When Daydreaming Replaces Real Life

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/04/when-daydreaming-replaces-real-life/391319/?single_page=true

by danso • 11 years ago

73 39 11 years ago

I'm not a hypochondriac, I swear, but this really hits home. I have medically diagnosed ADHD; seemingly contrary to the disorder, I often find myself getting stuck daydreaming for hours. I honestly _enjoy_ it, and as a consequence of my incredibly realistic daydreams I never get bored. Seriously--I never get bored. It's like a dopamine rush I can turn on whenever I want. My stories are better than any movie because I'm actually _in_ them.

The walking in circles bit is just uncanny. My most creative thinking (or most vivid daydreams) happen when I'm doing exactly that. It's really weird (and I'm acutely conscious of how it must look), so I never let people catch me doing it. Something about walking in circles turns up the realism an order of magnitude.

I think this is highly related to my ADHD, and now I want to tell my doctor about it. I don't want to rid myself of this, but I do want to control it better.

noobie• 11 years ago

I am sorry for being on a tangent but how old were you when you were diagnosed? I am 20, and I am having real trouble staying focused on one task and can definitely relate to what you said.

MalterWitty3• 11 years ago

Same here, I can't finish my stuff if I am alone with music playing.

kaybe• 11 years ago

Walking in circles when using the telephone is really common. I wonder whether it is related?

danbruc• 11 years ago

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1419/

bitwize• 11 years ago

The Navajo word for "cellphone" translates to "the thing you spin around with".

I think motor activity helps us pump thoughts through our brain.

tomphoolery• 11 years ago

I've also experienced this since childhood. Being an only child and having two working parents, I had to find something to amuse myself all day. My imagination ran wild and I was able to create entire universes in my head. But it was never a problem, I never felt bogged down by this imagination, rather I felt a compelling urge to continue developing it. Perhaps it's because I never considered it a "condition", but rather a gift that I was given that other children didn't seem to have. They were forced to derive amusement from others or external sources like video games or a television, things I still loved but didn't feel dependent on. I think this early urge to create things definitely spawned my interest in both music and programming.

I would urge anyone who also experiences this not to take the OP's advice, instead, learn to embrace the gift you've been given and learn to control it with your own willpower. It is possible. Keep your imagination in its place, and don't take drugs to diminish it.

MalterWitty3• 11 years ago

I don't agree with you. This has been a problem for almost 15 years. I can't get stuff done. I can't focus. Music triggers it, and I can lose entire months just doing nothing but daydreaming. It's been a genuine problem.

Doctors thought it was ADHD, and it could have been. But the medication hasn't helped with not triggering it. I'm going to look into the medication stated in the article. But where I am, the doctors are stringent with prescribing things. Took a year to ADHD pills.

innguest2• 11 years ago

I was also diagnosed with ADHD as a child and twice as a teenager. Today I don't believe in non-material diseases anymore, but the point stands that people like you and I have this thing in common with the prolific daydreaming.

It's unfortunate it's characterized nowadays as a disease. I enjoy it a lot, and sometimes whole afternoons go by where I was lost in a daydream. I never need to take books or anything anywhere to keep me entertained during dead times as I know I can barely choose what thoughts will engulf my mind next.

Have you looked into Jungian types? Without having an opinion as to its validity, I can say reading a thorough INTP description made me realize that this is really not a disease and some people are just more prone to being this way. I've learned to accept it (by doing my own research as for what this is) and now I'm happy without any meds whatsoever.

walterbell2• 11 years ago

In some creative professions, "daydreaming" fuels work output. Richard Branson has written about his dyslexia and how his business empire is built on his creative and strategic strengths, while operational weaknesses are delegated.

MalterWitty3• 11 years ago

I can relate. I got ADHD as well and while the medication helps me focus when I am working, it doesn't help with staying on task or even beginning.

It doesn't help not wasting an entire day just day dreaming about stupid action-packed shit either :-/.

