Maladaptive Daydreaming: An Introduction
The maladaptive daydreamer spends the majority of her waking-life lost in thought. Her fantasies are so vividly absorbing she spends hours each day in them, losing track of time and of what’s going on around her. She crafts complex, ongoing stories and becomes attached to the characters. Other times her thoughts are short and fragmentary. But whatever form it takes she is always thinking. She often indulges in fantasy while alone but can do so around other people too, especially when she hasn’t had time to ‘catch up’ on her thinking.
A common experience of the maladaptive daydreamer is walking alone so engrossed in thought she is mouthing the words being spoken in the scenarios she’s picturing, maybe even whispering them, not realising until she’s jolted into reality by someone walking passed. Over my life I’ve experienced this thousands of times. And it’s the sinking embarrassment — and the thoughts asking why the hell do I keep doing that? — which follow that thrust me into another spiral of thoughts and within seconds I’m again walking along wrapped up in fantasy unawares. Other times people ask why I’m smiling or laughing despite their being nothing around that would illicit either.
‘Maladaptive’ means to not adjust or adapt to your environment. Take alcohol as an example: drinking is common, many people do it to excess, indeed our culture (such as the part of it that swallows up students) actively encourage it; ‘maladaptive drinking’ would be excessive drinking that went much further than the level of excessive drinking socially accepted/encouraged by the drinker’s environment, to the degree that the Demon Juice became a substitute for a sense of connection, with people, work, one’s surroundings. Maladaptive daydreaming (MDD from here on) is thus the perfectly natural, healthy behaviour of daydreaming taken to excess. It is harmful because the MDD’er isn’t present when she needs to be, or purposefully avoids social situations because she’d rather be playing out fantasy storylines, or she has no drive to fulfil emotional needs in the material world because she’s satisfied having them met in fantasy.
To avoid confusion: MDD’ers are always aware their fantasies aren’t real. (Mistaking fantasy for reality is psychosis.) And not all cases of MDD disrupt the dreamer’s life: many live just fine, with solid relationships and successful work-lives, and defend their MDD as a good thing. It is a comfort, or an escape from life’s monotonies, or a space for releasing emotions and unspent creative impulses. One may reasonably ask, then, what’s the problem? Why consider it an issue? Or, indeed, is maladaptive daydreaming even identifiable as its own specific thing or is every persons’ inclination-for-fantasy plottable on a spectrum with these people those who just happen to have the strongest desire for fantasy?
It’s true the introvert and Highly Sensitive Person are temperamentally inclined to spend more time thinking and because of this have richer inner lives. But it’s possible to be these types and not think to a disruptive excess. Numerous professionals — artists, philosophers, scientists, inventors — are encouraged into a ‘life of the mind’. But there is a difference here too: in all examples thinking is being put to a material end, to produce something external. Not that everything needs to be justified on pragmatic grounds — learning for learning’s sake, the joy of following curiosity, and so on — but in these cases the imagination is being controlled and pushed in a purposeful direction; for MDD’ers the mind is feral, it jumps about and even if it may fool you into thinking you’re in charge, when you try to stop you’ll realise how wrong that assumption is.
MDD feeds on itself. Characters become a comfort. An imagined world becomes familiar and adding to it offers the same pleasures it would for a novelist or filmmaker. And as you act out the ups and downs of a story the compulsion to return is amped up. The longer you spend in your own head away from others the more you find fantasy easier than reality, the more you exaggerate how difficult doing real things is; going to a lecture, meeting friends down the pub, practicing guitar — they all seem like Herculean tasks considering how easy it’d be to lie down and drift into a space where you have total control. And this cycle continues until nothing in real life can compare…
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Maladaptive daydreaming is an addiction. For some people this raises the question: is it possible to be addicted to thinking? If you ask a Buddhist or a Hindu they’ll tell you everybody is addicted to thinking, other than those rare enlightened few. Likely more so now than ever, hence the push for ‘mindfulness’ in the last few decades. MDD is only the extreme form of something almost all humans are afflicted with.
