Your Nightmares Are Scary — and Putting You in an Early Grave: Study

Scared to death? You betcha.

Anyone who’s ever had a nightmare knows how much they can absolutely wreck your mood.

That’s because, as neuroscientist Dr. Abidemi Otaiku pointed out: “Our sleeping brains cannot distinguish dreams from reality.”

In even more frightening news, Otaiku and his team analyzed the data of over 183,000 adults aged 26 to 86 and 2,400 children aged 8 to 10 and found that adults who suffer nightmares weekly are over three times more likely to die before hitting 70 than those who don’t.

The researchers pointed out that this would make nightmares a stronger predictor of premature death than a poor diet, a sedentary lifestyle or smoking. . .

“Nightmares often wake us up sweating, gasping for breath and with our hearts pounding — because our fight-or-flight response has been triggered,” Otaiku, a Clinical Research Fellow in the Department of Brain Sciences at Imperial College London, said in a press release. (Read more from “Your Nightmares Are Scary — and Putting You in an Early Grave: Study” HERE)

Photo credit: Flickr