, Otaiku reported in earlier work linking nightmares with an i
ncreased risk of dementia and cognitive decline in middle-aged adults.
About five percent of adults experience nightmares weekly, and up to 40 percent monthly, percentages that are likely even higher if bad dreams are thrown in, he said. Considering how common a phenomenon nightmares are, “it is surprising that their clinical significance remains largely unknown,” he wrote.
In the latest study, presented this week at the European Academy of Neurology Congress in Helsinki, Otaiku and colleagues analyzed pooled data from 2,429 children aged eight to 10, and 183,012 adults aged 26 to 86 from six cohort studies following large groups of people over time.
Adults reported how often they had nightmares at the start of the study, and were followed for up to 19 years. For kids, nightmare frequency was reported by parents.
According to a release, adults reporting weekly nightmares were three times as likely to die prematurely than people who rarely or never experienced distressing dreams. “Children and adults with more frequent nightmares also exhibited faster biological aging, which accounted for approximately 40 percent of the heightened mortality risk” among adults, according to the release.
Even people who reported monthly nightmares showed signs of faster aging and a higher mortality,
“Our sleeping brains cannot distinguish dreams from reality,” Otaiku said. “That’s why nightmares often wake us up sweating, gasping for breath and with our hearts pounding — because our fight-or-flight response has been triggered.
“This stress reaction can be more intense than anything we experience while awake.”
While it’s all enough to lose sleep over, more research is needed to confirm the associations. Hormones are just one factor in accelerated cellular aging. In the meantime, nightmares are less likely if people avoid scary movies, manage stress and seek help for symptoms of anxiety or depression, Otaiku said.
Stress can drive unpleasant dreams, University of Montreal psychologist and sleep scientist Antonio Zadra told National Post last year as part of a special series on sleep.
But dreams also “tend to embody our current concerns and preoccupations and much of what is on our minds is often negatively toned.”
Worries “get replayed in our dreams in metaphorical and disjointed ways, and the emotions underlying them get amplified,” Zadra said.
Strategies to distract negative thoughts can help calm people down, he and other said, like reading a book or slowing breathing, which soothes the fight-or-flight response.
National Post
Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.