MDD’ers tend to act out repetitive motions while lost in thought. Examples include pacing back and forth, fidgeting and tapping her foot, leaning forward and back in her chair, or picking at the skin around her fingernails, unaware until she is back in reality.
There’s still a task in expanding our view of addiction to include things like MDD (or thinking in general). Addiction is typically framed with a dramatic image (i.e. the withered junkie, needle in arm). Which is fitting for a Reaganite-style ‘Just say No’ campaign but too extreme to suggest the wide breadth of forms addiction can actually take. And when the most extreme examples of addiction are all that are talked about it leads most people to play down their addictions or to easily rationalise to themselves that they don’t have any.
The best mind-expander I’ve seen on this topic is in the physician Gabor Maté’s book on ADD Scattered Minds where he reflects on his own long-term addiction to buying albums — albums as in CDs and vinyl’s. In the throes of addiction he spent hours every day searching through record stores, buying tens if not hundreds at a go, sometimes at times he should have been with a patient. In one section he writes of leaving hospital while a mother waited for him to deliver her baby to visit a record store down the street. To compare this to being addicted to cocaine or gambling might seem a stretch — and of course there is a literal difference between all addictions — but all three are addictions nonetheless and people don’t (or at least shouldn’t) rate their woes relative to the woes of others; regardless of the thing you are addicted to, an addiction will always act as a barrier preventing psychological growth.
Like with any other addiction, if a person doesn’t get their fix of daydreaming they can get angry or irritable; certain people or situations can act as triggers; and abstaining can be difficult, especially as the thing you’re trying to abstain from is immediately accessible to you at all times, and literally built into the functioning of your psyche. Unlike the addict who goes ‘cold turkey’ the MDD’er will never erase thought, daydreams, imagined scenarios, from her mind, but can learn to be aware of when she is daydreaming and daydream in moderation. On days when I’m especially successful at abstaining from MDD — which are usually days when doing so is my primary focus for that day — I feel mentally drained, it being a tiring task for the brain to work against its normal functioning.
MDD is an ‘invisible’ addiction. Friends and family will never hold an intervention to tell you they’re worried you’ve been daydreaming too much lately and it’s getting out of control. And besides, it rests on the MDD’er to decide whether it has become a problem or not. There are myriad ways MDD can affect life. It fosters procrastination. Zaps motivation. Makes concentration hard, even near-impossible. And it disrupts sleep since lying in bed provides ample opportunity to get lost in thought; the compulsion to continue in fantasy often overpowers the compulsion to sleep. Despite there being no external object at play this is no different from lying in bed playing a game on your phone putting off sleep with retorts of ‘just one more game’.
MDD can leave you devoid of emotions. You feel emotions during fantasy but rarely, if ever, in material life. For years this inner nothingness made me worried I was autistic (or a sociopath) and surely made me as unknowable to other people as I was to myself. The optimistic response to this on online MDD forums is that the emotions you feel while daydreaming prove you are capable of feeling them; one task of recovery is to learn to feel them ‘out there’.
We are so used to thinking of the imagination as childish, as something you should have grown out of by the time you’re a teenager, you come to hold your compulsive daydreaming inside yourself, hide that part of yourself away — which is exactly what got you here in the first place. Even now, I feel embarrassed opening up about MDD because it’s so hard to put it into words without making it sound like a non-problem.
And waiting at the end of every session of daydreaming is a pang of futility as you remember once again none of it is real and nothing you’ve been wrapped up in for the last hour has meant anything — no one will ever be able to touch these things you briefly held so dear.
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What causes a person to daydream to a maladaptive degree? Just like if you ask that about any mental illness, the array of answers you’ll find are more speculative than factual.
Most people who daydream maladaptively are likely to be doing so already in school, and root causes can often be found in the first few years of life. Stress and loneliness can play a big part here. Any environment, really, that the mind wishes to escape from but has no other means to. The MDD of some people is a defence against early trauma and abuse, but this is only a minority of cases; MDD doesn’t require anything as serious as trauma. (A person should never feel guilty over not having a ‘good enough’ reason for their problems.) There is unlikely to be a single event that caused MDD, rather a prolonged period where the mind is consistently in a state of pain or discontent. Like all psychic problems MDD once helped us — the brain used it to protect us from an external problem — but long after it’s no longer needed, even after external circumstances have changed for the better, it stays past its welcome like a house-guest hanging around long after the other guests have gone home, thinking his presence is a godsend, the host unclear how to get him out.
