Severe Maladaptive Daydreaming

[sleepless1]

I have ADD and dissociation, possibly from PTSD. I also read that maladaptive daydreaming is a subset of OCD, but I don't have any other issues with OCD. My daydreams take the form of dialogue; talking to someone and explaining something, or teaching a class. I am not a visual daydreamer.

This is something that is really destroying my life! Days slip by in what feels like a blink of an eye. Good things could be happening in my life but I feel nothing because I am lost in my thoughts. There have been no positive memories encoded into my mind for a long time, despite my life being otherwise good.

I started taking Ritalin 6 months ago and it doesn't seem to help. It just makes me more focused on my thoughts. I am trying mindfulness training, focusing on my breath to quiet my thoughts, and "grounding" (paying attention to my 5 senses, and trying to be self-aware), but I can only do this for a few minutes. Is there anything else I can try?

 

[redsun]

I have ADD and dissociation, possibly from PTSD. I also read that maladaptive daydreaming is a subset of OCD, but I don't have any other issues with OCD. My daydreams take the form of dialogue; talking to someone and explaining something, or teaching a class. I am not a visual daydreamer.

This is something that is really destroying my life! Days slip by in what feels like a blink of an eye. Good things could be happening in my life but I feel nothing because I am lost in my thoughts. There have been no positive memories encoded into my mind for a long time, despite my life being otherwise good.

I started taking Ritalin 6 months ago and it doesn't seem to help. It just makes me more focused on my thoughts. I am trying mindfulness training, focusing on my breath to quiet my thoughts, and "grounding" (paying attention to my 5 senses, and trying to be self-aware), but I can only do this for a few minutes. Is there anything else I can try?

This degree of severity needs professional help. Mindfulness, breath work, and grounding wont do much. There needs to be a conscious, consistent effort to stop yourself from daydreaming. You need to change how you think about this and make yourself realize how bad this is for you. If there isn't conscious work and effort to resist, it will never go away. And you need to get to the root of why this is happening and get psychotherapy.

 

[sleepless1]

This degree of severity needs professional help. Mindfulness, breath work, and grounding wont do much. There needs to be a conscious, consistent effort to stop yourself from daydreaming. You need to change how you think about this and make yourself realize how bad this is for you. If there isn't conscious work and effort to resist, it will never go away. And you need to get to the root of why this is happening and get psychotherapy.

Unfortunately, I cannot afford professional help at the moment. And yes, it is severe and I am trying to make a conscious effort to change. I am sleepwalking through life. What medications or supplements might help?

ADD medication: currently taking Ritalin. It is just making me more focused on my thoughts/inner monologue.
Dissociation: Naloxone has a few positive studies, but I doubt my doctor will prescribe this. Is there anything else?
OCD medication: should I try one of these?

Currently taking: Ritalin, pregnenolone, Vitamin D & K, niacinimide, aspirin, melatonin (non Peat-friendly but offsets Ritalin's wakefulness in the evening).I want to try ketamine, but I cannot find any place that uses it as part of therapy near me.

 

[redsun]

Unfortunately, I cannot afford professional help at the moment. And yes, it is severe and I am trying to make a conscious effort to change. I am sleepwalking through life. What medications or supplements might help?

ADD medication: currently taking Ritalin. It is just making me more focused on my thoughts/inner monologue.
Dissociation: Naloxone has a few positive studies, but I doubt my doctor will prescribe this. Is there anything else?
OCD medication: should I try one of these?

Currently taking: Ritalin, pregnenolone, Vitamin D & K, niacinimide, aspirin, melatonin (non Peat-friendly but offsets Ritalin's wakefulness in the evening).I want to try ketamine, but I cannot find any place that uses it as part of therapy near me.

You can try the rubber band technique where you slap your wrist with a rubber band whenever you start to daydream. Zinc and magnesium can help with OCD.

 

[mostlylurking]

Unfortunately, I cannot afford professional help at the moment. And yes, it is severe and I am trying to make a conscious effort to change. I am sleepwalking through life. What medications or supplements might help?

I'm so sorry for your trouble. I experienced being trapped in circular thinking (OCD, round and round and round) after the suicide of my brother. It went on for 5 years. I would exercise and I walked a lot. There was a lot of additional stress in my life from a lawsuit and finances. One day I decided to try something new to try to break the habit of the circular thinking. So I bought a Sony Walkman and I put David Nevue piano music on it. I plugged it into my ears and played the music. And I lived like that for three days. When I took off the Walkman, the circular thinking had stopped. It didn't come back. If it had, I would have plugged the Nevue piano music back in again, but the pattern had been broken.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LnqoFEUe3w


I had spent over 5 years in psychotherapy years before this event. I did the rubberband routine. Didn't work. I was OCD and constantly catastrophising about LOTS of things. I am very sure, at least in my case, that my load of toxic heavy metals and my borderline thiamine deficiency that was caused by the lead poisoning was the underlying cause of my OCD. The brain needs energy to work properly. Oxidative metabolism is required for ATP (body energy) to be produced. I've learned, that for me, supplementing thiamine is very helpful. I'm pretty grounded now.

