Is Constant Daydreaming a Sign of Mental Illness?

I’ve always been a daydreamer. Like many children, I loved playing pretend, using my imagination, and immersing myself into fantastical worlds.

But when my mental health started playing up, my daydreams took a dark turn.

I started thinking about upsetting hypothetical situations and struggled to control my thoughts. I’d often have PTSD-related flashbacks. I’d spend a long time daydreaming, overthinking, and ruminating about things that upset me.

Usually, when we think of daydreaming, we think about imagining something. It could include replaying memories over and over in your head, thinking about your goals or interests, or imagining an unlikely or likely future scenario.

Most of the time, we think of daydreaming as something that’s voluntary. In other words, you can stop doing it if you tried.

The tricky thing about daydreaming is that it can be fun, harmless, and sometimes beneficial — but at other times, it isn’t.

“Daydreaming is incredibly normal, but excessive daydreaming can be a symptom of a larger problem,” says Mollie Volinksy, a licensed clinical social worker who provides trauma-informed psychotherapy.

If you think about it, most mental illnesses involve problematic thought patterns that we struggle to control — and that can involve your imagination getting away from you.

“Daydreaming can be an indication that someone is suffering from concentration difficulty, which is seen in many mental illnesses, including depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,” says Lauren Cook, a therapist and author based in San Diego.

“It’s normal for everyone to daydream from time to time, but it becomes problematic when one is not able to follow instructions or pay attention when required,” she adds.

Because there’s no hard-and-fast, universal definition of daydreaming, it’s hard to tell when our daydreams become something more sinister. This is why it’s important to know how symptoms of mental illness can show up in our daydreaming.

Daydreaming is different for everyone. The way it turns up, and the reason why we daydream, depends on our mental state and situation. Someone with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), for example, might struggle to concentrate on day-to-day tasks. This can often look like daydreaming.

If you have anxiety, you might daydream about the worst possible scenario. “Let’s say you have a presentation at work in a week. You might find yourself continuously visualizing the presentation and worrying about all of the things that may go wrong,” Volinsky says.

When my anxiety is high, for example, I overthink and imagine awful situations. I often imagine having horrible arguments with people in my own head (which seems to be a surprisingly common thing, according to the internet), or I imagine that I’ll be hit by a car when I’m trying to cross a road.

And when it comes to depression, you might overthink or daydream about depressing situations.

“With depression, daydreaming can emerge as more of a listless and mindless wandering of the brain where there is a lack of motivation to stay focused,” Cook explains. This can make it even harder to concentrate on day-to-day tasks.

The problem with daydreaming in this situation is that you can make yourself even more anxious and upset — even about things that haven’t happened or might never happen.

People who are particularly stressed can also use daydreaming as a tool for escapism, Volinsky explains.

“Escapism isn’t inherently ‘bad,’ but it can lead to avoidance and the worsening of stress and anxiety. It is your brain’s way of protecting you from the distress and pain, and this is significant,” she says. “However, in order to feel better, it is often best to face this pain and distress head-on.”

Of course, daydreaming about sad situations or imagining arguments playing out in your head doesn’t necessarily mean you have a mood disorder. But it can be one of the many symptoms.

Do you ever have unwanted, distressing thoughts? These are known as intrusive thoughts. They often seem pretty similar to daydreaming.

Some examples of intrusive thoughts can include thinking:

• You’ll murder or hurt someone.
• You’ll die by suicide or hurt yourself.
• A loved one of yours will die.
• You’ll get a deadly disease.
• A natural disaster will randomly happen.

Intrusive thoughts can happen to anyone from time to time, but they can also be a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

OCD involves having obsessive thoughts (which are basically intrusive thoughts that persist) and then having compulsions (or rituals) to try to get those thoughts out of your head.

I have OCD. One of my obsessions is that I often think I’ll jump off of buildings, even when I don’t feel remotely suicidal. So, I try to steer clear of high balconies.

When I’m around a high balcony and I have intrusive thoughts about jumping off it, I try to blink in pairs — two quick blinks at a time — because for some reason I feel that blinking an odd number of times will cause me to jump.

The good news is that therapy can address OCD and intrusive thoughts. Nowadays, I experience intrusive thoughts a lot less. It’s easier to work through them instead of obsessing over them.

