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Post by banana3000 on Feb 18, 2020 2:39:54 GMT
So, I’m 20 now, and I’ve been daydreaming a lot since I was 12. Well actually, like every child, I would daydream all the time when I was a little kid, but nothing really serious, just kid’s games. But when I was 12, I saw the movie « My Girl » for the first time, and I started being obsessed with the lead actress. I would watch every single videos of her I could find, I would look at pictures of her on the internet, and eventually, I started daydreaming about being her sister, and every single day I would pretend I was with her. It didn’t affect my social life at all, I wouldn’t talk about it to anyone, I would just pretend like I was with her while I was also with my friends. Then, when I turned 13, One Direction arrived in my life. So I moved on from « My Girl » and started pretending like I was Harry Styles’s sister, and you know, just doing the exact same thing than before, only with a new person. Years went by, and my idols changed every now and then, it once was Ariana Grande, then Cole Sprouse, I’ve also been obsessed with french canadian actors because I’m french canadian, and now, it’s with the Stranger Things cast. When I was younger, it made me happy to be able to pretend I was living a dream life with my favorite celebrities. But when social media became more popular and I could actually see what those celebrities were doing, it started to hurt me. It was hurting me to see that they were doing something that I wasn’t doing. It’s like if I saw my best friend doing something with other people without inviting me. And today, now that I just turned 20, I’m tired of it. I don’t think that daydreaming can be cured, but I wish it could. At first, it was fun, but 8 years later, it’s starting to really hurt me. Like I explained before, now with social media, you know everything a celebrity is doing, and I feel really hurt when I look at one of my idol’s page, because I wish I really was with them, not just in my head. So it has become a problem. I can cry entire days because I wish my daydreaming was real, it’s not even fun anymore, it has gone too far. Sometimes I try to convince myself to just stop all of that daydreaming, but then I realize that if I don’t daydream like that, my life would be so boring. So if I daydream, it hurts me because I would like for it to be real, but if I don’t daydream, then my life is too boring. I don’t know what to do, I really need help. Thank you ❤️
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Post by Sam on Feb 18, 2020 5:06:56 GMT
Welcome to the forum!
Daydreaming itself can't be cured. It's a natural and necessary function and getting rid of it would be a very bad idea. The maladaptive portion of daydreaming, however, should be curable. Well, to clarify, you can change your responses to the urges and triggers so that you're no longer daydreaming maladaptively. And while the frequency of the urges will reduce over time, we will probably get the urges for the rest of our lives. But as long as you can respond to the urges in a more healthy manner, you'll be good.
I generally recommend finding your triggers and your root cause. Common triggers are unpleasant emotions like anxiety or depression and media like music or movies. Triggers are what cause urges. The root cause is your reason for excessive daydreaming in general. Often, the root cause explains why your triggers are triggering. I've used this example before, but say I'm watching tv and there's an emotional friendship scene. This brings up a lot of unpleasant emotions for me, which gives me the urge to daydream to escape from them. In this situation, media and unpleasant emotions are the triggers for the daydreaming. When I take a close look at what happened, I find that that scene was triggering because I feel isolated and lonely in real life so watching other people have what I do not is unpleasant. So the root cause of the daydreaming is loneliness.
Once you figure out what your triggers and root causes are, you can take steps to address them. I mentioned changing your response to the triggers and urges (learning healthy coping mechanisms is usually a good idea here). You could also avoid some of the triggers in the short term while you're learning to respond differently (this isn't applicable to all triggers, but you can do it with some of them). Addressing the root causes is likely to produce some of the best results. Taking my example from above, if I start trying to connect with other people in real life, addressing that loneliness will reduce the effectiveness of that trigger (emotional scenes) and make it easier to choose healthier coping mechanisms when I encounter it.
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Post by alvi on Feb 20, 2020 16:22:36 GMT
Welcome to the forum.
I get this a lot. I hate social media as it makes me feel awful. I've only every had one real celebrity dd and now I've stopped being able to watch anything with him in as it makes me feel sick when I see his real life. I know that its actually quite ridiculous as I won't even meet him in real life let alone have the kind of life I dd about but I feel so horrible having to face the reality. Regular social media post with old friend do the same thing to me as I can't live the kinds of lives that they have.
I think the thing that will help you the most is to try and distance yourself a bit from social media and look through the posts here to see if there are any of the techniques mentioned that may help you reduced the amount you daydream. It may also be worth looking into self soothing techniques to see if you can find any ways that will help you when you become overwhelmed with your emotions.
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