One study has linked MDD with high media consumption in early life. It’s easy to see how television prepares the brain for intense bouts of daydreaming: you are a non-participatory viewer of stories you become deeply involved in. Video games too: the player may be active and autonomous but before long she becomes acquainted with how the game works and playing it becomes a sort of inactive-activity, and the control you do have is not of yourself but of a character, putting the player at a remove from herself.
This last point is relevant because MDD, like ADD — which the former could be described as an offshoot of — is dissociative. Each person’s sense of self fractures. It is a common part of psychic growth, felt most painfully during puberty. ‘Internal conflict’ is quite literally one part of yourself fighting against another. Carl Jung found all neuroses to be responses to seemingly irreconcilable conflicts between different parts of the Self.
All psychological problems can be traced to our conception of self. It comes down to hating ourselves. Or feeling achingly confused about who we are. Or being fractured into so many pieces and each of the pieces wanting conflicting things. All people have some degree of problems regarding their Self, and all daydreams are dissociative, they allow you to experience something without being yourself while experiencing it. MDD’ers have a troublingly fractured sense of self — they may feel they are not a person at all, but rather a shapeless, blank non-entity — and so naturally gravitate towards things that will remove them from themselves.
It has likely always been possible for humans to slip into maladaptive daydreaming but it is only in the last few years — the internet playing a big part in this — that people have become aware of MDD. The term was coined in 2002 and research remains slim. The implication would seem to be MDD is a uniquely 21st century symptom. But if so, why? Any diagnosis of a whole generation or epoch is bound to be a gross oversimplification. But surely you can get a vague insight into a generation by the practices of its counterculture, which represents the more unconscious desires of a society coming to light. The hippie-age boomers, experimenting with weed and LSD, finding revolution in rock music, and looking for liberation in transcendent pleasures, were surely looking for more in reality than what their parents’ generation had. They wanted to experience reality bigger, weirder. A typical image of Gen X’er youth in the late 80s-early 90s is teens bouncing round acid-house raves on ecstasy. They were looking for reality with more excitement, fighting off monotony. But the millennial-centennial crowd have done mostly without a recognisable counterculture. Our countering is done mostly on the internet. Our party drug of choice is ketamine (a dissociative — no coincidence) and we are living through an opioid crisis (heroin and painkillers aren’t dissociatives but could be said to dissociate a person from their pain) and we are the most medicated generation in history (look at the prevalence of antidepressants). So it seems the people of the early 21st century want to experience reality less. Want to experience themselves less. No wonder the growing Western interest in Buddhism and Taoism, and no wonder they are mostly translated in bastardised form: ignoring the teachings of morality and compassion, and those of acceptance of everything, even the bad, putting focus on the principle of detachment, of being able to experience oneself at a remove so as not to get too overcome by feelings. Ancient tradition has thus been commandeered to work as just another tool in our growing repertoire of ways to dull ourselves.
There are material reasons, too, that we can speculate have increased the prevalence of MDD. In the safest parts of affluent countries — where I’m guessing most MDD’ers are from — the number of dangerous-addictive vices available to young people has been in steady decline for a while now, in the sense that a child or young teen in such places is now less likely to be introduced to drugs or alcohol or gambling or sex. But people remain troubled, and addiction seems built into us as a defence, it’s endlessly repeating loop of thoughts and behaviours acted as a distracting, distancing shield from external troubles, or existential despair. There are certainly children in poverty-stricken or war-torn countries who daily experience worse things than I have on my worst days and are more in need of psychic escape, but their lifestyles simply don’t permit a lack of concentration and awareness. But amidst the lethargy and hedonism of affluent 21st century locales like the one I grew up in the mind clearly sees no problem consuming itself in thought.
