Elsevier

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 42, May 2016, Pages 254-266
Consciousness and Cognition

Maladaptive daydreaming: Evidence for an under-researched mental health disorder

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.03.017Get rights and content

Highlights

  • 340 self-labeled “maladaptive daydreamers” (MDers) were compared to controls.

  • MDers had more daydreams that involved fictional characters and elaborate plots.

  • MDers spent 56% of their waking hours fantasizing, often accompanied with movement.

  • MDers’ daydreams were hard to control and interfered with life functioning.

  • MDers’ had higher rates of ADHD, OCD and dissociation symptoms.

Abstract

This study explores the recently described phenomenon of Maladaptive Daydreaming (MD) and attempts to enhance the understanding of its features. It documents the experiences of 340 self-identified maladaptive daydreamers who spend excessive amounts of time engaged in mental fantasy worlds, in comparison to 107 controls. Our sample included a total of 447 individuals, aged 13–78, from 45 countries who responded to online announcements. Participants answered quantitative and qualitative questions about their daydreaming habits and completed seven questionnaires assessing mental health symptoms. Findings demonstrated that MD differs significantly from normative daydreaming in terms of quantity, content, experience, controllability, distress, and interference with life functioning. Results also demonstrated that Maladaptive Daydreamers endorsed significantly higher rates of attention deficit, obsessive compulsive and dissociation symptoms than controls. In sum, findings suggested that MD represents an under-acknowledged clinical phenomenon that causes distress, hinders life functioning and requires more scientific and clinical attention.

Introduction

“I have 35 distinct characters in my daydreams. They have been with me since childhood. I cannot remember a time when my mind was alone, with just myself. They have always been there. All of my daydreams revolve around these 35 characters. They live in a fictional town in a non-fictional city and state.”

(Participant 164)

“My daydreams are based on a TV show I saw when I was 10. Imagine a television show that kept getting renewed year after year for 30 years. Think of all the experiences you would have watched the characters go through. That is what my mind has been doing for over 30 years. I do not feel like there is any way to possibly describe how in-depth it all is. There have been times I have been caught up in the daydream for entire days. Many nights, I force myself to stay awake and get no sleep so that I can have my ‘daydreaming’ time.”

(Participant 221)

“It stops me from interacting in real world and real people. My relationship with family goes from fine to bad as I did not speak to them often because I would just locked myself in my room. …My school performance worsens. I can’t concentrate on studies. I skipped school a lot just to be in my world.”

(Participant 519)

There are hundreds of pages on the Internet devoted to the topic of “maladaptive daydreaming” (herein MD). These websites have been established by individuals from around the world who have concerns about spending enormous amounts of time engaged in highly structured daydreams, often with well-developed characters and plots. Most of the daydreamers on these site state that they felt like they were the only ones who engaged in this behavior until they discovered these websites. These individuals have diagnosed themselves as “maladaptive daydreamers” (herein MDers), and frequently describe engaging in repetitive movement in conjunction with their daydreams, such as pacing or rocking. Although they state that they never confuse fantasy from reality, many of the daydreamers seek advice on how to stop, claiming they feel as if they have an addiction.

As a consequence, many of the MDers on the Internet forums indicate that they have sought out help from mental health professionals, but most had never heard of the symptoms and seemed to minimize them. Others have been given a differing array of diagnoses including Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity (ADHD) and Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder (OCD). This is not surprising, as MD is not a classified mental disorder or term familiar to mental health professionals. Although “ordinary” daydreaming, when accompanied by other symptoms, including lack of focus and organization, has been implicated in disorders such as ADHD (National Institute of Mental Health, 2012), at this point in time no disorder listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013) or in any other classification system describes highly structured and absorbing daydream worlds as a primary symptom.

Somer (2002) first introduced the concept of MD, which he defined as “extensive fantasy activity that replaces human interaction and/or interferes with academic, interpersonal, or vocational functioning” (p. 199). Somer described six patients with severe difficulty in social and vocational functioning, who had seemed to escape reality into a life of fantasy after experiencing abusive childhoods. Their daydreams were often accompanied by movement such as pacing, which Somer termed kinesthetic activity. Somer theorized that MD may have developed as a coping strategy in response to aversive early life experiences.

