Maladaptive Daydreaming

Hi, everyone!

So I thought that I would talk a bit about something that has really affected me greatly the past few years: maladaptive daydreaming.

Essentially, maladaptive daydreaming is a mental disorder that causes the person with it to compulsively daydream, sometimes for hours a day. It works (in my opinion) very similarly to OCD. You become completely obsessed with daydreaming. They are triggered by a variety of things, including conversations and media (TV shows, movies, music, news, etc.). You experience the trigger and feel a very strong, almost irresistible compulsion to daydream. Some people act out their daydreams through facial expressions or physical movements, like pacing.

Healthline lists the common symptoms of maladaptive daydreaming:

• extremely vivid daydreams with their own characters, settings, plots, and other detailed, story-like features
• daydreams triggered by real-life events
• difficulty completing everyday tasks
• difficulty sleeping at night
• an overwhelming desire to continue daydreaming
• performing repetitive movements while daydreaming
• making facial expressions while daydreaming
• whispering and talking while daydreaming
• daydreaming for lengthy periods (many minutes to hours)

Now that we've gone over a general summary of what maladaptive daydreaming is, I'd like to talk about what my experience is, personally.

I've always daydreamed a lot, generally in connection to music. That in and of itself is not a problem, I'm pretty sure everyone daydreams. It started getting stronger and more frequent as I entered my early teens. Once I left regular public school I suddenly had hours a day where I was alone or, at the very least, not constrained by traditional school hours. Despite doing a good job of managing my time (I was getting all of my assignments in on time), I was spending increasingly large amounts of time walking up and down the stairs in my house, daydreaming.

Now, at first glance, this seems like a good thing. It wasn't really interfering with my schoolwork (my only true responsibility) and it was giving me exercise. Sounds good, right? Truthfully, I didn't realize it was a problem and why until recently. 

I am (and have been for years) deeply unsatisfied with my life. My anxiety and the way I let it control me have severely limited my life satisfaction. I lost most of my friends after I left public school because none of them continued to contact me. I became increasingly more housebound as time went by. I had to watch people that I used to be friends with move on with their life as I was stuck in place. This, combined with my lifelong love of books (and being able to escape into them), led to my regular daydreaming becoming maladaptive.

Alternate reality-me (I believe they are called "paras"?) is everything that I'm not, but desperately wish I am. She is brave. She goes on awesome adventures. She is beautiful and confident. She knows lots of languages and is smarter than I ever have been (even though I am truly a smart person). She is cared about by so many people. Her existence is acknowledged by others in a way that I haven't been in a long time. She can experience emotions and feelings that, for a variety of reasons, I have denied in real life. She's me, but without the "personality defects" that I feel that I have.

There are a lot of emotions and feelings that real life-me does not experience that alternate reality-me can. I use her to feel and express those things. Which sounds nice, but it actually just creates more barriers to learning how to express them in real life. 

Anger, for example, is one emotion that I have a hard time with in real life. I've always had some anger issues and they've been made worse the past year or so from my anxiety and perhaps the medications that I'm on. I have a lot of anger inside of me, towards myself, others, and my situation in life. But I can't let it out because I can't let it all out at once. Letting it out in little pieces just ends up making me more angry. Exercising it out would be my best bet, but my migraines make it impossible for me to exercise beyond very light exercise for a few minutes (like 5) at a time. So its not really a good outlet. Therefore, I use daydreaming to let out the anger. Of course, that doesn't really work in the long term, it hasn't lessened the amount of anger I have inside of me.

Another somewhat separate feeling is the bitterness and betrayal that I feel toward my previous classmates. Even the people I stayed friends with didn't talk to me that often. I would sometimes go months in between talking to anyone other than my parents and my teachers. But I can't tell them what I truly feel for fear of alienating the few people I have left, so I rely on daydreaming to let those feelings out. Again, it doesn't really do anything other than make me feel better in the moment because I'm not changing anything in real life. 

I could go on and on and on about all of the things I rely on maladaptive daydreaming for, but you get the point. In general, I use maladaptive daydreaming to escape from reality instead of making positive changes and to feel things that I deny myself in real life.