Indeed maybe we’re currently living in the age of the acceptable addiction. It’s true it’s better in terms of physical health and levels of productivity to have a society of people addicted to their phones rather than addicted to opium. But at least in the latter everyone is aware they have a problem and are likely to be looking for ways out. When addictions are subtle — i.e. no immediate risk of an overdose or jail sentence — then most people cease thinking of them as addictions at all — hence where we have reached now. At the base of this is MDD which seems to occur when the mind needs help but cannot find external sources, or only things that are not in most cases all-consuming enough like television or videogames, and so invents for itself something to be addicted to.
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Can MDD be ‘cured’? (By which I mean: is there a way to reduce the compulsion to and intensity of daydreaming to the point the daydreamer no longer feels it is a problem?) Yes, certainly. It is always suggested to speak to your doctor but there’s still the worry your doctor won’t have heard of MDD.
The practical suggestions are to start a meditation practice, mindfulness anchoring you in reality. Keep a gratitude diary, similarly grounding you in the details of everyday life. (It’s worth a shot, although I’ve never gotten anything out of writing one.) The medication Fluvoxamine traditionally used to treat OCD has relieved some with MDD, others have found relief using CBD oil (or weed generally, I imagine).
The fact these are the recommended solutions, and often the only solutions, offered to those who MDD, and are similar to the suggestions given to people with depression and anxiety (i.e. to make lifestyle changes: meditation, healthier diet, exercise, consistent sleep schedule, and so on) is telling of how flawed our thinking about mental illness is and adds explanation to why we are so often hopeless in treating them. There’s nothing wrong with the individual techniques of the Lifestyle Changes Approach. The problem is that it is all based around giving you a mood-uplift in the short term, to boost you to the level where you can return to a normal(ish) condition where work or school is doable, but they don’t treat any of the root causes of the mental illness and so any improvement to the individual’s mood is likely to be short lived because the thoughts that caused the problems originally are still bouncing round the noggin.
So where else are we to look for help? My suggestion here — and this is where I’m sure to lose some people, but I hope the reader will hear out this other side of the argument — is to look back to the often-lampooned strain of Freudian psychology. It’s easier to give a patient a checklist of slight things they can change to improve their mood; much harder to get someone to examine their past, educate themselves on psychological processes, open up about their emotions, with the hope of transforming themselves in some fundamental way.
But the difference between the two is the difference between standing outside a burning house spraying water inside from a fire-engine, and being inside the burning house trying to put the fire out in each individual room by emptying cups of water onto it. You may feel immediate satisfaction when you’ve rid a room of fire, but by the time you’ve done the next room the fire will already have spread back to the previous one. And there’s only so long this can be kept up before the flames and smoke consume you. Better to step outside and learn how to do something that battles the whole of the fire all at once, even if at first it seems less intuitive, or overly alarmist, or frustrating because it involves asking others for help.
I’m not advocating a backtracking to Freud, more a measured searching for the gems among his and his disciples work. I understand it’d be stupid to suggest this with nothing to back it up which is why the rest of this essay is an attempt to apply psychoanalytical knowledge to MDD, mainly using one of Freud’s most misunderstood theories.
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Despite how much the imagination is integral to human life it has bizarrely hardly ever been examined by philosophers or psychologists. Even artists, despite losing themselves to it, rarely comment on it beyond repeating certain mores about creativity and expressing oneself. Philosophers have examined the life of the mind through developing systems of critical thinking and probing the ontology of the mind (e.g. arguments over mind-body duality) without ever looking at the more fantastical, visual, uncontrollable parts of the mind. Science has explored how the creative impulse first grows and the neurological dimensions of creative work but has said little about the subjective experience of the imagination or answering why this part of the mind first developed. Even psychology back to Freud has favoured examining the unconscious rather than the imaginative parts of the conscious mind. Freud felt a rich inner life was a good thing, a key to creative work, and didn’t take things much further than that. The imagination, then, despite how much of us it makes up, has always been neglected: it is that thing children have in abundance and that novelists learn to tap into, but beyond that it is just a trivial, random space the mind goes to when not occupied by anything else.