Sometimes, dissociation can look like daydreaming. I have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and dissociation is a common symptom of PTSD. When this started happening to me, I didn’t know it was dissociation, and I would describe it as an intense daydream.

But dissociation is different from daydreaming in a few key ways. “Dissociation is when [one] feels physically removed from their body or the place they are in,” Cook says.

“Dissociation is connected with the fight-or-flight response and usually only occurs when the person feels overwhelmed or threatened,” she adds.

Often, when we’re in distress, we mentally “check out” of the situation — which is what dissociation is. It often looks like “zoning out” or daydreaming, but it can feel pretty scary.

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If you find yourself emerged in daydreams for most of the time, it might be a case of maladaptive daydreaming.

Maladaptive daydreaming is a widely misunderstood psychiatric condition that involves persistent, intense daydreams. The symptoms include lengthy periods of vivid daydreaming and struggling to carry out day-to-day tasks.

Maladaptive daydreaming was first identified by Professor Eliezer Somer of the University of Haifa. As of yet, it isn’t in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), and it has no official diagnosis criteria or treatment.

Daydreaming isn’t all bad, though. Imagination can, in fact, be extremely pleasurable and helpful.

Creating art, finding solutions for practical problems, and even setting goals requires us to use a little imagination. Daydreaming can help you get creative, deeply think about issues, and plan your day-to-day life.

Daydreaming can also be a helpful coping tool, Volinsky says. “When our brains and bodies are in a highly activated state, it can be extremely helpful to distract ourselves with a different image,” she says.

This can help you soothe yourself and remind your body that you’re not actually in a life-or-death situation. For example, you might imagine a calm, beautiful scene, like sitting on the beach, and return to that image when you’re struggling with anxiety.

So, daydreaming itself isn’t a bad thing, and it isn’t something you should avoid. Rather, you should pay attention to it and note when it’s doing you more harm than good.

If you’re daydreaming a lot — so much so that it makes it difficult for you to function — it’s a sign that you should see a therapist, Volinsky says. You should also see a therapist if you’re having intrusive thoughts or dissociating.

There are some things you can do to address incessant daydreaming. “Engaging in physical tasks, like writing, playing with a fidget spinner, or typing, are great ways to break a daydreaming spell, as they force one to focus on a task at hand,” Cook says.

She also suggests setting aside time in the day to allow yourself to daydream — say, 15 minutes at a time.

“When you have this time set aside, like a daydreaming appointment, you limit all the other spontaneous times when you’d like to daydream throughout the day,” Cook explains.

Daydreaming isn’t always a bad thing, and it isn’t always harmful. It’s important to be aware of what you daydream about, as well as how frequent and how intense the daydreams are. This self-awareness will help you pick up whether you need help.

Daydreaming Can Have a Dark Side – Association for Psychological Science – APS

While someone is zoning out, their mind isn’t just blank. Instead, people who are daydreaming may be intensely ruminating on their future accomplishments, hopes, and goals. Research on daydreaming and other mind wandering has shown that this can help people generate innovative solutions to problems, an idea that the business world has started catching on to. But research is also showing that daydreaming can have a dark side.

Several studies have shown that spontaneous thoughts can be open and expansive, allowing the mind to creatively “wander” through different topics, helping people come up with expected solutions to problems. But a recent article in Clinical Psychological Science, shows how the kind of spontaneous thoughts that just pop into our heads can sometimes have negative consequences.

According to Igor Marchetti (Ghent University) and colleagues, individuals who struggle with negative emotions or who are under intense stress are particularly vulnerable to negative thoughts when their minds wander. When an at-risk individual is struggling to accomplish a goal, their spontaneous thoughts and daydreams may take a dark turn. Instead of open-ended wanderings, they may get locked into a repetitive, negative train of thought that produces thoughts like “I’ll never find a job,” “the boss hates me,” or “I’m going to screw up this big presentation.”

“In other words, a powerful and negative emotional reactivity to internal cues has the capacity to lock the train of thoughts into a thematically narrow content channel (i. e., funneling effect) and to substantially reduce the breadth of the associative network,” the researchers write.

