What you need to know about MDD

Hello readers,

I’m sorry for disappointing you with totally no follow up on this blog. But let me tell you what exactly happened.

My intention with this blog was to show other day dreamers a way to take control of their MDD and in the process lead more fulfilling lives.

I was a chronic maladaptive daydreamer myself since my mid school days and it took me more than 9 years to figure out how to overcome this effectively. I had another blog on this topic before 5 years back but then I stopped it since I couldn’t really get over my addiction back then. I am in my twenties now and it took me this long to finally get over MDD completely.

Let me tell you that it takes a great deal of self-discipline to overcome the maladaptive daydreaming addiction. I was kind of over the whole thing while I started this blog last year, but then I underwent some serious trauma in 2013 which caused me to resort to maladaptive daydreaming for a brief period. Hence I felt that I wasn’t ready yet to guide others on overcoming their addiction with daydreaming. I decided that I’ll make sure, I’m completely over this and then blog my experience on effectively coping up with daydreaming once I return to a steady healthy lifestyle. It took me more than a year to finally call myself completely under control.

Now before restarting this blog, I want to share with you a few things:

• Maladaptive daydreaming is NOT a mental disorder

This is perhaps the first of things you need to understand if you are trying to get over MDD. It very much possible to control the urge to maladaptive daydream. It is not a disorder that needs clinical attention like say depression or schizophrenia.

Understanding this the first step to overcome this. I understand that many of you don’t want to get over it, and see MDD as a source to vent out your daily frustrations, but then you should understand to have a healthy control over your daydreaming hobby. Are you unable to control your urge to daydream even when you are in the middle of some important task? Is MDD affecting your routine in ways you can’t predict? If yes, then you need to sit back and think about this seriously. Even if you choose to daydream, it is important to bring it under control. MDD is more like an addiction than a mental disorder. If you have MDD that means that you are a perfectly normal human being.  It is absolutely possible to overcome MDD by sheer will power and reflection on one’s own life.

•  More people around you have MDD than you think

Yes. But then you don’t realise it because they don’t realise that they are having MDD themselves. If you hadn’t googled your symptoms, then you probably would be one of them as well, who understands that there is something weird about them but then ignores it as some appendage of silly acts of their childhood past.  In fact, this is a much healthier state to be in, if you are a mild maladaptive daydreamer. This is because once you realise that it is not some weirdo thing that you do alone in this planet, you kind of start feeling that it is OK to maladaptive daydream and you are one of those poor kids born with this rare sort of disorder. Also, the articles in internet convinces you that you will end up leading an unsuccessful life if you suffer from MDD, and since not much research is being done on this topic so far, you are doomed for the rest of your life.

If you hadn’t come across the MDD information on internet, you would have probably come over this in the course of time. Now this whole idea of you suffering from a “disorder” makes you take your actions for granted. You tend to believe that you couldn’t have done anything to overcome it and blame it on your mental health instead.

 So basically overcoming MDD is like overcoming smoking addiction. You don’t need a therapist if you are willing to try things for yourself. It isn’t easy, but then quitting smoking isn’t easy either. In the upcoming posts, I will post techniques that I adopted to overcome MDD myself.

I may not be posting this on a weekly basis, so it would be better to subscribe to the posts via email so that you needn’t come back here to check. I’ve no intention of spamming your mailbox whatsoever. This is an anonymous blog.

Why you should stop maladaptive daydreaming?

Even though MDD has a bright side to it, you should reconsider quitting this habit because:

1. It sucks up all your time: You could just go on maladaptive daydreaming for the whole day without doing doing anything else. At the end of the day when you turn back, you discover that you had nothing the whole day. And all those office/ college/school works are still there pending, you are unable to meet your deadlines, lowering your efficiency and your whole work-life balance is completely out of place. Big time mess.

2. It sucks up all your energy: Of course  it is a great exercise if you are pacing about or jumping around for hours. But when dreaming tend to get longer, you will feel tired and yet it is so addictive that you can’t stop it even if you want to. It consumes all your energy, again you are too tired to do anything else after a long session of daydreaming.

3. People might think you are a psycho: Shutting the doors and pacing about, talking to yourself,  and getting lost in your fantasies without knowing what is happening around aren’t the things that a usual sane person would do. Would you like it if your bf/gf/bff/parents or neighbors start thinking you are a weirdo? Well if it’s ok for you, then carry on…or else it’s time you start thinking about changing yourself.

4. Escape is not the solution, you need to face the reality: You are living in the real world, you need to start accepting your real situations, daydreams can only give you temporary escape from your realities. Ultimately you need to face the reality. The faster you realize this, the better! Stop dreaming, start doing.

Advantages of being a maladaptive daydreamer

There are a lot of good things about being a maladaptive daydreamer. Following are some of those good things I found great! Well if you feel there are more to this, feel free to put them up under comments!

1. High level of imagination: We maladaptive daydreamers are blessed with extraordinary imagination power. We instantly come up with new storylines for our dreams, we are capable of weaving intricate and complex fantasy worlds (often complete with detail), create characters, diverse plots and what not! Malaptive daydreaming can actually be a boon if your field of work requires you to be creative. For example if you make screenplays, write fiction etc. MD can aid you through your career.

2. Workout alternative:  Maladaptive daydreaming involves a repetitive physical activity. This could be pacing to and fro in room, jumping in your trampoline or simply jumping, rocking, spinning,  combination of similar movements etc. Maladaptive daydreamers can often adapt to any repetitive movement of their wish (it would take time to adjust to new patterns of movement, but later they’ll be accustomed to it). So if MDD is a part of your everyday life, it would mean that you don’t need to do anymore cardio exercises! Because you are already MD-ing! I maladaptive daydream on a daily basis, listening t my favorite tunes in my ipod and I could go on for hours. I would pace and hop around daydreaming until am drenched in sweat. This means high level of daily metabolic and I guess that is why I stay super skinny all the time.

3. Stress reliever: Feeling low, stressed or depressed? Choose among the already created fantasy worlds in your head and escape for a while.  Or create a new one and indulge! Get back when you are satisfied with the daydreaming experience and over the matter that was bothering you.

Hello World!

I’m someone who has been living with MDD for the past 8 years, it started during my teenage years and I haven’t been able to get out of this compulsive fantasy for all these years.

When I first discovered that the strange things I do actually had a name called MDD, there weren’t much articles nor blogs written on Maladaptive daydreaming (I googled it then and there weren’t much pages under the search results and that was a long time ago)

So I started a blog on MDD under my real name. Sure the blog had a hell lot of hits then…but soon I got into trouble when my peers found my blog. And yes, that was way too embarrassing!!

So I had to delete that blog L (but then thankfully there are a hell lot of stuffs written on Maladaptive daydreaming disorder these days)

I don’t want such embarrassing sticky situations to happen with me again but then I can’t  resist to blurt out to the world of how I’d been dealing with MDD over years!!

So here is a blog: basically a bunch of  thoughts on MDD  or more like a journal, on how I deal with MDD in my everyday life  and how am going to get over it forever.

More posts coming up.