Maladaptive Daydreaming: When Imagination is Hard to Control

Petra

4 days ago

6 min read

Most of us daydream. We imagine future conversations, replay past events, invent stories, or let our minds wander while doing something boring. For some people, however, daydreaming becomes so absorbing and time-consuming that it starts to interfere with everyday life. This is sometimes called maladaptive daydreaming.

Maladaptive daydreaming is not currently a formal mental health diagnosis. Instead, it is a term used to describe intense, immersive fantasy that feels difficult to control and causes distress or interferes with daily functioning.

Although it is a relatively new area of research, it may not be especially rare. One 2022 study involving community and university samples of Jewish-Israeli's estimated that around 2.5% of the general population may meet proposed criteria for maladaptive daydreaming, with higher rates found among younger adults. More research is needed to establish prevalence across different populations.

What Does Maladaptive Daydreaming Look Like?

Maladaptive daydreaming is more than simply having a vivid imagination. People may develop detailed internal worlds, characters, relationships, plots, or alternative versions of themselves. These stories can continue for months or years and may feel emotionally compelling.

Someone experiencing maladaptive daydreaming might:

spend long periods absorbed in complex imagined scenarios
repeatedly return to the same characters, storylines or fantasy worlds
deliberately use music, pacing, rocking or other repetitive movement to help enter the daydream
feel a strong urge to continue the fantasy when interrupted
lose track of time while daydreaming
postpone sleep, work, study, household tasks or social contact so they can keep daydreaming
repeatedly try, unsuccessfully, to reduce how much time they spend doing it
feel embarrassed or secretive about the behaviour.

Importantly, people generally know that the daydream is imaginary. This distinguishes maladaptive daydreaming from psychosis, where someone may have difficulty distinguishing an internal experience from external reality.

Why Would Someone Daydream so Much?

Daydreaming can serve a purpose. An imagined world may provide stimulation when real life feels boring. It can offer comfort when someone feels lonely, stressed or overwhelmed. Fantasy can also provide experiences that are harder to access in real life: success, competence, excitement, connection, romance, belonging or control. For some people, daydreaming therefore becomes a very effective form of emotional regulation.

Research supports this connection. A 2025 meta-analysis combined the findings of 40 studies involving almost 25,000 people. Maladaptive daydreaming was associated with difficulties regulating emotions, loneliness, shame and psychological distress, as well as depression and anxiety. It was also associated with lower self-esteem and self-efficacy.

This does not tell us that these experiences cause maladaptive daydreaming. Instead, it suggests that immersive fantasy may exist alongside emotional distress and difficulty managing uncomfortable internal experiences.

The problem is not necessarily the fantasy itself. The difficulty arises when it becomes the person's main strategy for managing discomfort, particularly when the short-term relief comes at the cost of sleep, relationships, study, work or everyday responsibilities.

This can create a self-reinforcing cycle:

boredom, distress or discomfort → immersive daydreaming → temporary relief or stimulation → tasks and responsibilities accumulate → more stress or guilt → greater desire to escape into daydreaming.

What Does This Have to do With ADHD?

There is considerable overlap between maladaptive daydreaming and ADHD, but they are not the same thing.

The 2025 meta-analysis found a significant association between maladaptive daydreaming and ADHD, alongside associations with several other conditions including anxiety, depression, OCD, dissociation and autistic traits.

A 2022 study looked specifically at 83 adults diagnosed with ADHD. Around 20% also met the researchers' proposed diagnostic criteria for maladaptive daydreaming. Those who had both ADHD and maladaptive daydreaming reported more depression and loneliness and lower self-esteem than those with ADHD alone.

That figure should be interpreted cautiously. It does not mean that 20% of all people with ADHD experience maladaptive daydreaming; this was a relatively small research sample. However, it does demonstrate that the two experiences can occur together while still being distinguishable.

Previous research looking in the opposite direction has also found very high rates of ADHD symptoms among people identified as maladaptive daydreamers. This may partly explain why maladaptive daydreaming can be assumed to be evidence for ADHD-related inattention.

ADHD mind-wandering and maladaptive daydreaming aren't quite the same

Ordinary ADHD mind-wandering is often relatively spontaneous and disorganised: one thought leads to another, then another, and attention drifts away from the task.

