How To Stop Daydreaming While Studying
Don’t worry, I’m not just going to tell you to eat healthy and exercise.
If you have not heard of Maladaptive Daydreaming (MD) yet, there are Articles, podcasts and videos. Basically, maladaptive daydreamers dream so much throughout their days, it is to a point where it becomes a significant problem. To accomplish a task they require way more time than average.
Daydreaming while trying to be productive i.g. a student trying to study is a HUGE problem. I have struggled with this my whole life, and have had excessive daydreaming since I can remember. I don’t exactly know when It started, but I certainly remember my very first daydream storyline. I was about 5 or 6 years old.
MD affected my school grades massively. I remember spending hours trying to do a task that everyone else would do in 5 or 10 minutes (it varies a lot). MD also prevented me from enjoying my favorite hobby which is reading. After I read two or three lines I would start daydreaming and before I knew it, an hour had gone by, and I was still at the same page. I have tried everything possible to stop daydreaming, serious stuff and ridiculous stuff. Nothing has made any difference.
While I was studying to become a software developer I struggled a lot with my concentration and I was constantly trying new things to reduce my daydreaming sessions. You too may have heard that reading or studying out loud can increase your concentration. I tried studying out loud too but it was not much help. I would still daydream most of the time, but I realized something. Whenever I was studying out loud and then began to slip into a daydream, I would stop talking. So I thought maybe I could develop an app that kind of listens to me while I study out loud and the app would alert me if I stopped talking. That way I could stop daydreaming and go back to studying. So I developed exactly that and It WORKED!. With the help of the app all my studying sessions went to actually studying and not daydreaming. I was also finally able to enjoy reading. For the first time in my life I was able to read a 500-page book (a novel) in a week (about 2 hours of reading per day). Without the help of the app it would take me months to finish such a book.
As you might have guessed, I realized if this app helps me, it definitely can help others as well, not everyone but probably anyone that daydreams while trying to stay focused. So I developed the app for both Android and iOS, added testers to prove the concept, added more features and I was recently able to upload it to the App Store and Play Store under the name Focusability: Stop Daydreaming.
But wait, there’s more! It turned out that Focusability helps users in an unexpected way too. See, If we maladaptive daydreamers have been daydreaming for a few minutes then even if we realize we are daydreaming, we cannot simply stop and go back to our tasks. That’s because we become involved in our daydreams so much and because our daydreams feel almost real to us or at least they feel real to some part of our brain. So we want to continue the plot as if it was a movie we want to finish watching. When users use the Focusability app, it alerts them after a few seconds after they have started daydreaming so users are not really able to start a plot and become emotionally involved in it. So quitting the daydream becomes very easy.
That being said, Focusability does not cure Maladaptive Daydreaming. It only helps stop or reduce daydreaming while the user is trying to accomplish tasks that require focus and mental concentration.
What users say about focusability
P.S.
There are kids (and adults) who struggle with concentration issues because they daydream and they don’t know they have a problem so they suffer in silence just like I did. Maladaptive Daydreaming disorder is new. Only a small number of people have heard of it. My life would have been completely different if I got help when I was a child. So please share anything about MD on your social media. Just mention the term, that is good enough to make people check it out and increase awareness.
You have been great. Thank you!
