Fantasizing

Every day, Kyla* travels to a fictional universe with advanced space travel. It’s not real, of course, but an incredibly vivid daydream, centered on a protagonist with a detailed history. “It covers 79 years in the life of my main character,” she says. “I know how the whole thing plays out, and I can drop into it at whatever point I want to experience.”

Today, this habit is pure entertainment, which she limits to just an hour a day. “It’s like watching Netflix,” she says. “I just go into my head and enjoy it.” In the past, however, she had felt that her fantasies had become all-consuming. “There was a point where it was like an addiction.”

Karina Lopez tells a similar story. Her daydreams center on conversations with different characters – some real, some imaginary. She’ll replay the same scenario, tweaking the details – a process she finds incredibly pleasurable. “As soon as I wake up, I want to daydream.”

At college, she would become so lost in these imaginings that she would forget to study for her exams or run errands. “I put off so many things – but in the moment it feels so good,” she says. On average, she now spends about three hours a day immersed in daydreams, but on bad days in the past, she could spend as many as six hours locked in her inner world.

Such reports are of increasing interest to psychologists, who have started to identify a subset of the population marked for their unusually immersive daydreams. At their best, these vivid and compulsive fantasies can be a source of pleasure and comfort, but they can also be a serious cause of procrastination and distraction, and can prevent people from maintaining their social connections, looking after their health or even eating regular meals.

With research revealing that as many as one in 40 people may experience these problems, it seems increasingly likely that “maladaptive daydreaming” will soon be formally recognized as a psychiatric disorder. So what is it? And how can it be treated?

In the wake of a romantic breakup, one patient simply continued the relationship in his head; another, facing extreme loneliness, would imagine the conversations he wished he’d been able to have. “It’s an escape from what is happening in the here and now,” a third patient told him. “There are many circumstances in daily life that frighten me. Daydreaming helps me not feel the fear.”

For many maladaptive daydreamers, the fantasies are so rewarding that they take precedence over real life experiences. It was immediately apparent that these intense fantasies were very different from the kind of mind-wandering the average person might experience. “Mind-wandering can be fleeting thoughts,” explains Dr David Marcusson-Clavertz,“You might be reading a book and then spontaneously think of an old friend.” While the people with maladaptive daydreaming might also be prone to these distractions, their fantasies are complex, detailed and compulsive.

Many maladaptive daydreamers report being prompted by regular movements – and they may even use rocking motions or pacing to get into the correct mental zone, a little like self-hypnosis.

Despite the sheer detail of their fantasies, immersive daydreamers do not confuse their fantasies with reality, and they don’t tend to come out of nowhere. “It’s voluntary – it’s not intrusive,” says Somer. This makes it different from psychosis, in which someone has less awareness of their mental state, and the daydreaming is not – by itself – harmful for someone’s mental health.

The problems come when it is taken to excess. Many people use their daydreams to escape from negative emotions. This might offer short-term relief, but it can prevent the person from confronting the issues that may be at the source of their distress. Along these lines, a recent study by Somer and Dr Nirit Soffer-Dudek, of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, asked participants to keep a daily record of their feelings and behaviors over a two-week period. They found that negative emotions often rose after a day of particularly excessive daydreaming.

A study found that maladaptive daydreamers were especially likely to experience higher levels of depression and anxiety, which again suggests that the escape into an alternative reality does little to resolve the actual distress that someone is facing.

For many maladaptive daydreamers, the fantasies are so rewarding that they take precedence over real life experiences. “Nothing else feels as enjoyable,” says Dr. Somer that at one point in her life, she could not go 10 minutes without entering a daydream. “I would go into them no matter what I was doing.” This interfered with her academic studies, her relationships, and even eating regular meals. “I’d postpone my meals by two or three hours while I starved,” she says. “And food was right there to be eaten.”
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Intriguingly, maladaptive daydreaming seems to be far more common among people who have been diagnosed with ADHD. Despite the severe difficulties they are facing, many of the maladaptive daydreamers find it hard to share their experiences with the people around them. “I’ve only told three people and they had similar reactions: they looked as if they wanted to laugh,” Karina Lopez tells me. Michelle agrees that, from the outside, the issues can seem superficially trivial. “It seems like something that you could very much control,” she says. “But trust me: I’ve tried.” For this reason, she says, it has been harder to disclose her maladaptive dreaming than her anxiety and depression, even with the stigma surrounding those mental illnesses.

Intriguingly, maladaptive daydreaming seems to be far more common among people who have been diagnosed with attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorder, with a recent paper reporting a prevalence of about 20%. (Moreover, 77% of people with maladaptive daydreaming have been diagnosed with ADHD.) The constant desire to slip into daydreams, it seems, is contributing to difficulties in concentration and focus – and this group may require different forms of treatment from other people with ADHD.

Exactly how maladaptive daydreaming should be treated is an open question – though there are promising signs that people can learn to control their habit. In 2018, Somer published a case study of a 25-year-old undergraduate named Ben who would spend around three hours a day in his fantasies. Ben had originally been diagnosed with ADHD and was given a course of Ritalin, which only increased his tendency to daydream.

Working with Ben to find a potential solution, Somer suggested cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness training. Ben would note down the circumstances that seemed to be associated with his maladaptive daydreaming, for example, and prepare careful plans for each day to try to reduce the temptation. And when he found himself falling into his fantasies, he would try to interrupt the daydreams’ plots with unsatisfying endings. By the end of the six months, he had reduced his habit by about 50%.

Both Somer and Musetti agree that in many cases, it may not be possible, or even desirable, for people to eliminate their daydreams altogether; instead, the aim should be to enable them to regulate their habit, and to find alternative ways to process their negative emotions. “They could perhaps confine it to certain times of day,” says Somer.

Kyla, for one, would be reluctant to lose her daydreams completely. While her fantasies had once been maladaptive, they no longer dominate her life. Rather than using the daydreams simply to escape negative feelings, she says she can use conversations with her characters to gain perspective on problems. In one mental health crisis, she believes that this even saved her life.