How Can Something As Simple as Thiamine Cause So Many Problems? - Hormones Matter

Is thiamine deficiency too simple to explain the devastating nature of the systemic adverse reactions to some vaccines and medications?

www.hormonesmatter.com

 

[mostlylurking]

I have ADD and dissociation,

Another suggested article:

ADHD thiamine Archives - Hormones Matter

www.hormonesmatter.com

"It occurred to me that the complexity of how food is turned into energy presented the key to understanding why taking sugar caused brain dysfunction, in spite of the fact that a form of sugar called glucose is the prime fuel. The analogy of a car engine enabled me to see the answer. Some people will remember that cars had a gadget called a choke. It introduced a surge of gasoline to the engine, a so-called “rich mixture”. It was used to start a cold engine and had to be turned off when the engine warmed. Sometimes the choke stuck, thus permitting a “rich mixture” to the engine which promptly began to cough and splutter. The car slowed down and thick black smoke issued from the exhaust pipe. It is an example of fuel combustion efficiency. The rich mixture is too concentrated and overwhelms the ability to mix with oxygen and allow the spark plug to ignite the gasoline.

In the human body, glucose has to be ignited, but although the principles are identical to the car engine, the details are much more sophisticated. Thiamine and magnesium act as “spark plugs” by uniting the glucose with oxygen. If the food consists of too many calories, the mix with oxygen is overwhelmed: thiamine and magnesium are then insufficient to “ignite” the glucose. The brain is the most oxygen consuming tissue and it becomes compromised, resulting in changes in function that are expressed as symptoms such as ADHD. It would be fair to say that the engines of the brain cells, known as mitochondria, have been choked. Often times, in these and other cases, the measure of thiamine and magnesium are be found to be in the normal range, giving a false message that the ADHD is not due to thiamine/magnesium deficiency. The reality is calorie excess, relative to thiamine and magnesium, but the symptoms would be the same as true thiamine/magnesium deficiency in a person taking a healthy concentration of calories. It is the balance between essential vitamins and minerals and caloric intake, particularly of sugary foods, that is at the root of many diseases, including those ascribed to the category of ADHD. Perhaps before progressing down the medication rabbit hole with these children, a closer look at dietary contributors is warranted."

also:

ADD, ADHD and Other Problems of Modern Childhood - Hormones Matter

As a pediatrician in a multi-specialty clinic, I saw a great many children considered ADHD.

www.hormonesmatter.com

"Connecting the Dots: Diet, Thiamine and ADHD
You might be surprised to hear that these physical findings are those that would be found in a child with the vitamin B1 (thiamine) deficiency disease beriberi, naturally turning my attention to the question of diet. Could both the physical and mental defects in these children be explained on the basis of deficiency of a vitamin?

I came across a book with the title “Thiamine and Beriberi” it was written by a group of university-based Japanese scientists. Beriberi had existed in Eastern countries for thousands of years and the discovery that thiamine deficiency was its cause was extremely dramatic and affected the lives of millions. I read it and reread it and became acquainted with the characteristics of the disease. The clinical effects are different in infants, children and adults and it was clear to me that what I had observed in these “emotionally disturbed” children could be explained on this basis. How could such a devastating disease associated with malnutrition affect children in America? Wasn’t this a disease that occurred in poor countries? Wasn’t this associated with poverty?

The answer had come from research done in Cambridge, England and reported in 1936. Sir Rudolph Peters had found that there was no difference in the behavior of brain cells from thiamine deficient pigeons compared with those that were thiamine sufficient until glucose was added to the preparation. There was no activity at all from the thiamine deficient cells, whereas the thiamine sufficient cells immediately began to produce carbon dioxide, showing that they were active. Peters called this effect by a scientific nomenclature (catatorulin). This important observation was the beginning of the research that led to our modern knowledge of how cells produce the energy that enable them to function.
What this means is that if you take sugar in a state of marginal thiamine deficiency, you precipitate the symptoms of beriberi. It is very likely that the mother demonstrated her thiamine deficiency during pregnancy by suffering from hyperemesis and toxemia, thereby passing on a deficiency to her infant long before birth. The ad lib. ingestion of sugar in its many different forms is virtually a way of life in America. By our desire to please the children we love, are we in fact creating the common disasters of childhood by our permissive attitude towards their consumption of sweets? Are we inducing the seeds of addiction in the first years of life? Are we inducing ADHD?"

 

[redsun]

Unfortunately, I cannot afford professional help at the moment. And yes, it is severe and I am trying to make a conscious effort to change. I am sleepwalking through life. What medications or supplements might help?

ADD medication: currently taking Ritalin. It is just making me more focused on my thoughts/inner monologue.
Dissociation: Naloxone has a few positive studies, but I doubt my doctor will prescribe this. Is there anything else?
OCD medication: should I try one of these?

Currently taking: Ritalin, pregnenolone, Vitamin D & K, niacinimide, aspirin, melatonin (non Peat-friendly but offsets Ritalin's wakefulness in the evening).I want to try ketamine, but I cannot find any place that uses it as part of therapy near me.

Ritalin is mostly dopaminergic and doesnt enhance noradrenaline as much. Adderall may be better at improving OCD because it is a more potent norepinephrine enhancer. If you can't switch that soon there are some other things you can try.

Though its not likely you have copper deficiency, you may see benefit from copper glycinate 2mg a day as this will enhance norepinephrine synthesis. Iodine in normal physiological doses (~150mcg a day) will synergize well with copper for this particular effect. So you can try a combination of copper and iodine in the morning with breakfast. This may make it easier for you to get out of your own head, while the primarily dopaminergic effect of ritalin makes you too absorbed into your own head which is why it gets worse. You are also supposed to take ritalin as early in the day as possible so it has time to clear out of your system before you need to sleep. So i dont know if you do that but just making sure.