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hey guys heidi preep here welcome back to my channel if you are not new here welcome to my channel if you are today i wanted to talk about something that kind of touches a lot of the different systems that we talk about on my channel
Heidi Priebe explores healthy versus maladaptive daydreaming and fantasy, linking them to limerence, attachment styles, and limiting beliefs, and offers ways to ground fantasies in reality.
Key Takeaways
- Fantasy is valuable when it is grounded in reality and used to identify what to pursue.
- Completely eliminating fantasy is not the solution, nor is letting it consume daily life.
- Maladaptive daydreaming is most common among anxious and fearful-avoidant attachment types and those with imaginative personality profiles.
- Confronting limiting beliefs and accepting that achieving dreams involves challenges is essential to healthy growth.
What the video covers
- Fantasy and daydreaming are not inherently bad; they enable imagination, innovation, and conceptualizing a better future.
- Maladaptive daydreaming is intense, distracting fantasy that causes a person to disengage from tasks and people around them.
- Anxious and fearful-avoidant attachment styles are especially prone to vivid, consciously experienced romantic daydreams.
- Limerence, the intense crush feeling, can cause people to overlook red flags in others by painting them 'green' in their minds.
- The speaker experimented with completely stopping daydreaming, which revealed how much time she spent dissociated but also left her feeling depressed.
- Daydreams often signal what a person wants to bring into their current life, so they carry useful information when balanced with reality.
- The goal is a middle ground: identify whether a fantasy is healthy or unhealthy and, where possible, transform an unhealthy fantasy into a healthy one.
- Limiting beliefs, such as believing one cannot earn more money or travel because of family history, can be challenged to expand possibilities.
- Healthy fantasies serve as guideposts toward areas of growth, while unhealthy ones offer a 'hit' of feeling without the work of achieving the goal.
- A key test of a healthy fantasy is whether one has realistically weighed the challenges and problems that would come with achieving it.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Fantasy and Personality Systems
- 01:20Defining Maladaptive Daydreaming
- 03:34Attachment Styles and Romantic Daydreams
- 03:49Limerence and Missing Red Flags
- 04:49Experiment: Stopping Daydreaming
- 06:16Fantasy as Useful Information
- 07:48Limiting Beliefs and Breaking Through Them
- 10:13Healthy vs Unhealthy Fantasy and Closing Thoughts
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
so there can be parallels drawn to this phenomenon in myers-briggs in the enneagram in attachment theory and because this is a topic that is so prevalent in all of these different personality psychology tools i think that sometimes we don't make a clear
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distinction between the healthy expression of this thing and the unhealthy expression of this thing and i have only recently like in the past year or so of my life come to even realize that there is a big difference between
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the healthy and unhealthy versions of this and what that thing is is fantasizing or daydreaming so fantasies and daydreams not inherently bad things right if we never zoned out a little bit and thought about what a better life for ourselves and
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other people would look like in the future we would never have any innovation we would not have any change in the world we need the ability to think of a better future in order to build that better future right first we
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have to be able to conceptualize something then we can bring it into existence but for certain people especially if you have a certain personality profile that predisposes you to loving fantasy and then let's say a certain attachment style that makes
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fantasy feel incredibly real for you in some cases almost more real than real life fantasies can become very maladaptive very quickly so there actually is a term for this and the term that i want to talk about to start this
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off is the term maladaptive daydreaming so the term maladaptive daydreaming has different definitions depending on what site you go to but the first one that pops up for me when i type it into google is maladaptive daydreaming describes a condition where a person
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regularly experiences daydreams that are so intense and highly distracting so distracting in fact that the person may stop engaging with the task or people in front of them so this is a form of daydreaming that actually prevents you
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from keeping close contact with the world around you and will have you missing things that are happening right in front of your eyes in favor of the fantasy world that you're engaging with inside of your head now if you are let's
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say an enfp or infp personality type this might feel very familiar to you in fact this is kind of the water that you have been swimming in for much of your life is missing things that are happening in the real world because you
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are busy focusing on the world that is inside of your mind this might also be the case if you are of any personality type but you identify as either anxious or fearful avoidant in terms of your attachment system now interestingly
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avoidantly attached individuals will also have a measure of maladaptive daydreaming but it shows up differently and not as consciously as it does for anxious and fearful avoidance so in this video i'm going to more specifically reference the way that it shows up for
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those on the anxious spectrum who tend to consciously experience very vivid and very detailed daydreams about the life that they wish they had particularly in relation to their romantic life so i came across the term maladaptive daydreaming i'm not sure when a couple
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of years ago i didn't think much of it and then about a year ago i started learning about the term limerence which is basically the psychological term for a really intense crush where you meet someone and they have this like glow
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about them and you're like this person's going to be the answer to all of my problems and i realized when i learned the term limerence like ah i've done that so many times in my life and i started to realize how much that could
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be maladaptive for me how much i could be missing really big red flags in people because i have limerence around them so i just paint those flags green in my head and pummel forwards right and that definitely will not be an
