Maladaptive daydreaming is excessive daydreaming that can interfere with daily life and can become a compulsive behavior for people with OCD. Exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy can help you manage this behavior and improve daily functioning.
Does your mind drift off now and then to escape the present? Everybody daydreams from time to time, but when it begins to interfere with your daily functioning, it could be a sign of a mental health condition like obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety disorders, or depression.
While daydreaming can sometimes be helpful for fostering creativity or finding temporary relief from a boring situation, it can become a problem if you’re engaging in it excessively. When this happens, it’s considered maladaptive daydreaming (MD). Keep reading to learn about MD and how you can learn to better manage this behavior.
What is maladaptive daydreaming?
Maladaptive daydreaming is making the conscious decision to retreat into a world of fantasy or a narrative daydream. Using your imagination can be an unrestricted way to plan for the future, foster creativity, or take a momentary mental break from the present moment. But, daydreaming is considered maladaptive when it becomes compulsive or excessive, interfering with your social life, work, and mental health. When you maladaptively daydream, you can spend several hours engaging in an imagined world filled with specific plots, characters, and settings.
Maladaptive daydreaming was coined in 2002 by Eli Somer, a Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Haifa. MD is not currently recognized as its own mental health condition—and more peer-reviewed research is needed on this topic—but many clinicians believe it to be a sign or symptom of other recognized mental health conditions, like OCD, ADHD, depression, trauma, and anxiety disorders.
MD is not a threat to your physical health, but it can be harmful to your mental health.
Maladaptive daydreaming symptoms
Common behaviors associated with maladaptive daydreaming include:
- A strong urge to engage in daydreams.
- Trouble concentrating on things in the real world.
- Spending a significant amount of time (up to several hours) daydreaming.
- Dissociation from reality.
- Difficulty focusing or getting work done.
- Acting out behaviors while daydreaming, such as making repetitive movements, or whispering or talking to yourself.
- Becoming irritated if a daydream is interrupted.
- Feeling a strong urge to “finish the story” in your daydream.
- Using frequent daydreaming as a distraction from any feelings of anxiety, distress, or trauma.
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Is maladaptive daydreaming a sign of OCD?
OCD is a complex, chronic mental health condition characterized by a cycle of obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions are intrusive thoughts, images, feelings, urges, or sensations that cause significant distress. In response to obsessions, people with OCD perform compulsions—repetitive physical or mental behaviors meant to relieve distress from anxiety or prevent something bad from happening.
Although compulsions may temporarily reduce anxiety from fear-inducing obsessions, any relief is short-lived. In fact, engaging in compulsions only leads to more distress in the long run. These repetitive behaviors or mental acts reinforce the idea that your obsessions pose a real threat, so the more you engage in compulsions, the more persistent and distressing your obsessions become. This is called the OCD cycle, and it’s characterized by anxiety and uncertainty.
For some people with OCD, maladaptive daydreaming can become a compulsion. For example, let’s say you have intrusive thoughts about harming a loved one. Instead of facing these fears head-on, you might immerse yourself in an elaborate fantasy world to avoid these thoughts. When you continually resort to these daydreams as a way of responding to your intrusive thoughts, you reinforce the idea that the real world is too scary, and you can only feel safe in your daydreams.
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How do I know if maladaptive daydreaming is a compulsion?
As mentioned, maladaptive daydreaming can be a symptom of several mental health conditions. To determine if you’re dealing with OCD specifically, ask yourself the following questions:
- Are you experiencing unwanted, intrusive thoughts, images, feelings, sensations, or urges? If so, how persistent are they?
- Do you engage in actions to reduce or eliminate distress or anxiety or prevent a feared outcome?
- Do obsessions and compulsions take up more than an hour per day on average?
- Do obsessions and compulsions cause significant levels of distress?
- Do these symptoms impact your daily functioning?
If you are experiencing any of these symptoms, it’s important to seek a diagnosis from an OCD specialist. If OCD is left untreated, symptoms like maladaptive daydreaming can get worse. An OCD specialist can work with you to understand your experiences and develop a treatment plan to help you. Even if you’re not diagnosed with OCD, a trained therapist can still support you in finding help for maladaptive daydreaming.
Treating maladaptive daydreaming and OCD
While experts have developed the Maladaptive Daydreaming Scale (MDS) to indicate MD behaviors, there’s no official diagnosis for maladaptive daydreaming. Instead, treatment for MD typically focuses on managing underlying conditions, such as OCD, anxiety, ADHD, PTSD, or depression—and developing strategies to regain control over excessive daydreaming.
If your OCD compulsions involve maladaptive daydreaming, you may be struggling to escape a cycle of intrusive thoughts and elaborate fantasies. Fortunately, OCD is treatable. Exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy, a specialized form of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), is the first-line treatment for all forms of OCD, and can help you learn to resist compulsions like MD. ERP is highly effective, with 80% of people seeing a significant reduction in symptoms.
In ERP, you’ll work with a therapist who will gradually and carefully expose you to your triggers while teaching you how to address your fears head-on without engaging in compulsions like MD. Over time, ERP therapy can help you experience reduced anxiety and distress, and improved confidence in your ability to confront your fears. If you’re engaging in maladaptive daydreaming, ERP can help teach you healthier ways to tolerate discomfort from obsessions—without escaping into excessive fantasies.
Bottom line
Maladaptive daydreaming (MD) is an immersive and compulsive form of daydreaming that can interfere with your daily life, often serving as a coping mechanism for mental health conditions. If you have OCD, MD may be acting as a compulsion that reinforces distress and avoidant behaviors. Working with an ERP therapist can help you identify the situations that trigger your maladaptive daydreaming and teach you how to resist this behavior, so you can be fully present for the important moments in your life.
Key takeaways
- Maladaptive daydreaming is an intense, immersive form of daydreaming that can affect daily functioning.
- MD often serves as a coping mechanism for OCD, anxiety, ADHD, depression, and trauma.
- If you have OCD, you may use maladaptive daydreaming as a compulsion to relieve distress or as a form of avoidance.
- Treatment for MD can involve exposure and response prevention (ERP) to teach you healthier ways to respond to distress—instead of resorting to excessive daydreaming.