Let me know if you ever find a medication or solution that works. My only trigger is music, nothing else. I noticed the author wrote Fluvoxamine worked, I will see if my doctor would prescribe it.

ALSO WOW.... I thought I was alone. It never occurred to me that I should google this, I just naturally assumed i was alone in this. This is some crazy shit.

nnq• 11 years ago

I remembered what helped me with a more or less similar problem: plain old "focusing on the now / present / just this second".

1. You can look into plain/western mindfulness meditation (the science-based non-mystical flavor of it): http://palousemindfulness.com/selfguidedMBSR.html

2. Or look into the buddhist way of arriving to more or less the same thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nasIq4E9nNg

3. Or, my favorites and much more western-friendly versions of the same message of "just live in the now, accept the present as it is and work with it, instead of evading into dream-land":

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkgNIJLpBEI - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9JgLgBtV-M

...the other thing maybe that you're just meant to live a more action packed life than you actually do. If nothing works, forget the medication and just go join the military or find something else that can give you enough "action-packed shit"... the world is pretty "rough and wild" if you go out of your USA/UK/EU "walled garden" you know. Go volunteer for the red-cross or other humanitarian organization in a conflict-zone African country for example. Some people actually need this and just fantasizing about it instead of getting it is just sad and wasteful.

varjag• 11 years ago

I wasn't diagnosed with anything (not that I was ever checked), but you sound a lot like my experiences. Maybe I should get checked for ADHD..

rl3• 11 years ago

The level of persistence and continuity in the imaginary worlds that some of these people have constructed is striking.

I wonder if this is simply due to the extreme volume of daydreaming, or if it's a characteristic unique to the disorder itself.

Lawtonfogle• 11 years ago

I wonder if they remember all the details or if they are able to recreate them to a very similar degree of detail with good accuracy without needing to actually remember them because they also created the original information.

lectrick• 11 years ago

Could someone who becomes "addicted" to an MMORPG be a variety of that? (Because it requires suspension of disbelief, which is a form of imagination, I feel)

sandeepspatil• 11 years ago

Why not write down the characters and their lives and may be turn that into fiction? Especially if they are so interesting. Then this obsessive day-dreaming becomes an asset rather than a liability?

normloman• 11 years ago

Don't a lot of fantasy prone people already do that? It would explain a lot of fan-fiction and con-worlds.

That said, most daydreams have an element of wish fulfillment in them, which wouldn't make for good fiction.

RobertKerans• 11 years ago

I have problems with daydreaming similar to what the article describes (it makes it incredibly difficult for me to work from home [with music the main trigger], though I am getting much better at controlling it), and yeah, most of it is wish fulfilment. Also fan fiction is basically wish fulfilment as well IMO, so that fits as well. (somewhat ironically, the effort to turn that into good fiction would probably fall prey to the same daydreaming problems)

astine• 11 years ago

There are a couple of problems with this suggestion. The first is, have you ever read any fan-fiction? Often, the reason these fantasies are so engaging to authors is the same reason they would rather off-putting to others. They're generally self-insert fantasies or power fantasies or wish-fulfillment fantasies.

The other problem is that writing often interrupts the fantasy. The flow in one's head is often very different than the flow of a book and that translation process often takes effort, especially if one is prone to revising the fantasy as one goes along. Worse, once a fantasy is done, one might be able to go back and retrieve it. Creative writing and fantasizing are really different 'skills.'

neovive• 11 years ago

There is a story, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (1939) [1] that was made into motion pictures in 1947 and 2013 depicting a man who has elaborate, heroic, daydreams. The 2013 film [2], directed by Ben Stiller (who also played Walter Mitty) was an interesting mix of comedy and reality that leaves you contemplating at the end of the movie.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Walter_Mitty [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Walter_Mitty...

astrocyte• 11 years ago

Meh', I channel Terence McKenna and Alan Watts on this matter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emHAoQGoQic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMDu3JdQ8Ow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rGwASGXj8w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RC7aud4b3dQ

