Is This Daydreaming, Perseveration, or Just Brooding?

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What exactly is daydreaming?

Is it daydreaming if someone is, for about ten up to thirty minutes, imagining unpleasant conversations they had in the past, sometimes months or even years in the past, and thinking about saying stuff they never said, or explaining themselves better, or making witty comebacks, and the other person responding?

Or imagining doing things with other people or being out in public and unpleasant things happening, like being misunderstood, saying something stupid out of nervousness, getting unwanted attention due to "looking weird," or being with a new person who suddenly figures out that the you aren't compatible because of an awkward conversation about political differences? Not even upcoming social stuff, just completely imaginary situations.

And these thoughts are unpleasant but difficult to stop; it feels like they could provide some sort of satisfaction but they never do, and produce mild physical sensations of anxiety?

This doesn't seem like daydreaming or perseveration.
They seem like brooding or intrusive obsessive thoughts.
10-30 minutes per day isn't that bad, but if it's 10-30 minutes each hour one is awake, that is bad.

Imagining other things I could have said feels somewhat satisfying, but remembering the conversation going wrong, or the nasty things the other person said, or that I've no idea how to talk without upsetting them, or knowing that I can never get any closure because the conversation is long over, is the unpleasant part that causes the feelings of anxiety.

I like to think about the topic we discussed, but I want to convince my mind to stop expecting the situation to be resolved and wishing the conversation had happened differently. It keeps thinking it can somehow fix an old conversation by continually thinking about it.

Do you have any compulsive actions you perform when you experience these sorts of thoughts? Do you continue to analyse these thoughts and the past experiences that they refer to? Do you find it difficult to stop this sort of analysis?

I have OCD and I perform these sorts of mental rituals in response to painful memories. I try to analyse past conversations to determine what I did wrong. I also have social anxiety which manifest itself in the social content of my intrusive thoughts/memories.

The type of OCD without apparent compulsion is Pure O. The compulsions can be mostly or wholly mental rather than physical. I often 'check' my thoughts to see if they are 'normal' or acceptable to my moral values.

CBT is the best treatment. There are some good self-help guides to CBT for OCD. Brain Lock is pretty good. You may need the help of a psychologist trained in CBT. Medication can lessen symptoms but they generally come back when medication is stopped.

No, I just sit and think.



No. I've only made a couple of analyses about the thoughts, and I've stuck with them/not re-considered them much: I desperately want closure to the conversation and get in a processing loop when I'm misunderstood. I don't usually analyze the conversations much, except a few in which the other person surprised me. I just imagine continuing them or saying different things, or occasionally posting about them on my blog or posting a comment to other people about them (I hear the text in my head).

I do think about the thoughts in terms of how to stop having them a little bit, but I haven't come up with much besides distraction.



I looked up OCD and it seems like the obsession examples are about actions, people worrying about things they may do or may have done. When I'm just imagining actual conversations that I KNOW went wrong; simulating disembodied voices in my mind (they're mostly Internet conversations, so I don't even know the other people), does that count as an obsession? I suppose the imagining awkward social situations counts.

OCD-style obsessions can be about pretty much any kind of unpleasant thought or experience. This sounds very much like Pure O. It's certainly not unusual to feel anxiety about past awkward conversations. I have a great memory so I can remember a lot of times when I said or did something I felt embarrassed about. The feelings generated by these thoughts can be very intense and cause quite a lot of anxiety. Part of it is because I can't change what happened, no matter how much I think about it. I can only change how I think about it. I can demand perfection and then obsess about my mistakes or I can acknowledge my fallibility and try to do better next time. I can't forget but I can forgive.

All mental illness is a spectrum from non pathological to pathological. If this issue is causing significant levels of distress, then it is not simply brooding or daydreaming (non pathological).

I'm sorry that you're experiencing these thoughts. I know how difficult it can be. Have you been sleeping okay? Do these thoughts bother you more at certain times than at others? I always find that I'm particularly prone to obsessing when I'm trying but failing to sleep.

Me too. I have had insomnia on and off for most of my adult life, but these thoughts didn't start happening until I naively began to get myself involved in online forums.

These "daydreams"... they have bothering me, too, for a long time now...

Sometimes it's not that bad, I just end up replaying an encounter in my head for a couple of days, ruminating on the conversation, adding to the dialogue, making notes to myself - "you could say THAT next time someone starts talking about this"...

It is not bad when there was no conflict, nothing to prove, no debate on principles. Sometimes, though, when a discussion takes me right down to the core of the problem, showing that my discussion partner seems to be immune to simple logic and reasoning, I get stuck in a vicious loop. One part of me wants to break it all down for the other party, explain in detail where they misunderstood me, where they are wrong, another part starts doubting my own sanity (but do I even have that?), making me believe that just maybe, this time, my logic is actually flawed... and when I cannot find the mistake in my own reasoning, I start these endless re-runs of our discussion, trying to find just the right thing to present to the other party so that they finally open their eyes and understand... I become obsessed with "turning" the other person, and I end up being more than upset after realizing that my ability to form meaningful sentences doesn't seem to be sufficiently developed to win this case.

For me, there's only one way to get out of it: turn away from it completely and let time heal the wounds. First, I feel like I have given up, like they have won, but then I use my self-preservation technique that is based on the purely arrogant approach of telling yourself that your conversational partner is a very narrow-minded person, unwilling and unable to learn, to expand their horizon, to properly read what you've written, to question their own opinion once in a while - and therefore unworthy of your attention, unworthy of you being unable to sleep, having anxiety attacks, being preoccupied with them all the time. I stop returning to the place of the discussion, stop talking to that person, and the recurring thoughts and memories of the debate start fading and fading, until I forget what it was about and regain my calm (although it never goes away completely, there's always a "scar" left, but it doesn't really hurt anymore).

And that's how you lose friends and stay alive...

It might be hyperreflectivity or ruminations motivated by perplexity (i.e. you have trouble "getting" things like others can):

http://www.nordlandssykehuset.no/getfil ... r/EASE.pdf

Do any of these seem to match?

This one seems to match. I'm fairly certain that I tend to overlook the social implications of conversations, and that's why I'm slow to understand why some of them derail. I'm hesitant to call the ruminations "disturbing," however — re-playing the conversation in my mind isn't really unpleasant, but being misunderstood or insulted or whatever in the original conversation is unpleasant. I just experience the original emotions over again, not new ones associated with the remembering itself.