Maladaptive daydreaming (MD) involves becoming deeply absorbed in vivid fantasies that feel difficult to control and begin to disrupt everyday life. A large review published in 2025 found that people with more severe MD also tended to report other difficulties, including dissociation, depression, anxiety and problems with attention. This does not mean that MD causes these difficulties (or vice versa), or that everyone who experiences it has another mental health condition. It does suggest that MD can be associated with significant distress and deserves to be taken seriously.
What is maladaptive daydreaming?
Daydreaming itself is normal and can support imagination, creativity and problem-solving. The paper describes maladaptive daydreaming as an elaborate, compulsive immersion in intense fantasy. It may involve detailed stories or imagined relationships and can be accompanied by evocative music or repeated movements such as pacing, gesturing or mouthing dialogue. The experience can feel highly rewarding or provide a refuge from distress, which helps explain why it may be difficult to stop. It becomes maladaptive when it takes up substantial time and comes at the expense of study, work, relationships or other responsibilities.
Why did researchers study maladaptive daydreaming?
Firstly, people who identify with MD often report that professionals do not recognise the term or direct them towards more familiar diagnoses. Formal recognition of MD as a diagnosis might help with that.
The paper also describes an ongoing debate: is MD simply an extreme form of ordinary daydreaming, a feature of another condition, or a distinct mental-health problem? From a psychiatric perspective, MD is not listed as a separate disorder in the DSM-5-TR or ICD-11 diagnostic manuals. And there is no prospect of that happening quickly as revision typically takes many years. The authors considered the existing evidence too scattered to answer the debate clearly, so they brought the quantitative research together to examine the overall pattern.
How large was the maladaptive daydreaming review?
The review included 40 studies with a combined total of 24,977 participants. The researchers searched for work published from 2002, when the term maladaptive daydreaming was introduced, to March 2024. The total of 24,977 refers to everyone who took part in the included studies; it does not mean that all of them had MD or a confirmed diagnosis.
What did the 40 studies find?
A 2025 review of 40 studies involving 24,977 participants found that, across the studies, higher MD scores were associated with higher levels of depression, anxiety, dissociation, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, ADHD-related difficulties, general psychological problems, psychotic symptoms, autism-related measures and traumatic experiences. The review also found links with difficulties managing emotions, loneliness, shame, negative mood, problematic internet use and broader psychological distress. Lower self-esteem and lower self-efficacy – a person’s confidence in their ability to manage challenges – were also associated with MD. Clearly MD can be present alongside a wide range of diagnoses.
Dissociation showed one of the strongest specific associations. Dissociation is a broad term for experiences of disconnection, such as feeling detached from yourself, your surroundings or parts of your experience. That link is important because deep absorption in an inner world can resemble or accompany some dissociative experiences.
Is maladaptive daydreaming a dissociative disorder?
The review does not establish that MD is a dissociative disorder, or that MD and dissociation are the same thing. It shows that higher levels of the two tended to occur together across the available studies. Nor does it show that MD causes depression, anxiety, ADHD or another condition. The authors interpret the broad pattern of overlap as resembling the way recognised mental disorders often occur alongside other difficulties, and they argue that MD may deserve recognition as a distinct condition. (For an alternative perspective, see another of my posts describing how another group of clinician-researchers goes further, advocating that MD be defined as as a separate psychiatric disorder.)
What might these findings mean for someone who experiences MD?
For people who experience MD, the findings may offer validation. The problem is not simply having an active imagination, being lazy or lacking willpower. What matters is whether the daydreaming feels compulsive, causes distress or crowds out ordinary life. It may help to describe these effects directly to a counsellor, psychotherapist, psychologist or doctor: how much time the daydreaming takes, how controllable it feels, what triggers it and what it prevents you from doing.
For friends and family, curiosity is likely to be more helpful than criticism. Asking what the daydreaming provides and how it affects the person’s life can open a more useful conversation than simply telling them to stop. By its nature, the review cannot settle every question about MD, but it supports taking the experience and its impact seriously.
Primary source: Somer et al. (2025), Maladaptive Daydreaming and Psychopathology: A Meta-Analysis