Are You a Maladaptive Daydreamer? Here’s How to Quit

Are you a maladaptive daydreamer? Keep reading. / Photo Credit: Jr Korpa

What Is Maladaptive Daydreaming?

Maladaptive daydreaming is a psychiatric response, often due to trauma. The trend seems to be that it’s a survival technique/coping mechanism that is essentially extreme escapism. Identified by Professor Eliezer Somer, maladaptive daydreaming creates a space where people can escape into their minds while sometimes simultaneously becoming trapped by the coping mechanism which has become maladaptive meaning “not providing adequate or appropriate adjustment to the environment or situation.”

Some of the signifiers that you might be a maladaptive daydreamer; you:

1. Daydream for many minutes or hours in a way that interrupts your everyday tasks and intrudes upon you actually living.
2. Find daydreaming a compulsive habit that’s automatic and addictive.
3. Make facial expressions, pace, mutter, whisper, voice imaginary conversations aloud, cry, or laugh reacting to what you’ve imagined.
4. Create storybook worlds where you’ve devised all the characters and play them out in your head.
5. Recycle characters from books, TV shows, or real people from your real life to populate your fantasies.
6. Are kept awake at night by your daydreams.

Note: Not all of these are necessary to be a maladaptive daydreamer. Frequently, maladaptive daydreamers have a combination of many of the above. What makes maladaptive daydreaming harmful is if it’s intruding upon your day-to-day life and if it’s addictive.

Professor Somer developed the Maladaptive Daydreaming Scale (MDS) which allows daydreamers to rate the severity of their symptoms and gauge the intensity of their daydreams, their ability to control their daydreaming as well as the compulsivity of it as a behavior, the amount of distress they feel by intrusive daydreaming, their perceived benefits of daydreaming, and how much daydreaming impacts their ability to carry out every day activities.

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