Lost in My Mind: Daydreaming. What is maladaptive daydreaming? | by Kimberly | Sep, 2025
What is maladaptive daydreaming?
Maladaptive daydreaming is a mental health issue where a person can daydream for hours without stopping. Sometimes a person doesn’t want to stop daydreaming, which makes them anxious about their basic needs. For example, going to the bathroom, eating, and doing work. Moreover, maladaptive daydreaming is an unhealthy or poor way to cope with trauma or problems within people’s lives, and we don’t want to think or worry about it. Therefore, they create a fantasy world in their heads to escape reality. These realities can be very complex with a deep description of the story. Furthermore, it’s difficult to stop maladaptive daydreaming because it becomes an addiction where people like spending time in their own fantasy world instead of the real world.
Why does maladaptive daydreaming happen?
It can happen when a person has dealt with a lot of trauma or changes in their life, and they don’t know how to deal with it, so they find other ways to “solve” the problem. People are usually around a place where they feel safe and non-judgmental, and sometimes people will play music in the background that fits into the situation they are imagining. In other cases, people can engage in maladaptive daydreaming if they have anxiety, depression, dissociative disorder, or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
Impact on Daily Life
Maladaptive daydreaming can lead to numerous negative outcomes in life, but it primarily affects daily life. Primarily, it’s your work life, because most people, after a long day at school or from their job, tend to procrastinate on the work they have to do at home. For example, teens not doing their homework, projects, or studying. Furthermore, it could also impact a person’s sleeping schedule due to daydreaming late into the night, which causes a person to unintentionally go to bed late, and if this constantly happens, it can lead to poor memory or low motivation. Overall, maladaptive daydreaming can control people’s whole lives, preventing them from engaging fully in daily responsibilities or even future goals.
The difference between daydreaming and maladaptive daydreaming
Daydreaming is when a person’s mind wanders, making fake scenarios, but it only happens from time to time. People tend to daydream to reduce stress or increase creativity in the mind. For example, getting an A on a test/quiz. However, Maladaptive daydreaming is when a person daydreams excessively over the day, and instead of doing it to reduce stress, it can cause stress and anxiety. Furthermore, it’s more complex scenarios. For example, they imagine being a secret government agent who risks their life to save the world at night, all while pretending to be just another quiet student at school during the day.
Personal experience
I started maladaptive daydreaming when I was seven. At first, it was just a few days out of the week, but after I moved to a more rural area, it only increased, especially because school was getting worse for me, thanks to bullying. Later, when COVID started, I felt more alone, so this amplified my daydreaming, and after quarantine, it was hard to come back to school and socialize with different people instead of the people I had built relationships with in my head. Moreover, it was increasingly hard because my school was very openly racist towards black people, and I was so tired of being ridiculed for something I couldn’t control. For example, people would say I was ugly because I was black and would just call me the N-word for no reason. I could be sitting in class, and a student will say, “ Hey, N-word, can you pass me notes, paper, etc.” The teachers will do nothing about this, so I would counter this by just thinking I was a different race during class or just outside of school. Furthermore, I’m now a rising senior in high school, and I can say I am more confident of being black and staying away from people who are racists, but I still struggle with maladaptive daydreaming, especially after a hard day at school or just when I’m bored. Sometimes I can even get bored while daydreaming, but still do it because it’s comforting. However, I’m slowly getting better, but it’s still a problem I’m trying to combat, and I didn’t know this case had a name until a year ago, which is why stories like mine need to get out there to help other people who have it worse and can’t function without it.
Why does it need more help/attention?
Why does maladaptive daydreaming need more attention, just like any other mental issue? Well, maladaptive daydreaming is like a drug you can’t put down. It’s an abuse cycle where it’s easy to get into but hard to get out of. It’s an issue that takes over your life and leads to more mental issues like Anxiety, Depression, Personality disorders, etc. The fact that many people have this disorder and don’t speak up about it is because it’s not talked about as much as other disorders. To the point, people don’t know it’s a mental disorder or just think it’s just a weird thing they only do, and it seems embarrassing. However, it’s in fact not embarrassing that maladaptive daydreaming could be from trauma that has not been well treated. There are around 2.5% of people in the world who have maladaptive daydreaming. That’s around 1 in 40 people. In conclusion, this is why maladaptive daydreaming is a big problem in the world that needs more studies on this because it truly does majorly affect people’s lives.