Marchetti and colleagues note that these repetitive, negative thoughts share many of the features of cognitive risk factors for depression. Consequently, for at-risk individuals, mind wandering and daydreaming may pave the way toward depressive symptoms or other mood disorders. And studies suggest that may be especially true when they engage in daydreaming, rather than problem solving, as a response to stress.

“Many findings indeed report that well-known mechanisms leading to depression, such as rumination, hopelessness, low self-esteem, and cognitive reactivity, are consistently associated with daydreaming and are likely to exacerbate negative mood in individuals,” they explain.

Intriguingly, dozens of experimental studies have suggested that positive distractions can help relieve depressed mood.

“This interpretation is supported by findings that pleasant activities brightened mood and reduced rumination in depressed individuals, presumably by interrupting their ruminative train of thought because the positive distraction overrides the existing cognitive processing priority, and this mood-brightening and rumination-reducing effect was especially marked in more highly depressed individuals,” the researchers explain.

A recent meta-analysis suggests that there might be a neurobiological reason for this, suggesting that socioemotional processing and spontaneous thoughts may rely on common brain areas.

Researchers have developed specific counseling techniques to help people who are coping with negative thoughts. The counseling aims to reduce commitment to unrealistic or self-destructive goals, and to instead direct the person towards more adaptive, less stress-provoking goals.

“Longing for unrealistic, overvalued, unreachable goals or being reluctant to relinquish them (once failed) are both likely to cause mental distress and should, in turn, be targeted by clinical interventions,” the researchers conclude.

Reference

Marchetti, I., Koster, E., Klinger, E., & Alloy, L. B. (2016). Spontaneous thought and vulnerability to mood disorders: the dark side of the wandering mind. Clinical Psychological Science. doi: 10.1177/2167702615622383

Why it is harmful to dream: arguments

They say that it is not harmful to dream. Shamelessly lie! Dreaming is at least not useful, as it turns out. And if you are not one of those who hover in the clouds, if you do not consider yourself a dreamer and know that you stand firmly on the ground, this article is for you. Because we all, it turns out, are constantly dreaming. And we hurt ourselves.

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Dreams prevent you from living in the present

Actually, while you are dreaming, you generally seem to be out of time. There is no past, it has already passed, and despite this, most of us dream of returning there and changing something. It does not add any peace of mind or self-confidence. There is no future either – in the sense of a predetermined future. It cannot be imagined.

But you can create a lot of illusions for yourself. For example, what a beauty you will be when you finally lose three kilograms. You will not. That is, you will throw off these unfortunate kilograms, of course, but your life still will not look like a beautiful clip with you in the title role. Hence the disappointment. And the present moment, the very moment in which you dream, will become the past. A past in which you did nothing significant. Because I was lying on the sofa and dreaming.

Dreams prevent you from being happy

According to a recent study by Harvard psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Matthew Killingsworth, most people are distracted half their time from what they are doing. To check what exactly they are distracted by, scientists developed a special application for the iPhone, posted it on the Web and invited everyone to take part in the survey. 2,000 people aged 8 to 88 regularly answered one question: what are you doing at the moment and what are you thinking about?

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It turned out that almost no one really thinks about the case. People reminisce about the past and regret their actions, and also dream about things that will never happen. It is interesting that people break away from reality no matter what they are currently doing. The only thing we are ready to give ourselves completely to is sex. The problem is that when we dream, we lose emotional stability: if we dream about the future, we imagine possible failures, and if we remember the past, we scold ourselves for mistakes. And it prevents us from just feeling happy.

Dreams prevent you from working

And they also interfere with rest. It seems to you that it will be easier to write a boring report if you dream about a vacation at the same time. In fact, your attention is scattered and you make mistakes – this is the first thing. Second, you work slower. The right hemisphere of the brain is responsible for the symbols and images that make up your dreams, for imagination, emotions and, in fact, the fantasies themselves. Analytical thinking, sequential processing of information, literal understanding of words are all tasks of the left hemisphere. Of course, they can work at the same time – for example, you can easily talk on the phone and draw.