Maybe this is because we suspect the imagination of being nothing other than what it seems to us. We aren’t quick to realise that it has depths and meanings and unconscious areas itself, or that it is as frequently uncontrollable as a dream. The imagination isn’t in our control, not fully, not at all considering all the different things that put contents in there in the first place, and so it’d be wrong to think of the imagination as only being the trivial doodles of some unfocused synapses.
When I first became aware I was MDD’ing and decided I didn’t want to anymore I leaped in the opposite direction and told myself I’d reach the point where I wasn’t spending any time in the imagination: I’d be forever ‘in the now’, which led to me reading a lot about Buddhist enlightenment. But Carl Jung wrote that it would be wrong to think of the imagination as merely the outgrowth of the reality-centred conscious mind. Both need each other; they are flipsides of one another, both deeply entwined. The imagination, thought in general, provides the borders of your worldview. In it are our desires and ambitions, superstitions, regrets, beliefs, secrets, our wildest bouts of creativity. These are not material things in front of us but they affect everything we do. If Buddha did truly reach a state without thought it is because he spent years in a state of total acceptance — of everything in his mind, every person he met, all the things of the world he observed, and over time he became so present and his mind so still that it no longer needed anything but the here and now. The difference here is between neutralisation and evasion. The average person is said to spend 50% of their waking life thinking or daydreaming. This is not excessive but rather a harmonious split between the material and the psychic.
But why would the human mind be driven to lose itself in fantasy at all, especially if it evolved to its present complexity to help with material tasks like hunting and travelling? Freud’s idea of the ‘death drive’ helps us here. It’s likely because of its name the death drive is usually consigned to the shelf with Freud’s cookier theories. But the death drive isn’t — as some infer from the name — a defiance of the Darwinian drive for survival. It goes back to the womb, where even before subjective self-consciousness develops our bodies and minds are conscious. We are conscious of living in the protective walls of the womb, fed by the mother, in a state of connection with another person unlike ever again, in the perfect, omniscient state predating our psychological separation from all other things. The moment of birth is traumatic. We are suddenly (and prematurely) ripped away from this oneness. And for years afterwards we remain entirely dependent on others for our survival. Our vulnerability is a direct refutation of the serene state of the womb. The ‘drive’ then is a drive to experience this wholeness again, to transcend the material, finite, alienated feeling of being a living person and return to a primordial pre-birth state that we cannot remember but our unconscious can. Freud likely called it the death drive because it is only in death we can ever achieve this ‘flatlining’ of life’s continuous ups and downs (and surely every urge of suicide has this within it). It is less a wish for death than one for immortality. But its impossibility doesn’t stop people spending their lives trying to attain it. One can see this instinctual craving for a whole, flowing, unbothered consciousness in the desire for spiritual enlightenment, in the willingness of so many to lose themselves to the oblivion of drugs, in the total rejection of reality (at least as we know it) in the most extreme cases of madness. And I believe MDD stems from this same craving. It is a wish for perfection rather than having to deal with life’s ongoing peaks and troughs. The wish to inhabit oneself and nothing else rather than to have to adapt oneself to the world, to face unknowns, to risk losing something. Just as the heroin addict in the short term chooses the simplicity of life based around nothing more than acquiring and ingesting drugs and drifting into the dulled consciousness they illicit, and the spiritualist wants to feel no judgement for anything, acceptance of all, oneness with nature, so too does MDD dissociate from the hassle of life enough that at least in the most engrossing fantasies you can spend hours forgetting the fact you’re a material person bound to a specific time and place with problems now and surely more to come.
I can identify in my own predilection for MDD a cowardice, a fear of life and of living it. It never seemed it at first but losing myself in daydreams has always been about hiding away from life’s ups and downs and craving the unconsciously-intuited easy nothingness described in the paragraph above. As mentioned earlier these things grow with time; I got to a point where I wanted nothing of life, none of its hardship, only a crisp, plain emptiness, even if that meant death, and I burrowed so deep into that hole I’m still climbing my way out of it.
