Addicted to Daydreaming
We’re all guilty of it from time to time, but what happens when we prefer to live inside our heads than in the real world?
“Where are you, Hannah? Is it better than where we are?”
We were sitting at my friend’s dining room table — with her mum, her dad, and her brother. At some point, I had checked out, mentally, without realising, which is something I use to do a lot when I was a teenager. My response to my friend’s mother’s question of where I was was to smile and say nothing at the time, but that question, which was put to me 18 years ago now, has stuck with me.
The thing about daydreaming is, you’re not usually aware of when you’re doing it. The whole point of why I daydreamed as a teenager, was to take me out of where I was, to disconnect me from reality and put myself in my own world where I’m in charge. Of course, it wasn’t as straightforward as that, it’s not as if I’m playing a video game and I’ve got a set of controls. Sometimes your mind can take you to places you didn’t plan on going, especially if you’re angry or upset about something.
I daydreamed a lot as a naturally creative child, and then it became a trauma response in my teenage years because I was bullied badly at secondary school. Daydreaming helped me feel safe and calm when I was anxious. After feeling so ill at ease in my school environment I started to find solace in my head, which gave me a much-needed space to work things out and understand myself. As I was yet to possess the self-confidence to communicate how I was feeling, it felt easier to stay silent a lot of the time. So, letting my mind wander during lunch hour or while getting the bus to and from school was my time to get to grips with things that had happened to me and to relax.
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According to Dristi Hajong from the University of Dehli, “The Default Mode Network (DMN) is known to be atypically active during PTSD when an individual engages in introspective activities such as daydreaming, contemplating the past or the future, or thinking about the perspective of someone else.” Our DMN mode is the part of our brain most associated with our mind’s dormant state and is used to reflect on our consciousness and inner monologue.
Is this a healthy coping mechanism? While daydreaming holds many positive functions, it can also be detrimental to our focus and well-being if overused or used in the wrong way. Some have even discussed labelling forms of daydreaming as psychiatric disorders, such as the newly coined phenomenon known as Maladaptive Daydreaming. First reported in 2002, Maladaptive Daydreaming is when a person experiences very vivid daydreams and subsequently becomes addicted to experiencing them. Individuals with conditions such as anxiety are more susceptible. For me, I don’t think there would have been a better way to escape, I believe my mind needed a break from stress and this was the least harmful and natural way to do that. According to Walden University, Maladaptive Daydreaming can be harmful when it disrupts sleep and focus, but on the whole, studies show that it helps your mind move forward.
In the podcast ‘Lost in My Mind: What Happens When We Daydream’ novelist and essayist Leslie Jamison puts forth the idea that daydreaming can be an act of rebellion. This is an empowering idea for us daydreamers, as we’re so used to being belittled for our mind wanderings, whether it be by our teachers at school, or by our peers when we start glazing over at the pub.
These days, I the daydreamer, am rebelling against this societal pressure to be constantly, and unequivocally engaged with something. One of my pet hates is people asking me “What have you been up to?” or “What have you done today?”, because I feel like it forces me to think of my life as this timetable of activity when I like to think of it as more of a collection of abstract experiences that I can dip in and out of. I like to pick out the best bits and roll with them, I don’t always want to recall everything that happened. I detest the modern phenomenon that is hustle culture, this idea that our lives should revolve around smashing our goals and striving for career success and money all the time. To me, life is much more complicated than that. I believe in new experiences, exploration, creativity and learning over anything hustle culture related.
But on the contrary, daydreaming shouldn’t be seen as a lazy anti-working act, as it’s been shown to be a vital part of creative and problem-solving processes in numerous scientific and psychological studies. “many influential scientific thinkers — including Newton, Poincaré, and Einstein — claim to have had their moments of inspiration while engaged in thoughts or activities not deliberately aimed at solving the problem they were trying to solve” claims Baird, Smallwood and Schooler in their 2012 study ‘Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation’. Sigmund Freud gave an influential talk in 1907 called ‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming’ whereby he argued that ‘preconscious phantasies’ were a necessary part of the creative process for artists and writers.
Evidently, the state of daydreaming and its benefits is far more complex than I and others would have imagined. Upon learning the term Maladaptive Daydreaming, and as I cast my mind back to being a teenager that was going through such an anxious and miserable time, I suspect that’s exactly what I was doing. I do not think that my experience is unique, as I would hazard a guess that many anxious teenagers experience similar things, but I hope that teachers and parents are beginning to reframe their minds around young people with tendencies to daydream. We are not built like robots, and while society’s obsession with focus and productivity will live on as long as capitalism does, we should remember that some things in life require a more complex and thoughtful approach as opposed to bulldozing our way through a task list.
