Quitting tips

Here are some tips on breaking up a daydream when it happens. Not all of these might work for you, and other things I have not suggested might work for you better.

The most common tip is to talk to other people. I think it works because you are using the brain power you use to daydream to think about what you are going to say next. I feel like singing out loud or talking to myself about what I am currently doing works for the same reason.

Usually, I sing aloud in the shower because it's something that people will not question if they hear me and also because I tend to daydream a lot in the shower because it's something I can do while on autopilot leaving me a lot of mental space to daydream.

Thedreamersof suggests journaling when you get the urge to daydream on their tumblr and also to think of each moment you daydream "as an isolated incident."

There is also John K's method of stopping a daydream, analyzing it and daydreaming about the opposite of what you were originally daydreaming about.

Discovering Maladaptive Daydreaming

I don't quite remember how I discovered what I had was called Maladaptive Daydreaming. What I do remember is looking up fantasy and coping mechanisms in an outdated children's psychology book and somehow finding this page on Daydreaming Disorder. There is a lot of helpful information on it, including tips on stopping and a link to this study, Compulsive Fantasy: proposed evidence of an under-reported system through systematic study of 90 self-identified non-normative fantasizers.

Between that page and the study, I recognized a lot of my symptoms: daydreaming automatically or without planning to, pacing and making weird faces as I daydreamed.

In my daydreams, I am a character from a book or another sort of media, and I am usually a character that is part of a couple, be it of friends or people dating. The daydreams themselves are usually about one of the following:

• me having an argument with the other person in the couple
• me doing unexpected that changes that person's view at me
• me rescuing that person or becoming stronger

I guess a way that you could frame it is that I am role playing as that character. As in, I am thinking about their relationships and concerns and reacting to things based on what they value. I've also thought about it as living vicariously through that character.

6 things about friendship I had to learn

I first started to daydreaming to cope with how bad my peer relationships were as a kid. I idealized friendships and other relationships and imagined scenarios where I already had close friends. That, combined with my lack of actual practice becoming friends with people, meant that I missed a lot of crucial lessons about making relationships.

As I grew older, I got a little better at developing friendships, but I didn't know how to approach other people, and I was always unsure if we were really friends.

When I went to college, I turned my friendship efforts on to 100%. I introduced myself to everyone in my dorm the first week I was in there. I asked people about their majors. I leapt on the information they gave me and kept an eye out for questions I could ask to extend the conversation. Through all the practice I got during college, I learned that I had made a lot of assumptions about friendship because of the way I had idealized it.

1. that close friendship was automatic.

A Plan to Quit Maladaptive Daydreaming

I've read a lot of Maladaptive Daydreaming blogs on the internet, and it seems like most people have a two step recovery plan:

1. Stop themselves from daydreaming from moment to moment
2. Fix the root cause of the daydreaming, usually by forming or developing their relationships with other people

I think this is very valuable because it makes the psychological tangle that is Maladaptive Daydreaming a little bit more manageable. The second step will be what ultimately removes the need to daydream, but the first step is what gives you the room to do so. Daydreaming takes a lot of emotional energy and time that you are going to need at your disposal while you are develop areas of your life that you have not paid a lot of attention to.

Due to the nature of my daydreaming, my steps looked like this:

1. Stop myself from daydreaming from moment to moment
2. Develop my relationships (by paying attention to the people around me and by seeking out people to fill my social need instead of automatically daydreaming)
3. Find meaning from or develop meaning in my own life
4. Do entertaining things

The reason my plan has two extra steps is because I realized that there were actually three reasons I daydreamed: I was lonely, I was bored, and I didn't feel that the things that I was doing were meaningful. 

For example, while washing dishes one morning when everyone was still asleep, I started to pretend that I was an anime character who was guarding a high ranking official's son. Washing dishes became meaningful in that context because it showed how the character was practical and took care of things that needed to be done. Doing the dishes in that context was meaningful. 

When I realized why I was daydreaming that particular scenario, I thought about how my doing the dishes was meaningful. I realized that washing the dishes was meaningful because it meant that when someone wanted to eat later, they wouldn't have to wash dishes first and be stressed about it. Because I was too busy thinking about that, I stopped daydreaming. Then, every time I started to daydream, I could just go back to thinking about how good it was to wash the dishes.

That was a great discovery for me because it meant that I now had a way to avoid daydreams when there was no one else around. Of course, I have other methods, but I find that the ones that fulfill one of my needs had the longest effects. Instead of staving off the daydreams, they remove the cause, at least for a while. 

However, I am aware that other people don't have the exact same experience I do, and that even the first plan might not be applicable. But the framework might still be useful. Basically, both of the above plans melt down to two steps:

1. Stop using the maladaptive coping mechanism on a moment to moment basis. 
2. Figure out why you were using it in the first place, so you can replace that coping mechanism with something else.

The first step will be mostly you figuring out what works for you. Singing? Writing intensely? Calling someone on the phone? The second step will require a bit of introspection, and you might have to write down your daydreams in order to recognize a pattern like I had to do. Either way, Maladaptive Daydreaming is something that can be managed.