Maladaptive Daydreaming Resources

Find helpful resources for understanding and managing maladaptive daydreaming, including blog posts, apps, podcasts, and TED or TEDx Talks.

Table of Contents

Blog Posts

Focusability: Stop Daydreaming
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An app created specifically for excessive daydreaming and difficulty staying focused. Its active-monitoring feature can alert users when they drift away from studying, reading, or work. It also tracks focused time and progress.
Driftless: MD Support
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A newer app specifically for people with maladaptive daydreaming. It provides anonymous peer support, daily check-ins, and simple tools aimed at helping users notice when fantasy is taking over too much of their day. It is a peer-support tool rather than therapy.
Ground Me: Dissociation Aid
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Designed for dissociation, zoning out, depersonalization, and maladaptive daydreaming. Users can track episodes, notice patterns, and use practical exercises designed to redirect attention back to the current activity or environment.

Parallel Lives
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A podcast devoted specifically to maladaptive daydreaming. People with lived experience discuss triggers, fantasy worlds, daily functioning, relationships, secrecy, managing daydreaming, and what it is like when an internal world starts competing with real life.
Addicted to Fantasy: Inside the Minds of Maladaptive Daydreamers
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Focuses on people who spend large amounts of time in detailed fantasy worlds. Episodes explore possible causes, the addictive pull of fantasy, creativity, distress, and how different people experience maladaptive daydreaming.
The Longing Lab
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Includes an extensive interview with clinical psychologist and maladaptive-daydreaming researcher Dr. Nirit Soffer-Dudek. It is particularly useful for understanding the current research rather than relying only on social-media explanations.

Maladaptive Daydreaming: The Current — Brick by Brick
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A 2026 episode examining current maladaptive-daydreaming research, why some people spend hours in detailed imaginary worlds, what tends to trigger episodes, and what can make the behavior difficult to reduce.
The Psychology of Maladaptive Daydreaming — The Psychology of Your 20s
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Explains signs of excessive daydreaming, emotional effects, escapism, creativity, trauma, anxiety, OCD, and why someone may repeatedly return to fantasy even when it is causing problems in everyday life.
Why Do We Daydream? — BBC CrowdScience
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A BBC science episode featuring researchers including Professor Eli Somer, who introduced the term maladaptive daydreaming. It compares ordinary daydreaming with the more compulsive form that can consume hours and interfere with daily functioning.

How to Tame Your Wandering Mind — Amishi Jha
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Neuroscientist Amishi Jha explains how attention gets pulled away by both outside distractions and internal thoughts. With more than five million plays, it provides a useful introduction to why attention drifts and how stronger control over attention can be developed.
Living in a Dream — Laura Weinstein
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Focuses on depersonalization and dissociation rather than maladaptive daydreaming itself. It is useful because dissociative experiences and feeling disconnected from real life can overlap with some people’s experience of excessive immersive fantasy.
What Do We Daydream About? — Charlie Elison
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Explores what people daydream about and why certain fantasies repeatedly capture attention. Although it focuses on ordinary daydreaming rather than the clinical problem, it can help explain why imaginary stories can become emotionally meaningful and appealing.

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