Every one of us loves to fantasize from time to time, but when that becomes an obsession or your new coping mechanism to escape reality, that is when we start talking about maladaptive daydreaming. It’s like a hidden world of excessive fantasy…
Before we start explaining what happens when maladaptive daydreaming becomes a daily part of your life, let’s say a few words about our imagination and fantasizing. It is not unhealthy for people to fantasize from time to time, especially because it can help us explore different ideas and emotions.
However, for some individuals, this natural tendency can become excessive and interfere with daily life. This phenomenon is known as maladaptive daydreaming (MD), a condition where a person’s daydreaming becomes so immersive and frequent that it disrupts their ability to function in the real world.
How is maladaptive daydreaming different from pure occasional fantasizing about various things? What makes this phenomena different is that it is always followed by truly vivid, long, and intricate daydreams.
Those are also usually triggered by real life events, but don’t have to be. Emotions, wishes, and our desires are yet always connected to this way of fantasizing.
For example, a person who has gone through trauma, let’s say losing a child, may develop a habit of maladaptive daydreaming about their child, imagining that they are still alive, healthy, and dreaming a different life.
People who lack support or don’t feel loved may even fantasize about a romantic relationship with someone, either a made up person or someone they know in real life.
What makes MD problematic is that, with time, it can consume hours of a person’s day, leading to significant distress and impairment.
Maladaptive daydreaming is sometimes even described as a behavioral addiction that can be as difficult to manage as other compulsive disorders, such as gambling or substance abuse. Individuals with MD feel an overwhelming urge to escape into their fantasy worlds, often at the expense of personal relationships, work, or school responsibilities. You understand how that goes – your imaginary world allows you to escape from this reality and offers you something better.
Let’s take a look what are the most common signs and symptoms of maladaptive daydreaming. It is very closely linked to traumatic and stressful events:
1. Excessive daydreaming about characters and plotlines. You create your own characters, relationships, and go through various plotlines. You can even go through the same plotlines in your mind over and over again.
2. Out of control. Once you get used to MD, it feels uncontrollable. Not only you will want to do it on a daily basis, but it will also consume a lot of your daily hours. Besides that, you will feel irritated or stressed if someone reaches to you in the real life when you are maladaptive daydreaming. You will feel angry because you wanted to finish that plotline and enjoy it in your head.
3. Emotions. Various uncomfortable emotional states can trigger episodes of maladaptive daydreaming. It will become your coping mechanism to escape and survive the reality.
4. Real life neglect. When MD becomes excessive and uncontrollably, you may give it a bit too much priority, feeling like some sort of OCD problem. Then, you may start to neglect your daily obligations in the real life because you start choosing fantasy over everything.
As said, some of the main causes of maladaptive dreaming are usually related to developing coping mechanism for trauma. Yet, many people who practice MD claim that it helped then with regulating emotions, such as loneliness, sadness, and even boredom.
Maladaptive daydreaming is still not recognized as a mental health issue on its own. Yet, if you are wondering what can be useful to overcome this behavior, professionals claim that cognitive behavioral therapy can bring great results. The point is to replace maladaptive coping mechanisms with healthier alternatives.
