Maladaptive daydreaming?

[Foreverl0st]

So I spend a lot of time making up fanfiction in my head with my favorite characters. 4-6 hours, some days more. And I recently learned about maladaptive daydreaming. Which happens to have the majority of the symptoms fit my daydream things.
So uh idk.

[Andy]

Hi there,

I don’t have any formal psychological knowledge so someone like a mental healthcare provider might give you a better answer but as I understand it, daydreaming becomes a problem only when it puts you in significant distress or negatively interferes with things like school or relationships. Is this something you are experiencing?

On the other hand, our imagination and daydreaming is really common and can be a really powerful tool as a safe way of exploring our identities or as a coping mechanism. Everything is possible in our imagination, there are no restrictions, we have full control over everything and it’s entirely private. It’s a great way of testing what feels good and what doesn’t when it comes to relationships, appearance, situations, emotions etc. It can also serve as a distraction, a much needed escape from reality, for example when living in an unsafe, unaccepting home. It can be just a way of fulfilling needs like feeling of closeness, belonging, having control or being taken care of, that you don’t have enough of in your life right now. So it might be that with time as you gain more independence and control over your life you will find you don’t need to daydream as much.

[Foreverl0st]

Maybe, but I do sometimes find it hard to focus because I'd rather just be daydreaming, which is the main thing that worries me.

[Sam W]

Hi Foreverl0st,

So, a thing to know about terms that arise from the area of psychology or therapy is that they're often describing a behavior that has become enough of a problem that it's causing the person distress and/or disruption. For something like daydreaming, we're talking about people daydreaming to the point where they're consistently neglecting school, work, relationships, etc, or where it's getting in the way of them taking care of themselves. That's a very different level of severity than just wishing you could be daydreaming about something interesting when you're supposed to be focused on something less interesting.

[Jacob]

I might also tack onto what Sam said that medical diagnoses are not completely neutral either. Sometimes a diagnosis can exist because of the severity of the issue and unfortunately they can be about bias, either historically or for an individual.

Some things which are completely healthy and actually fine are described by some clinicians as disorders, because a group of them have a bias against some behavior they don't like in itself, for example: that person doesn't engage in mainstream work/education/domesticity the way that they think that person should.

Whereas, I think the best way to judge whether a diagnosis is relevant to you is to think in really practical terms of what you need.

It can also happen that instead of that bias coming from some mean doctor, the idea that you're doing something wrong, as you mentioned in your other thread about masturbation, is somehow something you're feeling internally, in the form of self-judgement/shame.

Often it's really hard to pivot from seeing the thing we feel shame about being the problem, to seeing the shame itself as the the thing we need to work on. Does that sound like something it could be helpful to work on?

It sounds like shame was coming up in that other thread too.