In 2009, Schupak and Rosenthal presented a case study of a woman troubled by excessive daydreaming. Similar to Somer’s (2002) patients, the subject reported that her childhood daydreaming had been accompanied by kinesthetic activity, involving pacing while twirling a string. The daydreaming was eventually reduced and controlled with the treatment of prescription medication, Fluvoxamine, commonly used to treat obsessive–compulsive disorders. Unlike Somer’s (2002) MDers, this woman did not report an abusive childhood and seemed to function successfully in the real world, suggesting that there may be more than one pathway to MD and varying degrees of psychopathology. The same patient eventually underwent a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) procedure conducted by researcher Malia Mason. In a 2015 interview describing the fMRI study, Mason stated “The test showed great activity in the ventral striatum, the part of the brain that lights up when an alcoholic is shown images of a martini. Frankly it was super strong” (Bigelsen & Kelley, 2015).

After analyzing surveys by 90 MDers, Bigelsen and Schupak (2011) presented a population of individuals who engaged on average over half (56%) of their waking hours in immersive daydreams, with 80% using kinesthetic activity. Findings indicated that these daydream worlds provided participants with an unending source of comfort and emotional fulfillment, but at the same time caused distress through three factors: (1) difficulty controlling the need or desire to fantasize, (2) concern that the amount of time spent fantasizing interfered with actual relationships and life goals, and (3) intense embarrassment regarding the fantasy resulting in exhaustive efforts to keep this behavior hidden. Over 70% reported that they did not experience childhood trauma, thereby providing further evidence that trauma, although potentially a contributing risk factor, is not necessarily causal to MD.

To date daydreaming has mostly been seen as a universal experience comprising much of normal mental activity (Klinger, 2009, Singer, 1966). Killingsworth and Gilbert (2010) found that almost half of all human thoughts qualify as daydreaming activity. The reported high levels of daydreaming among the general population may leave clinicians reluctant to consider excessive daydreaming a mental health issue.

A potential source of confusion can arise when researchers use differing definitions to compare daydream quantity. Many definitions of daydream and mind wandering encompass all off-task thought (Singer, 1975, Smallwood et al., 2003), which is far broader than the activity of interest to the MDers. For this reason Bigelsen and Schupak (2011) chose the term ‘fantasy’ to describe the behavior of their study population. They defined fantasy by using Klinger’s (1971) definition of “a fictional tale created by a subject for his own pleasure and for no other purpose constitutes an instance of fantasy” (p. 6).

Fantasy, defined as above, is considered to occur much less frequently than daydreaming. Klinger (1990) wrote, “Most of us have some fanciful daydreams, but for the majority of us the extremely fanciful ones occupy only a tiny fraction of our thoughts” (p. 83). Yet it is precisely the fanciful daydreaming that the MDers describe as engaging in excessively (Bigelsen and Schupak, 2011, Schupak and Rosenthal, 2009, Somer, 2002).

For the above reasons, fantasy is the more technically accurate term for the mental activity under examination in this article. However, due to the more common usage of the term ‘maladaptive daydreaming’ and the thousands of individuals who identify as such, and because daydreaming does include the subcategory of fantasy, we will continue to use the term MD to describe the symptoms of concern.

A previous line of literature that seems directly relevant to MD is the research on the fantasy prone personality. In 1981 Wilson and Barber (1981) described a category of persons who had highly vivid daydreams in which they engaged for 50% of their waking hours. Although this description of fantasy is similar to that offered by Bigelsen and Schupak, 2011, Wilson and Barber, 1981, Wilson and Barber, 1982 also found that belief in parapsychological phenomena and confusion between fantasy and reality were central features of the fantasy prone personality. Yet, Bigelsen and Schupak found that 98% of their MDers reported no confusion between fantasy and reality, and few reported belief in parapsychological phenomena. It, therefore, seems that those with MD have some elements of the fantasy prone personality, but not others.

Glicksohn and Barrett (2003) found that the trait of absorption which consists of disconnecting from one’s current circumstances and becoming immersed in another focus (Ross et al., 1990, Ross et al., 1991) can serve as the predisposing factor for the hallucinatory experience. As hallucinations are believed to be on the continuum of normal conscious experiences, which include vivid daydreaming (Slade & Bentall, 1988), MDers may show higher levels of absorption compared to non-MDers.