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unfamiliar experience to anyone who is insecurely attached and so for a period of time actually inspired by a friend who took this initiative on first i decided to completely stop daydreaming so the friend who started doing this first was telling me about how they no
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longer listened to music they no longer zoned out when they were walking somewhere they were very intentional about keeping their focus in reality in a way that they usually did not do and i was so inspired by that and thought that
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that was so cool so i was like okay i'm gonna try it out for myself and for a while i got incredible results out of this i started noticing just how much time i spent dissociated i spent in
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fantasy i spent making things up about myself and other people and the way that other people thought and felt and experienced the world and i realized that if you actually just go talk to those people and ask them questions
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instead of assuming what you think they know you often get very surprising results that helps you actually get close to people instead of just going off the fantasy version of them that you have in your head and i also realized
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that not fantasizing saved me a lot of time this was the phase of my life where i started reading like a book a day because i used to go for multi-hour long walks and during those walks i would
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always just associate into fantasy think about the life that i wish i was living and instead in that time i started listening to audiobooks and i was like this is so cool i'm getting smarter i'm learning more information i am getting
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to know people better and more accurately this is the answer to everything except i also started getting really depressed because i quickly learned that daydreams are actually kind of important for me in many ways because they help me understand what's not
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working for me in my current life so if i spend a lot of time fantasizing about something it's usually because there's something in that fantasy that i want to bring into my current life and eventually if i spend enough time
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fantasizing about it i will generally find a way to work that in so fantasies for me i realized were yes in some form maladaptive and getting in the way of reality but in other forms were actually giving me really important information
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about what i needed to bring into my reality so all-consuming constant fantasies were not the solution but neither was completely eliminating fantasy right i needed to find some kind of middle ground and to do that i had to
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sit down with myself and learn to dissect what a healthy versus an unhealthy fantasy is how i can tell the difference and in many cases how i can take an unhealthy fantasy and actually make it a healthy one so there is a term
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that goes around self-help circles like crazy lately especially coaching circles and that term is limiting beliefs so limiting beliefs are often talked about as things that we believe about ourselves that aren't necessarily true and that limit our ability to expand our
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potential so let's say i believe i will never make more than a certain amount of money because growing up no one in my family ever made more than a certain amount of money and i believe that it's just not possible for me that's
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something that other people do this is kind of the most common example that i see people using the term limiting beliefs around if i believe that the theory goes i might constantly self-sabotage when i start making more money i might start getting really
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negative judgments about myself and what it means about who i am as a human being if i have a certain amount of money so the idea behind limiting beliefs is that you have to find a way to bust through
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them in order to expand your life expand your awareness and start welcoming things into your life that you otherwise would think psychologically were not possible now i think that there is a lot of truth to this and i actually think
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that in healthy doses fantasies can help us bust through limiting beliefs but i think that in unhealthy doses fantasies can actually keep us stuck in them so let's say that i want a beautiful happy harmonious relationship right and this
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is very common with anyone on the anxiously attached spectrum to have something that we call a magical future fantasy so a magical future fantasy is when you spend all of this time and emotional energy thinking about the beautiful perfect wonderful relationship
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or family that you're gonna have at an unspecified time in the future well in reality you actually have no idea how to build a healthy relationship or how to raise a healthy family and so you don't have the actual tools to get you there
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but you have this very vivid fantasy world inside of your mind that you believe is real you believe once i get into the right relationship i will just instinctively know what to do once i have a family i will just instinctively
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know what to do and so in this way having this vivid fantasy world actually disconnects us from reality and reality is the place where we would need to live for long enough to build the tools to actually have a healthy relationship to
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actually be aware of where our blind spots are to actually work with another person to build a family in a way that is non-destructive right so in a weird way dissociating into this fantasy all the time actually limits our ability to
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act in reality in a way that would align with the end goal that we want which is that healthy happy future but it might feel like you're using the fantasy to bust through your limiting beliefs right because you're like oh maybe i've never
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seen a healthy happy family unit but i can imagine one and i can use that imagination to create it now i think that this is where we have to be really careful about the distinction between healthy and unhealthy fantasy because
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healthy fantasy allows us to find something that we could pursue that is different from what we currently have and if we can balance out that fantasy with reality and keep ourselves grounded in what it's actually going to take to
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get there on concrete daily terms that fusion of fantasy and reality can bring us to incredible places and it can also help us to dream and imagine a better future for ourselves than we may have thought possible so we can't discard