Medication or a shakeup of your daily routine will never solve a problem as deeply entrenched as this. (Although it certainly gives the boost you might need to do so.) A major change is needed. For me — and that’s all I can comment on; there’s no one-size-fits all — it’s about working towards not being scared of life, not running from responsibility, about accepting and living among the imperfectness of it all. When I’m doing these things I naturally daydream less.
And it’s about being more open. I’ve spent years not expressing emotions and exhaustively creating the façade that everything is fine. It’s only logical that clogging up the brain with negative, unconfessed emotions leads the whole system to begin fighting itself. It brings with it the numb of depression and a restless aching to do anything other than what you’re doing right now.
Is it possible to analyse daydreams, the one place where emotion still thrives? It’d be tempting to take the ol’ Freudian route and conclude that whatever you’re daydreaming about represents unfulfilled desire. But the surface of the fantasies isn’t important, what is is the emotions you feel. Because those are the emotions you are not getting in the rest of your life. Thinking back over repeated fantasies I’ve had for long periods, the emotional craving they point to isn’t hard to work out. During childhood, on top of more usual fantasies, I’d play out stories where I was part of a gang, often made up of characters from cartoons I watched or celebrity actors I liked (in the latter I was always an adult myself). The contents of these fantasies were the stuff of daytime sitcoms: me and the gang would hang out, date and hook up, have arguments, resolve said arguments, have emotional one-to-ones. I was lonely and this was a way for my mind to feel connected. But the harmful dimension of this is immediately clear: by simulating friendships and romances in my mind I became less driven to search for them in real life.
As I entered my teens I spent hours daily picturing fantasy relationships in my head, sometimes about girls I knew, sometimes celebrities. I’d envision myself a celebrity actor, my own age — not that the fantasies ever involved me acting — and I dated a slew of relationships always rocky enough for a soap opera: Maisie Williams, Chloe Moretz, Lorde, Elle and Dakota Fanning.
Thinking back, I see how many fantasies were influenced by things I’d watched. I’d insert myself as a character into Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. And invent movies and videogames in my head, sometimes sequels to my real-world favourites. And I’d ‘frame’ whatever I was doing: if I was playing Gran Turismo I’d imagine the race was real, a world championship, and I was competing for the title, and there was a heated rivalry between me and another of the racers, and a solid friendship with my team. Or, watching The Dark Knight I’d picture myself as the director, and I’d miss half the movie lost in thought constructing my imagined directorial career, which films I’d release, who my returning cast members would be, the level of acclaim each film would get, and etc. None of reality was ever enough, it always needed a dose of imagination to make it bearable.
My most persistent fantasy, though, one that’s stuck with me since teenagerhood and still sometimes appears — it’s like the screensaver of my mind, there when all other windows are minimised — is one where I’m the lead singer in a band called The Harmonix. Therein I play a less fortunate version of myself who uses his deep love of music to pull himself up from the gutters, along with my other four working-class bandmates, to revive rock’n’roll in the present day and become the biggest-selling and most acclaimed musicians of our generation. I write the songs and occasionally play guitar. I can tell you the names of the band’s first five albums and when they were released, who they collaborated with, the antics they got up to on each tour, the in-band dramas, the controversies, the genres we experimented with, the acts that supported us. (I should note that in real life I have no musical ambitions or talents whatsoever.) This fantasy is clearly about success and status. It is a space for my ego to run wild and picture having all these things, living the hedonistic ecstasy of the rockstar lifestyle — but have all this without having to work for any of it, or even go through the pain and complexities of actually experiencing it. It is wanting life to be a skeleton outline of successes, a Wikipedia page, rather than the mushy, tangible, complicated thing it is.
And so recovery from MDD can’t be compartmentalised into its own small checklist of possible solutions. It is part of the wider process of changing who you are. It’s painful: it will bring up old emotions, emotions you buried for a reason, but surely that is better than the alternative, to spend the rest of your life a slave to your neuroses. I’m still working on it all myself so I can’t paint an inspiring picture of what waits on the other side — and I’m suspicious of those anyway. But to ease maladaptive daydreaming is to open up space in the psyche — the question now is, what will you fill it with?