I've started calling these things that I feel "pseudo-feelings" or "pseudo-emotions." I still feel them just as strong as I would if I were experiencing them in real life scenarios. My daydreams can make me laugh, cry, smile, rage. But they aren't really real. The feeling of catharsis that I sometimes get after expressing those emotions in the daydreams don't last. I think that's part of the reason why daydreaming becomes so, for lack of a better word, addictive. You get that momentary high from the feelings you get in the daydream, whether they be pleasant or unpleasant, and as soon as it fades you think "I've got to get back there." Because that place is, in your mind, better or more free than real life. So you daydream again and feel it again. And again. And again. But until you realize that those feelings are just a crappy placeholder for the feelings that you need to express in real life, you may never understand the importance of breaking free and moving on.

I began to realize a while ago that my daydreaming was taking up huge swaths of my time. Its similar to my dermatillomania (compulsive skin picking) in a way: I'll go "oh I'll just do this thing for a second" and then all of a sudden minutes or hours have gone by. I actually wrote out each thing I was doing in a day and how long it took me and I've calculated that I'm somewhere between three and five times more efficient if I don't daydream. So literally I get three to five times as much stuff done in a day if I don't daydream during that day.

Around that time I also began to understand that alternate-me has a lot of traits that I don't, or don't believe I do. As I mentioned above, there are a lot of them. So one day while I was in the shower (another place that I have a habit of daydreaming) I decided to spend that time going over the differences between real life-me and alternate reality-me. I came up with a list of quite a few things. I also countered those statements with positive counterstatements (I learned how to do it through cognitive behavioral therapy) in the hope that doing so (and reading them when I felt the compulsion to daydream) would reduce my compulsion to daydream and desire to be someone other than myself. It didn't very much, but I also didn't apply myself to following through with my promise to read them so that might be why.

All in all, maladaptive daydreaming is a fairly unresearched condition that can be very debilitating. The compulsions can be overwhelming and the daydreams time-consuming. I hope that this condition will become more talked about in the coming years. Because of its nature, and the fact that it often begins in childhood, it would be good to highlight the importance of mental health awareness in children. If children are taught how to express themselves in childhood, even the unpleasant parts of themselves (anger, grief, sadness, all of the emotions that are labelled "wrong"), then perhaps they won't feel as much of a need to self-comfort through daydreaming, a problem that can become lifelong. Once you start it can be incredibly difficult to stop and catching the problem early would be a very good thing.

I'm open to questions, if anyone has any. Obviously, I can only speak for myself and my experience personally, but I hope the information that I can provide will be useful.

Love always,

Sam

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The One Year Anniversary of My First Real Mental Breakdown

Hi, everyone! Since November 6th is the one year anniversary of my first real mental breakdown (or the first one that I remember, at least--I feel like I might have had them previously, but my memory is just so bad that I can't truly say whether I did or not), I thought I might take the time to talk about it here.

I honestly don't think I've spoken at length about the circumstances and events of it before. Bits and pieces are on my twitter, but I don't think there is any one collective record of the events leading up to and following the breakdown.

There's some background that I think is necessary for you to understand before I talk about that actual day.

First, I briefly went to therapy in the late summer and early fall of 2017. I tried to commit myself to it in the way that was necessary, but I still wasn't being truly honest with my therapist or with myself about all of the problems I was experiencing.

Second, I'd been practicing mindfulness since about... May, I think. Now, this is neither an endorsement or criticism of mindfulness itself. When used properly and in the right circumstances, mindfulness can be beneficial. But at the time, I was not used to practicing coping skills, and because of this, all of the stuff that the mindfulness practiced dredged up from the depths of my memory and subconscious hit me like a train and I wasn't able to deal with it.

Third, I'd been having chronic migraines and tension headaches for almost a year. It was severely impacting my ability to function, though the tension headaches got better after I went to the eye doctor and was prescribed glasses (I really needed them). But the migraines, which caused a large amount of nausea and sensitivities to light, sound, motion, etc., were incredibly debilitating and stressful (even more so because of my extreme emetophobia.

Fourth, I'd switched my birth control to a higher dose in October, and my body DID NOT like it. But I didn't realize that until later.