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fantasy entirely but we do have to be aware of when we are actually over relying on it to the detriment of us getting there so the question is not fantasy or not fantasy it is how to merge fantasy with reality and the first
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thing i'm going to let you know is that it's going to get a lot less fun when you do it this way okay because a lot of the time we are dissociating into fantasy we're not actually creating a
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blueprint for our future lives what we're trying to do is dissociate from the lives that we are currently living maybe because we're not happy in the lives that we're currently living often because we think that there is such a
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gap between the lives that we want and the lives that we have that we don't even think we could get there realistically but we do think if i dissociate and imagine myself already having that thing i get a pretty good
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hit of the feeling like i get a hit of what it would be like if i had it without actually having to do the work of getting it so staying stuck in fantasy is a very appealing option and i
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totally get that but interestingly that's another example of when you are letting your limiting beliefs run your life you think i could never actually have this life whether this life means that you are more successful than you are in your field whether it means you
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are in the type of relationship you don't think you could ever actually have whether it means that you look a certain way talk a certain way act a certain way show up in a way that you don't have the
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confidence to show up in in the world as it stands fantasy is a very quick route to getting the feeling without doing the work right and ironically if you are a bit of a fantasy addict or someone who
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dissociates often into fantasy it's probably because you have low self-esteem in the real world you don't feel competent enough to go for what you actually want and so you use that fantasy as kind of a blanket to comfort
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you around the fact that you don't believe you could have those things does that make sense and so if that's the case what your fantasies might be alerting you to is where your limiting beliefs are you might be fantasizing
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about what you think you can't have and if you can learn to approach that fantasy in a way that grounds it in reality you can actually use it as more of a guidepost towards what you need to work on developing how do you do this
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you get realistic about your fantasy so i have a terrible fear of airplanes i absolutely hate getting on them i hate flying every single time i get on a flight i'm like this fight is crashing i like call people that i love before i
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get on flights and i'm like i have appreciated having you in my life thank you mother for raising me thank you friend for loving me thank you person sitting next to me in the seat for this brief moment of company that we will
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share as the plane plummets into the ground every time i get in a plane i think that and it took me many years to realize that one of the main reasons why i felt that way was because a lot of the
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time when i was getting on planes i would be going somewhere and i would have a giant fantasy about what it was going to be like when i got there so i would be let's say going on a trip to
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south africa and i'd be like when i'm in south africa i'm going to be living the most incredible explorative exciting life i'm going to be on safaris every 10 minutes i'm going to feel so alive and so awake and so energized and i had a
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limiting belief around the fact that i could have that life right i thought i didn't deserve it i thought that because for generations in my family travel wasn't really something that people could afford or had access to i
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shouldn't have that i should have guilt around the fact that i can access that and so i made up this story in my head that because this thing is too good to be true something bad is going to happen
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on my way there and it must be that my plane is going to crash because what else really could go that wrong now interestingly something i started noticing after i was a digital nomad for like five or six years and traveled over
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and over and over again was that of course reality never matched up to my expectations of a trip right the trip that i imagined myself going on and the trip that i actually ended up taking were always two completely and totally
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different things and this actually became a little bit comforting for me to the point where i'd be sitting in the airport waiting to board my plane and i would be telling myself okay you have this overwhelming fantasy about what's
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gonna happen on your trip but if you can balance out that fantasy with some realistic things that are probably going to happen on your trip it actually easens that guilt feeling you have and allows you to feel less scared about the
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plane ride because now i was looking at reality instead of fantasy and reality never really feels like it's too much for us to have because here's the truth on the other side of your limiting beliefs on the other side of the life
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that you think is too good for you to have there is just a whole bunch of new problems if you start making a hundred thousand dollars more than you're making now yes of course it will change your life and improve your circumstances in
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many ways but it will also add a plethora of brand new problems into your life that you don't have to deal with right now if you get that partner of your dreams and you're in a happy harmonious relationship and raising a
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new family together yes it might give you something that you want but it will also pose to you an incredible number of new challenges that currently you don't have to worry about at all and i think that the more we can round out our
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fantasies with the reality of what it would look like if we were to achieve that thing the less impossible they start to feel because often the reason we have limiting beliefs is because we believe that if i got that thing i would
