Struggling to get through daily tasks or difficulty attaining your goals are important indications that your mental wellness might need a little fine tuning. While it is good to be aware of what our body and mind are signaling, we can be tuning into social media or trends for explanations that don’t take our unique situation into account. There is absolutely nothing wrong with embracing the reality of adult ADHD. In fact, getting the right “label” on things gets us a step closer to relevant resources and community that can teach us possible coping and solutions. However, the “wrong” label, or let’s say the “one-size-fits-all” labels that dominate social media might actually short-circuit true introspection and understanding our own unique challenges.
That said, let’s explore other possible reasons for lost focus or difficulty concentrating. The more you know, right? No matter the root cause of concentration issues, taking care to attend to some of the other causes of concentration could benefit us more than we expect. Often we ignore the basics in search of a larger magnitude solution.
Lack of Sleep:
Bottom line, sleeping fewer hours contributes to a loss of control over attention, not to mention other important cognitive functions. The world of neurological research is compiling data from multiple studies and finds that even poor-sleep is better than no sleep. Functions of working memory (again, executive function) struggles in correlation with fewer hours of sleep which impacts memory as well. If you are feeling scattered, spaced or disconnected you might start with some good sleep hygiene. Over time, consistent rest can create a stronger foundation for controlling attention, which means tuning out the distractions as much as focusing on the desired input.
Worry and Fear:
Notice that anxiety is not listed here. Anxiety can include the physical sensation of stress separately from the actual interpretation of danger. For example, some atheletes have a the ability to feel physical anxiety and mentally decide those are just body signals to motivate their action; mind over matter. Sports and study of competitive anxiety reveals that when shakiness, heart racing, etc. are interpreted as “I can’t do this” or “This is so much pressure,” it is more likely performance will suffer.
So what does this mean in general? If we are worried or have fearful thoughts, we aren’t able to operate at our best. Sometimes a jolt of stress can push us, or help us get started. However if we tell ourselves that the pressure or the scrutiny surrounding a task is “too much” or that we are “not enough”, we might just live up to that fear.
If your concentration or focus is worst under certain pressures, maybe competition, maybe in classes or situations that are already challenging, you might just be a little overwhelmed by expectations. Of course this adds to the reality that you are miserable, or struggling. So the old notion of “attitude” can truly help us get clarity. If we embrace the difficulty as part of the task, we might find invigoration instead of fuzziness. It’s possible that lowering expectations (it’s okay to lose) combined with increased effort (doing our best) might be a powerful solution for the disorientation coming from “big” tasks.
Stress
Here we go with another term that is so often interchanged with anxiety. Life literally equals stress. Growth is stress on the body. Good change even reperesents change, growing up for example! In context of many life events equalling stress, it is noteable that the more we literally “have on our mind” the more difficult it can be to focus and concentrate. Think of it like noise in our head. Even excitement is noise. It might be more fun to think about positive things than the task in front of us. Or it could be that there is so much change and demand (negative stress) in our lives that we have a loss of energy and will to hold something in the line of our focus.
For large amounts of positive stress, having structure and even scheduling time to think and plan for all the things can help us create time for specific thought and processing. For overwhelming negative stress, finding outlets for both the physical and emotional load are important. Physical exercise, regular contact with friends that we trust and share with—these help release some of the tension and give our mind energy.
Be careful what your distraction coping looks like during times of intense stress. It can be almost a manic moment when we are in a season of growth to plug ourselves into more information, more activity—read more stress. Less is more. Seek music without words, activity and company without conversation. Seek mediation and prayer. Recognize a major goal is literally sweeping the clutter and creating space for internal growth to happen with less pressure.
Thoughts
Just to circle back to the above, too many thoughts are actually distracting. Especially hurtful negative ones. Trauma and depression include difficulty concentrating as well as fatigue, some of that due to the internal exhaustion managing hurtful memories, emotional reactions or even negative inner dialogue. This can look like being constantly pre-occupied and might cause people to think the root problem is concentration. Maybe. Or maybe there is so much static and pain the brain is trying to manage that the external world is put on pause.
Seeking counseling support for traumatic and stressful events can improve concentration and connection with the world at large. Concentration doesn’t just mean taking in words, it is all data: body language, tone, intent, things that help us in our relationships. Difficulty concentrating interferes in either our disconnection with others or their sense of connection with us. Inversely, when you start to feel safe and hopeful again you will most likely begin noticing things about yourself, others, life—how bright IS the sun?—that might have been tuned out before.
Hopefully this conversation has given you some new ideas of how wide and deep concentration is; so much more than one label. Attention Deficit Disorder is real and can be really difficult. If you have ADHD or not, recognizing the patterns of your attention can tell you a lot about other areas you might be struggling, a.k.a. other ways you might find solutions.
