JAYNE BIGELSEN was always a daydreamer. As a young child, TV fuelled her imagination. “I would watch certain shows over and over… and I would create my own episodes,” she says. She found daydreaming an effective way to dispel boredom. However, by her teens, Bigelsen’s fantasy world had become more all-consuming. “The first thing I would do when I woke up in the morning is continue one of my stories,” she says. “I remember being frustrated when I ran into a friend because I had to stop my story and talk to them.”
Everyone knows the pleasures of daydreaming. Whether envisioning your next vacation or an ideal romantic partner, it is enjoyable to let your mind drift into a stream of consciousness where aspirations come alive. Better yet, research shows that, far from being a waste of time, daydreaming has all sorts of benefits and is . That’s just as well, because we spend lots of time doing it. Two-thirds of children have imaginary friends. One in 10 invent fantasy worlds, or “paracosms”. And when psychologists tracked the mental states of 15,000 volunteers, they found that adults .
Advertisement
Nevertheless, you can have too much of a good thing. As Bigelsen discovered, excessive daydreaming can undermine one’s ability to cope with everyday life. Psychologists call this maladaptive daydreaming. They believe it can be addictive and its prevalence increased during the covid-19 pandemic. Much about this condition remains a mystery, but we are starting to discover who is prone to it, what causes it and how it can be managed.
Daydreaming was long considered a distraction – quite literally – from the main purpose of thinking: focus. The ability to concentrate is essential for solving analytical problems. What’s more, our brains contain an “executive control network” that links various areas responsible for keeping us on task and regulating impulses. However, in the 1990s, researchers using brain scanners noticed another network of neurons, one that fired up when people weren’t thinking about anything in particular. We now know that this “default mode network” performs various mental housekeeping tasks, such as sorting and filing memories. It is also the part of the brain most active when we daydream.
Thinking is a constant tug of war between these two networks. That makes sense in evolutionary terms because our survival isn’t just dependent on focus. Daydreaming allows us to move mentally in time and space, planning for the future and rehearsing different possible scenarios. It is also creativity crucial for creativity and lateral thinking, where the brain makes connections between disparate bits of information whose links aren’t apparent when we are too focused. When we intentionally let our minds wander, the default mode network can even forge connections with the executive control network, increasing our ability to learn.
However, while the benefits of daydreaming were coming to light, clinical psychologist at the University of Haifa, Israel, discovered something different. “At the beginning of the millennium, I noticed that some of my patients were describing extensive fantasy lives,” he says. “These patients had been regulating traumatic experiences by using daydreaming as a soothing mental activity.” That sounds positive, but when Somer probed further, he found that their fantasies were replacing real social interactions and, as a result, were to maintain relationships with friends and family. Psychologists call repetitive actions that interfere with an individual’s ability to cope with daily life . And here was a behaviour that not only undermined social relationships, but also had detrimental effects on people’s performance at work and in education. So, in 2002, Somer coined the term maladaptive daydreaming to describe what he had discovered.
What counts as maladaptive daydreaming?
What began as a study of eccentric daydreaming in six patients has, in the past 20 years, become a mission to understand this strange psychological phenomenon. Even defining maladaptive daydreaming isn’t easy. There have been no brain-imaging studies of the behaviour, so we don’t know whether it differs neurologically from regular daydreaming. And the amount of time an individual spends in their fantasy worlds isn’t necessarily an issue: many people daydream for hours each day without that being a problem. But maladaptive daydreams are qualitatively different.
One person who has helped reveal how, is Bigelsen. Now a successful public-interest lawyer based in New York, in recent years, she has teamed up with Somer and others to explore the behaviour. One of their studies . The former reported that their daydreams were hard to control and interfered with their lives. They spent an average of 56 per cent of their waking hours in fantasy worlds featuring fictional characters and elaborate plots. Unlike regular daydreams, theirs often involved pacing and rocking or unconscious facial expressions. “At times, the activity is accompanied by stereotypical repetitive movements and listening to evocative music to facilitate the immersive state,” says psychologist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, another pioneer of the field.
Other research suggests that maladaptive daydreaming is so immersive that many people find themselves with imaginary characters. Maladaptive daydreamers spend an average of around 4 hours a day in this zoned-out state. Their daydreams can take many forms, from amusing and surreal to solemn and poignant, but they tend to be more vivid and emotionally intense than regular daydreams. are love, friendship, self-idealisation, social support and imaginary family, which might help explain why the activity is so compelling. A 2015 study found that daydreaming about significant others . However, the researchers also noted that if such daydreams displace actual social interactions, they could result in loneliness and desperation.
“The waste of time spent in fantasy, and the gap between the idealised imaginary life and the more dreary reality, can result in feelings of shame, depression and attention deficits,” says Somer. Exploring this idea further, he and Soffer-Dudek asked 77 people to keep . This revealed that the activity brought increases in negative emotions, alongside symptoms of depression, social anxiety and general anxiety, and decreases in positive emotions.
