u/Head-Cartographer-99

Hey everyone. I've been reading through this subreddit for a while now, and I just want to say that the stories here are real, and they matter. The lost hours, the missed conversations, the way the real world starts to feel like the lesser option. I see you.

I'm a PhD researcher studying maladaptive daydreaming. What brought me here isn't just academic curiosity. The more I read about how deeply this affects people's lives, across cultures, across ages, across every kind of background, the more I felt like the research community needed to actually do something useful with that knowledge, not just describe the problem.

So I built something. It's an app with a mindfulness-based intervention designed specifically for MDD, not generic meditation, but something more intentional about the patterns that keep us trapped in our heads.

It's still in development, and honestly, that's exactly why I'm here. Before I go any further with it, I want to hear from the people who actually matter. You.

So I have two questions:

1. How many of you would actually be interested in trying something like this? Comment below. Even a simple "I would" tells me so much.
2. What would you want from it? What would make you feel like it was actually worth your time? What has every other thing you've tried gotten wrong?

Your answers won't just help the app. They'll shape the research behind it. This is me asking before building, not after.

You deserve to be as present in your own life as you are in the ones you imagine.

You sat down to do something. It could've been anything. Study, eat, reply to a text, just sit for a moment.

And then a thought arrived. Or a song. Or nothing at all, really, just a quiet pull inward.

And now it's dark outside.

You weren't asleep. You weren't scrolling. You were somewhere else. Completely, vividly somewhere else, and the world you went to felt so real that coming back almost feels like the strange part.

I've been trying to understand this experience better, and I keep coming back to the same question. How much time, on an average day, do you lose to daydreaming?

Not the quick, harmless kind. The kind that takes you under. The kind you didn't choose and couldn't stop.

• Is it minutes?
• Hours?
• Do you even know anymore?

I'd genuinely love to hear how this shows up for people, even if it's hard to put into words.