Instagram Trigger

[Prudence Snow]

Hello, I'm Prue and I'm new to this forum :).

My daydreams have been centered on 1 crush since last year even though I only know the guy from instagram. I have a bad habit of constantly viewing his social media pages and was stunned to see that he had a girlfriend. I cannot stop daydreaming about this guy and I really dislike the fact that he's seeing someone else because to me, it means that she is getting the opportunity to live out my fantasies.

Have any of you had a similar experience?

[Source]

I get the impression that this is a common theme in maladaptive daydreaming, pulling the images of real people (or things, or situations) into one's own fantasy only to get mad when the basis of that fantasy is in any way challenged or disrupted.
I also get the impression that MD is only one example of this behavior. Every form of addiction I know of seems to pack some version of this phenomenon. All the more reason to suspect there's some underlying mechanism they all share.

[Katharina]

Hi, my md has also always been made worse by such obsessions. I have only recently discovered there is a name for it and that there are fellow sufferers. Regarding Instagram: I recommend deleting it or using an app (mine is called stay focused) to reduce your daily ig time to say 10 min. maximum, then the app shuts down ig automatically). This helps me right now, because in my experience wasting time on social media is closely connected with endless md loops.