The study also found that obsessive-compulsive feelings consistently preceded bouts of daydreaming, which fits with the idea that . The scientists who first proposed this in 2018 pointed out that, like many addictive and impulsive tendencies, it offers a temporary escape from stressful thoughts and unfavourable realities. The idea is yet to be fully tested, though.
Addictions are associated with the release of dopamine in the brain, which can produce a euphoric effect. No research has investigated whether this happens during maladaptive daydreaming, nor have there been studies to look for genes known to be associated with the behaviour. However, there is research indicating that maladaptive daydreaming may be common in people with , a behavioural addiction recognised in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), a US handbook that lays out the vast panoply of diagnosable mental health conditions. Both seem to involve the same .
All this comes as no surprise to Noam (not his real name), an Israeli student who has been struggling with maladaptive daydreaming. “These daydreams are very tangible, so it’s a very addictive feeling,” he says. “When I was trying to stop, getting back to my real life got me depressed. It’s much more comfortable to be in the safe zone I invented in my head.”
The prevalence of such experiences is unknown because maladaptive daydreaming isn’t listed in the DSM-5 or widely recognised by doctors. Research has revealed that certain people are more prone to it (see “Who is at risk?”, below), but many questions still remain. For example, how does maladaptive daydreaming affect psychological development? “We have received emails from parents describing such behaviours in their children, who then go on to describe their inner worlds when asked what they are doing,” says Soffer-Dudek. “Unfortunately, there are not yet any published studies on children.” Another mystery is the common use of music to trigger daydreams. Somer hopes to find out more about this and discover how music influences the fantasy worlds that people create.
Tests for maladaptive daydreaming
Somer also wants to encourage other psychologists and doctors to take maladaptive daydreaming seriously. “Many professionals object to pathologising daydreaming,” says Somer. “But they seem to forget that alcoholism is not an unnecessary pathologising of social drinking or that obsessive-compulsive disorder is not merely another form of orderliness.” He has developed the , which aims to help medics assess whether someone is experiencing maladaptive daydreaming. Another test, the , can be used to gauge the severity of the condition. This evaluation measures aspects of daydreaming, such as how comforting it is, how difficult it is to control, how disruptive of everyday activities it is and to what extent it is triggered by music or accompanied by repetitive movements and facial expressions.
As you would expect for a condition that isn’t yet widely recognised, treatment and management options are still being developed and tested. People who experience maladaptive daydreaming often have underlying mental health conditions and other stressors, and addressing these through general psychotherapy could have a big impact, says Soffer-Dudek. “Monitoring the behaviour, its triggers, conditions and emotional consequences may help individuals control it,” she says. “Also, practising mindfulness meditation may be helpful in staying in the present rather than escaping to fantasy worlds.” Mindfulness meditation is a mental exercise that encourages stress reduction by refocusing the mind on specific things without judgement. Other techniques involve and suspected triggers in a journal, and rewarding personal milestones in suppressing these fantasies.
Bigelsen is proof that maladaptive daydreaming can be managed. She was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder years ago and believes that the medication she takes to cope with that has helped her control her daydreaming too. Noam is also doing well. Just two months after starting treatment with Somer, his daily daydreaming has fallen from 16 hours to around 7 hours. He is now doing better in his studies and in social settings. As his therapy progresses, he hopes to achieve a more balanced lifestyle. “I genuinely want to get better, to take pleasure in my life as it is and to love only the people who are part of my life and deserve my affection,” he says.
Who is at risk?
Maladaptive daydreaming isn’t confined to Western societies. “We have found it to be present in many countries and cultures around the world,” says Nirit Soffer-Dudek at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. “And it seems to be more common in young people than older people.” Loneliness, distress and boredom are thought to trigger it. But researchers are discovering more serious risk factors too.
For a start, it is more common among people who have experienced severe trauma, such as sexual abuse as a child. Eli Somer at the University of Haifa, Israel, found that maladaptive daydreamers who were victims of childhood neglect and similar traumas often and saving others from maltreatment, assuming the role of a captor, taking revenge and experiencing other allusions affiliated with death. “Those with trauma histories such as childhood adversities usually report that their vivid daydreaming abilities enabled them to [mentally] escape from a harsh reality,” says Soffer-Dudek.
Many people who experience maladaptive daydreaming have , including anxiety, depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder. People with a dissociative disorder – a psychological condition where you feel detached from yourself – are at especially high risk.
There is also a link with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Earlier this year, that around a fifth of respondents with ADHD showed signs of maladaptive daydreaming, with many also expressing feelings of loneliness and reduced self-esteem.
In addition, surveys suggest that maladaptive daydreaming increased as a result of the covid-19 pandemic. Last year, research reported that during lockdowns, 17 per cent of the more than consistent with maladaptive daydreaming. And in 2020, Somer and others surveyed people in more than 70 countries and found that they were than they were in normal circumstances.
Â鶹´«Ă˝ audio
You can now listen to many articles – look for the headphones icon in our app newscientist.com/app