"Real" life .... An Interesting concept.

jmnicolas• 11 years ago

I don't know if it's only a French thing, but the problem is not unknown as the author seems to think : this is called "bovarysme" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovarysme

discardorama• 11 years ago

FTA: "Will maladaptive daydreaming ever end up in the DSM? In the most recent version, hoarding and skin picking made an appearance for the first time, as a part of obsessive-compulsive disorder. For people who suffer from these conditions, this means they can now receive treatment and insurance reimbursement for behaviors that were previously considered odd but not pathological."

Am I the only one who worries about everything and anything ending up in the DSM, to then be controlled by medication? Unless what's going in your head actively interferes with your day-to-day existence, why does it matter what you do?

unicornporn• 11 years ago

Am I the only one who worries about everything and anything ending up in the DSM, to then be controlled by medication? Unless what's going in your head actively interferes with your day-to-day existence, why does it matter what you do?

But isn't that the point of DSM, to diagnose those with conditions that really interferes with their day-to-day existence? Medication is only one way to cure/control these disorders.

Nursie• 11 years ago

Well the woman who wrote the article does sound impaired by this, reporting everyday life as a struggle to wrest herself away from the stories in her head in order to interact with people and tasks in the real world.

So... sounds a bit like a disorder to me. Not that I'm qualified in such matters, but it could be evaluated in a similar way to HPPD - it's only HPPD if it interferes with your life, otherwise it's just a psychedelic hangover.

DanBC• 11 years ago

"Interfering with your day to day life" is one of the things used to decide if you want or need treatment. There are limited situations when treatment is forced upon you and hoarding or skin picking probably aren't them.

Don't forget that something with a common English word as a name ("hair plucking") is not as simple as "occasionally plucks some hair", but "compulsively plucks hair, to the point of semi baldness, with distress as a result".

logfromblammo• 11 years ago

With a sufficiently large vocabulary, it is easy to distinguish between cosmetic depilation and trichotillomania. While drugs and therapies are prescribed to people suffering from the latter (clomipramine, acetylcysteine), they are also available over the counter for the former (thioglycolate).

One could also make the argument that perhaps it is real life that is interfering with the daydreams, rather than the other way around. If that's the case, we also have drugs to treat that (alcohol, psilocybin, heroin, marijuana, nicotine, LSD-25, cocaine, MDMA, etc.).

Keeping it out of the DSM won't stop anyone from inventing treatment options.

zyxley• 11 years ago

I am reminded of ELO's Eldorado, which itself follows the style of the original Walter Mitty story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldorado_(Electric_Light_Orche...

lemiant• 11 years ago

I definitely met all of these symptoms as a kid, down to the hours of elaborate stories and the repetitive motions. I've since outgrown it, I got too busy to return to my fantasy chracters. But I'll always miss them a bit.

kaffeemitsahne• 11 years ago

What's it like to daydream? I don't think I've ever done it. Until a few years ago I didn't realize it was actually a thing, I just thought the word meant "not paying attention" or something like that.

mtVessel2• 11 years ago

What is it that's holding your attention when you're "not paying attention"?

pja• 11 years ago

I’m not surprised that a drug used to treat OCD helped her, because this really sounds like a variant form of OCD. The difference is that she was obsessing about the virtual world she had created inside her own head instead of something out in the physical world.

It seems to be a human failing to sometimes trap ourselves in self-sustaining loops of thought that we find very hard to break.

mtVessel2• 11 years ago

The reason why the author has a hard time finding a specific diagnosis is because her "maladaptive daydreams" are a symptom, not a disease. Her real problem is an inability or unwillingness to engage with reality, which is a component of any number of personality disorders.

Really, this inclusion of ridiculously overspecified symptoms and diseases-du-jour in the DSM has got to stop. It makes a mockery of what little credibility psychology has left.

When Daydreaming Replaces Real Life

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