Why we lose focus and what to do about it
Updated: Oct 1
Understand why we can't concentrate when stressed and how meditation helps
Have you noticed you can’t concentrate or think constructively when you’re up against a deadline? If either of these things have ever happened to you, then you know what stress does to our cognitive functioning.
Fortunately, there are ways to train the attention to remain on task when we’re under pressure so that we get the job done without the overwhelm.
Image copyright: Ricardo Arce Unsplash
To understand how such training works, we first need to understand the brain’s attentional system.
The mind tends to wander
If you drive, you’ll know that you can arrive at a destination without remembering driving along the road you’ve taken. And, I’m sure you’ve had times when someone has asked you a question and you realise you haven’t been listening to a word they've said.
On both occasions you’ve experienced mind wandering.
What you might not know is we mind wander around 30-50% of the time. No matter what we’re doing we’re generally off-task about half the time (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010).
The problem with mind wandering
Naturally being off task impacts whatever we're meant to be doing. It’s been found to reduce recall, reading comprehension and error detection (mentioned in Zedelius et al., 2015). In other words, we become less alert, less efficient, less safe.
Mind-wandering is also known to negatively impact mood. This is because when we mind wander, we don’t generally visit our happy place.
When we’re having off-task thoughts we tend to go over things that are bothering us. This could be things that might happen, things that we need to make happen or things that have happened.
We mentally time travel, either rewinding back to the past or fast forwarding into the future.
This ability to hindcast and forecast has supported our survival. By remembering and referencing things from the past, we get the opportunity to learn from them and, by considering how the future might be, we can prepare for it.
What’s important to note is that the brain makes no distinction between real and imagined difficulties/threats, we respond emotionally, biologically and physically as if it's happening now.
This means that if our previews or reviews have an element of harm or loss, our body is taken into a distressed state every time we think about the challenging situation.
Stress and mind wandering
It’s easy to imagine that paying attention is like aiming at a target, you simply choose your point of focus and direct your attention at it. But there’s more to it.
According to Amishi Jha (2007), a professor of psychology at University of Miami, paying attention requires the orchestration of three specific aspects of attention or what she terms subsystems:
1. The orienting system – this part can be directed at something in our external (object, person) or internal (body sensation, thoughts) environment.
2. The alerting system – this is the noticing part of attention. It stands ready to respond to novel stimuli and deploys attention accordingly.
3. The executive system – this part makes sure our actions and intentions are aligned. Like a supervisor, it doesn’t do the work, but it makes sure we are doing what we intended.
When we’re in high stress/high demand situations - where there's something at stake that we care about - all three attention sub-systems can become degraded making it difficult to concentrate. At the same time mind wandering increases.
In today’s high pressure work environments, it’s not uncommon to find that when we try to direct our attention to what needs to get done, we get pulled back to thoughts about other things that also need to be taken care of. It’s as if our orienting system gets snagged on negative narratives.
At the same time, driven by the sense of threat, the alerting system goes into high alert. We become hypervigilant about what we or others do and say, everything begins to feel threatening and we become increasingly worried.
And, the executive system becomes unable to keep everything under control, so things begin to feel overwhelming.
The more we notice our mind wandering and inability to focus, the more concerned we’re likely to become that we can’t concentrate, and that time is running out.
This fires stress hormones into the body’s blood stream again, keeping the stress response on and our attention in reactionary mode.
The good news: attention is trainable
Whilst being able to reflect on the past and anticipate future events is useful, it can become a problem when our attention is repeatedly pulled away from what we need to be doing right now.
Being able to notice when the mind has wandered and consciously choose where we place our attention has both wellbeing and productivity benefits.
Jha, who has been researching attention since the 1990s, is particularly interested in how it becomes degraded under high levels of stress and what we can do about it.
She has found that regularly practising certain meditations that are used to train mindfulness can strengthen attentional control and build cognitive resilience, even in high pressure environments. She has come to this conclusion through conducting studies with deployed military personnel, firefighters, and other first responders.
The types of meditation that appear to help are those where we intentionally focus attention on a chosen object, such as the breath. As we do this, we develop what’s called meta-awareness (being able to recognise what is happening inside our mind). When we notice our attention has drifted, we simply guide it back to our chosen object.
This process of focus, notice and redirect acts like a workout for the brain's attention systems. Over time, we become better at recognising distractions and returning our focus to what matters.
Like all mindfulness meditations, you practice in a relatively calm environment so that it becomes available when you need it most.
Jha's research has found 10-15 minutes of meditation practice a day for at least 4 weeks makes a significant difference to attentional control and subjective wellbeing.
Summary
Being able to concentrate when under pressure is increasingly needed in the fast-paced work environments of today.
If you’re finding that you have trouble focusing at times of high demand, it’s likely that you’re experiencing a decline in attentional capacity due to how the body responds to stress.
Meditation practices used to train mindfulness have been found to reduce mind wandering, helping us to stay on task, disengage from unhelpful thinking, and focus on what needs to get done.
Interested in training your attention?
If you'd like to experience these attention training practices for yourself, join one of my weekly meditation drop-in sessions. We practise the same attention-training exercises described in this article.
Whether you're completely new to meditation or looking to develop a more regular practice, the sessions provide a supportive space to train your attention and recharge.
Further Reading
Jha, A.P., Krompinger, J. & Baime, M.J. (2007). Mindfulness training modifies subsystems of attention. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience 7, 109–119 (2007).
Jha, A. P., Stanley, E. A., Kiyonaga, A.,Wong, L., & Gelfand, L. (2010). Examining the protective effects of mindfulness training on working memory capacity and affective experience. Emotion, 10(1), 54–64.
Jha, A.P., Morrison, A.B., Parker, S.C. (2017). Practice Is Protective: Mindfulness Training Promotes Cognitive Resilience in High-Stress Cohorts. Mindfulness 8, 46–58.
Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, (New York, N.Y.), 330, 932.
Mason, M. F., Norton, M. I., Van Horn, J. D., Wegner, D. M., Grafton, S. T., & Macrae, C. N. (2007). Wandering minds: the default network and stimulus-independent thought. Science (New York, N.Y.), 315 (5810), 393–395.
Zedelius, C. M., Broadway J. M., & Schooler J. W. (2015) Motivating meta-awareness of mind wandering: A way to catch the mind in flight? Conscious Cogn. 36:44-53.