In recent years, researchers may have unknowingly been investigating the early stages of MD, through their work assessing repetitive movement in children. Stereotypic movement disorder consists of repetitive, coordinated, and rhythmic behaviors, including hand flapping and pacing (Mahone, Bridges, Prahme, & Singer, 2004). Specifically, Freeman, Soltanifar, and Baer (2010) found active daydreaming in 35 children who had been studied primarily for features of stereotypic movement disorder.

Robinson, Woods, Cardona, Baglioni, and Hedderly (2014) studied ten children who described voluntary engagement in acts of imagery with stereotyped movements. The movements were reported to occur as a secondary response to the imagining activity. Interestingly, stereotyped movements typically occurred when the child was bored or relaxed, which the authors hypothesized is likely to reflect a propensity for a need to increase cognitive stimulation at these times. Accordingly, the authors suggested that engagement in episodes of intense imagery may serve the purpose of increasing cognitive stimulation, while the associated stereotyped movements enhance concentration and may provide a sensory gain. Both studies add further evidence of the connection between repetitive movement and fantasy activity, and they furthermore add to the assumption that stereotypic movement disorder in childhood could represent the childhood precursor to MD. Further investigation is needed to determine if some of those children will eventually develop MD.

Our primary goal was to paint a comprehensive picture of the experiences and symptomology of those with self-reported MD using quantitative and qualitative data from the largest sample of MDers to date compared to a group of non-MDers. We hypothesized that a population of MDers exists that shares unique daydreaming patterns that are different from non-MDers. Specifically we expected differences in terms of daydreaming content and that MDers would experience higher levels of quantity of daydreaming, accompanying behavioral and mental characteristics (i.e. kinesthetic activity and absorption), and distress caused by the daydreaming.

Another goal of this paper was to locate MD in the context of potentially related clinical constructs. We hypothesized that MDers would score significantly higher on pathologies such as OCD and ADHD, as many MDers have reported receiving those diagnoses after seeking help for MD. More specifically, we expected that MDers would score higher on subscales related to obsessive symptoms and inattention, but that there would not be differences on compulsion and impulsivity, because those features have not been described in the anecdotal reports of MD. We also hypothesized that MDers would score higher on items assessing fantasy proneness, absorption and dissociation, but did not expect large differences on items measuring psychosis. Finally, we examined whether MDers differed significantly from non-MDers on trauma history as a possible etiology for MD. Although Somer (2002) proposed that childhood trauma could be a trigger, we hypothesize in line with Bigelsen and Schupak (2011), which found that trauma was not a necessary element of MD, and therefore that MDers and non-MDers would not differ in reports of traumatic experiences.

Section snippets

Participants and procedures

The sample included 447 participants (347 female, 96 male, 2 transgender, 2 omitted). Age range was 13–78 (M = 30.08, SD = 13.94). Nationalities represented 45 countries (Table 1). Most frequently represented were the United States (46%), the United Kingdom (14%), and Australia (12%).

Participants with MD were recruited via flyers in online chat rooms for MD, psychology, and mental health. Control participants were recruited using chain-referral (snowball) sampling, starting with researchers and

Qualitative information on daydreaming themes

Content of daydreaming was analyzed using the answers to open-ended questions on daydreams from 141 randomly selected study participants (MDers: n = 85, 60%; non-MDers: n = 56, 40%; see Table 2 for themes and examples). Among MDers, the three most popular daydream themes included being a celebrity or having a relationship with a celebrity (37%), having an idealized version of self (34%), and being involved in a romantic relationship (34%). These content topics were significantly less often

Discussion

The present study provides evidence of the existence of a distinct population of daydreamers who engage in extensive daydreaming activities that they find enjoyable, but also distressing and hindering to life functioning. We demonstrated that MD differs significantly from normative daydreaming in terms of quantity, content, accompanying behavior (i.e. kinesthetic activity), immersion/absorption, controllability, distress, and interference with life functioning.

Conclusions

The present study is the largest investigation to date to shed light on maladaptive daydreaming behavior reported by thousands of individuals around the world on a multitude of websites, most likely indicating an untold number of others, including those who are not accessing the Internet or who do not speak English. Many of these individuals correspond frequently with us asking for help and often describe being rebuffed by members of the mental health community who are unaware of this

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