Fifth, I was starting my senior year, and coming to the realization that there was no way I'd be able to apply to or go to college the next year (2018). This increased my sense of isolation from my peers and a sense of helplessness and failure.

Sixth, my panic attacks, which had slowed down over the 3 years that I'd spent away from regular society, returned in full force in late February of 2017, following an absolutely awful one that I had on the way to a gynecologist appointment.

And seventh, by the time November came around, I was already 2 months into my annual months-long depressive episode. I recognized it earlier that year (the year previously I didn't realized what was wrong until it ended), but combined with everything else, it made life very hard to deal with.

Now, I quit therapy after a few weeks because I started getting horrible panic attacks every time I went. Obviously, some therapy was better than no therapy, because it refreshed to methods used in therapy in my mind, but that didn't really help me until months later. I also briefly took Lamictal for my mood swings, but stopped after I felt really nauseous one day (I assumed it was from the med, in reality it was probably just anxiety).

I was finding school harder and harder to deal with between my depression, anxiety, and migraines. Finally, at the beginning of November, on a Friday, I had a god-awful migraine. It was terrible and lasted for hours, but even after the pain went away, the nausea and sensitivities stayed. I'd never had that happen before, or at least not to that extent. I spent the weekend laying in bed or sitting on my bed, staring at the wall for hours because I was so sensitive to everything I could barely move. I certainly couldn't read or watch movies. I was incredibly apathetic to everything. I was so exhausted and tired. My parents tried everything to get me out of that state. My dad stayed home on Monday to make sure I was going to be okay, but I was still very fatigued and I just wanted to sleep. We actually almost took me to the doctors to get blood work done. By early afternoon, I was sitting up, my dad got me to drink some electrolyte water and I was feeling better. I put an uplifting essential oil blend on my wrists (something I have to be careful about doing because of mania), opened my window, and sat down at my desk to send an email to my teachers. That great mood lasted for maybe 30 minutes, at which time I started getting a migraine. The migraine, as usual, slammed me right down into a depressive episode, which felt worse than usual because the essential oil blend had made my mood higher than it usually is.

The nausea and sensitivities caused by the migraine started to give me panic attacks, which, of course, only made me feel worse. I panic attacked my way down the stairs to my dad, who was on the phone with one of my doctors (the psychiatrists office probably). I was crying and scratching at my neck and chest (a self-soothing behavior that I developed that winter). He took me back upstairs into my blacked out room, where I spent the next few hours crying uncontrollably on and off. He was considering taking me to the hospital, but decided to wait until my mom got home. She eventually got home, but there wasn't much they could do to calm me down, so they finally called the on-call doctor at my psychiatrists office (it was 5 or 6 by then--after hours). The on-call doctor talked to me a little bit and finally decided to prescribe me mirtazapine, an anti-depressant that's easy on the stomach. I took my first dose that night and went to bed early.

And oh boy did that med knock me for a loop. An expected loop, but a loop nonetheless. I was so groggy I could barely function until mid afternoon the next day. Taking the anti-depressant gave me some hope in those first few weeks that things would get better, but if I'm being totally honest, I'm not sure it made much of a difference in my depressive episodes until recently. My anxiety symptoms in particular are so severe that I haven't yet found a med that can cover them up.

Despite taking mirtazapine (and buspar, something that I was prescribed previously but hadn't taken much), the next few months were terrible. I was anxious constantly. I felt like crap constantly. My dad had to work from home until the end of the year because I needed constant support. Everything got so bad that by the end of November, I went to a psychiatric facility for almost 2 days (one of the worst decisions of my life, and something that I'll talk about in a different post). I continued having breakdowns on almost a daily basis. I couldn't stop crying. The only reason why I didn't start failing all of my classes was because my teachers were very understanding and gave me extensions on most of my work (I've always been an exceptional student, so they knew that I'd get it done eventually).

I could go on and on and on about the events of the last year, but then this post would get horrifically long and tiresome, so I'll break it down into smaller pieces that I'll post every once in a while. There were a lot of factors that contributed to the hell that has been the past year, but that one breakdown was the main catalyst for it all.

It's taken a long time, but I'm slowly recovering from everything that happened. I just have to keep reminding myself "one day at a time."


Love always,
Sam

My other blog.

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