Your Nightmares Are Killing You, Literally.

A study presented at the European Academy of Neurology Congress 2025 has found that frequent nightmares aren’t just a terrifying nuisance that causes you to bolt up out of bed covered in sweat and out of breath like in the movies; they might also be physically dangerous. Great, now you’ll have nightmares about that too.

Led by Abidemi Otaiku of Imperial College London, the research makes a case for why those disturbing dreams could be chipping away at your lifespan. According to Otaiku, our brains don’t know the difference between real trauma and dream trauma.

So, when you’re being chased by a Frankenstein that’s also your social anxiety and sort of looks like your childhood bully, your body reacts like it’s real. Its fight-or-flight system ramps up, dousing you in cortisol.

Researchers tracked kids and adults for up to 19 years, documenting nightmare frequency and measuring biological age using telomeres, which are little caps on your chromosomes that shrink as you age. Turns out, regular nightmare sufferers had significantly shorter telomeres. If you had them weekly, you were over three times more likely to die before 70 than those who slept blissfully.

That link held across genders, ethnicities, and mental health backgrounds. In fact, the researchers found that nightmares were a stronger predictor of early death than obesity, smoking, or skipping the gym.

Even monthly nightmares chipped away at your cellular youth, suggesting that the damage doesn’t require nightly terrors, just a semi-regular schedule of horror movies your brain creates exclusively for you.

Persistent nightmares trash your sleep, mess with your hormonal balance, and crank up your stress. Over time, your body wears down, unable to keep up with the ravages of persistent terror. So while your subconscious is working out how it feels about the variety of horrors you’re dealing with in your waking life, the sleep that should be restorative is actually shaving years off of your life. Sleep tight!