But if both hemispheres are fully loaded, they will start to work separately and independently of each other, which will make it impossible to complete the third task. An experiment conducted by French researcher Etienne Coechlin in 2010 showed that volunteers were able to perform two tasks at the same time, but the third surprisingly eluded their memory. At the same time, scientists say, the reason is simple: the brain simply does not have a third hemisphere. And this means that if you daydream while working, you may miss something important. If you indulge in daydreams on vacation, then was it worth going somewhere at all? You just won’t notice and remember the most interesting things!

Dreams lead to depression

Well, it’s not surprising. What do you dream about most often? About wealth, about success, about a handsome prince, where without him. The problem is that the brighter and more realistic your dreams are, the sooner they will turn into illusions. About the fact that they themselves will come and give you everything. The Heavenly Chancellery will collect the parcel and tomorrow you will wake up as a famous millionaire. At the same time, by the way, it is possible that the universe will be favorable to you and there will be a place for miracles in your life. But it won’t be at all like what you imagined. And that’s it – your very smart brain will decide that life has not been successful at all. He is like that, yes, he will decide and instantly organize a depressive state for you. And it won’t be easy to convince him.

Dreams don’t come true

Because if you dream of your own house with a garden, then this is not a dream, this is a goal. In the event that you have ideas on how to make money on this charm. And if you just imagine how pleasant it is to lie in a hammock and listen to birdsong, this is not the goal. You spend time creating beautiful mental pictures. Try to remember your dream come true – it did come true some time after you stopped thinking about it, right? This is how the visualization technique works: imagine, dream and forget. Because the picture that looms in your head prevents you from acting and generally makes you nervous. And how can you turn a dream into a goal? No way. And, therefore, it will not come true. Such are miracles.

Why is it bad to dream? | Psychology

Harmless dreams actually turn out to be very harmful. “Why? – perhaps someone will be surprised. “After all, there is nothing wrong with them, at first glance. What’s wrong with dreaming?”

It turns out that there are more than enough bad things in dreams. Even when we only dream about what comes after the positive plus sign.

First of all, when we dream, we kind of stop living in the present and start living in the future, in our dreams. We stop seeing real life and living in the real world. But if you look closely, then we have not so little to just be happy now, and not when our dreams come true.

In the process of our dreams, we live outside of time, because we stubbornly ignore the present, because it does not suit us, we cannot change the past and the events of the past, and that transcendental future in our dreams has simply not yet come.

Dreams have a relaxing effect on our willpower and character; they, in the literal sense of these words, demoralize our will to live and fight for our goals. Why fight, strive, achieve, if you can just dream and live dreams?

There is one significant difference between a dream and a goal, although in some ways these two concepts are even very similar. Dreams is state , target is already action . That is why the goals set are more often realized than just our dreams.

In the West, the visualization technique and the “three steps” technique are very popular. Both of these techniques are a visual aid of how dreams take on wings and become not just empty sighs and desires, but a very specific and real, in their achievement, goal.

The visualization technique suggests clearly presenting our goal, namely the goal, because if we awarded the dream with wings, then it turned into a very specific goal. So, there should be a clear idea of ​​the goal and its visualization, embodiment in a real image. It can be a picture, a photo, an inscription, a toy that embody the goal. What follows is a process where the goal you set comes across more and more often and reminds you that the goal needs to be achieved. Many in the process of visualization attach drawings, pictures, notes with their goal on every corner in the house, at work. This happens in order to push the subconscious to action, to actively move forward in pursuit of the goal. The subconscious, after a few days of such active visualization, gives out possible ways to achieve goals.

Incredibly, this scheme really works! Someone considers this an accident, but most likely this is a natural process, because the path from setting a goal, its visualization and the final result is clearly traced – instructions in action to achieve the goal.

The “three steps” technique is somewhat similar to the previous technique at its initial stage. The first step is to visualize the goal. It manifests itself in a similar way: the more concretely and clearly you imagine your goal and visualize it, the better it will be for you. What follows is an interesting self-deception, as it may seem at first glance, or a process of substitution. You begin to act as if you have already achieved your goal. You act like a confident person who already has what he has been striving for so long. You create a state of achievement of the goal and begin to live in this state. Not only the external influences the internal state, but the internal state can also change external circumstances.

The final step in the “three steps” technique is the ability to be grateful for what you have. After all, you can have a lot, but not appreciate it and just not notice it, as in the case of dreams. The goals set and achieved always make you remember the path that had to be overcome.