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never have problems again and the human mind knows that's not true right so if you have this huge incredible fantasy about something and you're like yeah i'm going to go on this trip or i'm going to date this person or i'm going to get
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this job and then nothing bad is ever going to happen again your brain's gonna freak out a little bit because your brain knows that that is too good to be true right it is in the way that you're
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imagining it because you're probably imagining it as perfect and nothing is perfect everything that is really good is also balanced out by some worse aspects or buy some things that are challenging to cope with and the more that you can make your realities reflect
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both what would be good about this different life that you want and also what would be challenging about this life that you want the better you're going to be able to access the actual concrete steps you would need to take in
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reality to build your way towards those fantasies because now you're dealing with the truth so for example let's say you have this fantasy of yourself as very rich but what you leave out of the fantasy is that in order to get really
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rich maybe you had to build up a business maybe you had to work really hard for a period of time maybe you had to make some high-stakes decisions that were really stressful and if you leave that out of your fantasy then as soon as
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you're trying to build towards that in the real world and you encounter something challenging or difficult or stressful you're gonna be like wait wait this isn't my fantasy right this is my stopping point because in my fantasy i
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have no problems so that means that this path that i'm taking towards getting there must not be the path that's taking me there you're gonna hit those disillusionment points over and over and over again but if you have a healthy
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fantasy where you're saying okay i want a different outcome which also means i'm going to have to accept a set of different problems that are paired with that outcome now you're talking about a fantasy that is realistic because what
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you're wanting is not a perfect or idealized version of your life what you're looking at is simply a different option right just something else that you could choose with its own pros and its own cons and that is an adaptive fantasy or
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an adaptive daydream because that actually offers you a realistic window into a different life that you could have and that you could choose and it gives you an idea of the steps you would have to take to get there as opposed to
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a fantasy that is maladaptive which completely disconnects you from reality gets you imagining a world that could not possibly exist and convinces you that that is the world that you could have and of course we never end up
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getting to those fantasies because they are fantasies about a world that does not exist every single good thing that happens comes in at least some small way with a brand new set of challenges and a brand new set of things you have to deal
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with that are a little bit annoying and a little bit difficult or in some cases a lot annoying and a lot difficult and if we want to start moving towards our dreams we have to accept that we are
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moving towards a version of our lives that is not better or worse it just has higher level or different challenges and ironically at the end of the day this can also feel like a little bit of a relief because it helps us to realize
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why we might not have that thing right now and make an actual pro and con list inside of our minds about how badly we want it maybe i want more money but i don't want to sacrifice the freedom that
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i currently have and once i really sit with that and think about it and recognize why it is that i haven't sacrificed all of my spare time to go chasing a side hustle that could make me more money the easier it's going to be
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for me to accept that actually i kind of have a situation i'm happy with and now i understand what the trade-off would need to be if i were to change my circumstance so now i am negotiating with myself instead of deluding myself
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and then becoming anxious or depressed the second those delusions do not translate into reality which delusions never do so to sum all of this up i think that a really good litmus test for whether we're dealing with a healthy or
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adaptive fantasy versus an unhealthy or maladaptive fantasy is are we aware of which new challenges or problems would crop up if we were to achieve that fantasy and are we actually realistically weighing out our desire to deal with those challenges if so then we
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can start making concrete steps in reality towards that if it's what we want or away from it if it's what we don't but if we are not looking at any of the negative aspects of what would happen if we were to achieve a certain
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end we are probably stuck in a maladaptive fantasy that we are not using to improve our circumstances we are using to dissociate from our circumstances sometimes for myriad reasons we are not ready or psychologically prepared to stop frequently dissociating yet dissociation
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is a trauma response because it shields us from things that our minds are not yet ready to unpack so my suggestion is not necessarily to tell yourself no more fantasies ever again but i do recommend rounding out your fantasies where and
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when you can to include the realistic steps that would actually help you move towards them so that they become less pie in the sky ideal futures and more futures that you could actually create okay that is all i have to say for today
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on this topic as always i love you guys i hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other leave in the comments any thoughts or feelings or aha moments that might have come up for you over the course of this video i'm always curious
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what you guys are thinking and experiencing and until next time i love you guys i hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and i will see you back here again soon [Music]
Topics:maladaptive daydreamingfantasylimerenceattachment theorylimiting beliefsself-developmentanxious attachmentpersonality psychologyhealthy vs unhealthy fantasiesHeidi Priebe