Maladaptive daydreaming tends to be different. It is usually immersive, sustained and narrative. Someone may repeatedly return to an elaborate fantasy world with continuing characters and storylines and have a strong desire to keep engaging with it.

In the 2022 ADHD study, some people initially scored highly on a maladaptive daydreaming questionnaire but did not meet the proposed criteria when interviewed. Their distracting thoughts turned out to consist more of worries, rumination or rapidly changing thoughts than immersive fantasy. For an ADHD brain, an elaborate fantasy world could be extremely stimulating. Unlike many everyday tasks, it provides novelty, emotion and immediate reward. There are no administrative tasks, waiting periods or tedious steps required before something interesting happens.

Difficulties with attention regulation and executive functioning may also make it harder to:

notice how much time has passed
disengage from the daydream
switch attention back to a less interesting task
remember intended tasks
start something that feels comparatively unrewarding.

Is it the Same as Dissociation?

Not necessarily. There can be overlap between maladaptive daydreaming, absorption and dissociative experiences, but they are not identical.

A person who is daydreaming is usually actively engaged with an imagined story. Dissociation can involve quite different experiences, such as feeling detached from yourself, feeling that the world is unreal, or having gaps in awareness or memory.

However, the connection between the two is receiving increasing research attention. The 2025 meta-analysis found a clear association between maladaptive daydreaming and dissociation, and some researchers have proposed that maladaptive daydreaming may eventually be best understood within the spectrum of dissociative conditions.

It Often Occurs Alongside Other Difficulties

The growing research literature suggests that maladaptive daydreaming rarely sits in isolation.

Across the 40 studies included in the 2025 meta-analysis, greater maladaptive daydreaming was associated with:

ADHD
depression and anxiety
obsessive-compulsive symptoms
dissociation
autistic traits
traumatic experiences
emotion-regulation difficulties
loneliness
shame
lower self-esteem.

These are associations, not evidence that one causes another. They do, however, suggest that when someone is spending many hours immersed in fantasy, it can be useful to look beyond the daydreaming itself and consider what else may be happening psychologically.

When Does Daydreaming Become a Problem?

Having a rich fantasy life is not inherently unhealthy. The more useful question is whether the daydreaming is working for you or interfering with your life.

Consider:

Can I choose when to stop?
Am I regularly losing much more time than I intended?
Am I avoiding things that matter to me?
Is it affecting my sleep?
Is it interfering with relationships, study or work?
Do I feel distressed when I cannot daydream?
Have I repeatedly tried to reduce it and found that I cannot?

If the answer to several of these questions is yes, it may be worth looking at what function the daydreaming is serving.

What Can Help?

There is not yet a well-established, evidence-based treatment specifically for maladaptive daydreaming. This is another reason to be wary of confident claims about particular treatments online.

Trying to simply ban daydreaming often misses the point. If the behaviour is providing stimulation, comfort or escape, taking it away without replacing those functions may be difficult.

Instead, it can help to become curious about when the urge appears.

Is it strongest when you are bored? Lonely? Anxious? Overwhelmed? Avoiding a difficult task? Trying to fall asleep? Listening to particular music?

Once the pattern becomes clearer, you can experiment with alternatives. For example, someone who daydreams primarily because they are understimulated may benefit from adding movement, music, novelty or social contact to boring activities. Someone using fantasy to avoid anxiety may need strategies for approaching uncomfortable tasks in

smaller, more manageable steps.

Environmental changes can also help. You might identify particular triggers, set a timer before intentionally daydreaming, move to a different physical space when you notice yourself becoming absorbed, or deliberately schedule periods for creative imagination rather than trying to suppress it completely.

For some people, the imagined stories themselves may also contain useful information. Recurring themes of competence, belonging, recognition, safety or intimacy can sometimes point towards needs that are not being adequately met elsewhere.

If maladaptive daydreaming is occurring alongside ADHD, depression, anxiety, trauma-related difficulties or another mental health problem, identifying and treating those difficulties may also be important.

The Goal Does Not Have to be “Stop Daydreaming”

For many neurodivergent people, an active internal world can be enjoyable, creative and meaningful. The aim is not necessarily to eliminate it.

A more helpful goal may be to develop greater choice: being able to enjoy daydreaming when you want to, while also being able to return to the external world when there are other things you want or need to do.