Are you struggling to concentrate? Find it hard to focus on anything for more than a few minutes? You’re not alone. It could be caused by the numerous distractions we face every day. 

Think back to your childhood. Chances are you would have had a postman and a landline, and if you were lucky enough a scattering of children who lived near by that you could hang out with.

As you got a bit older, chances are you would have had a desktop computer which you would sit at and do computer based things, before switching it off again to go about your day. At this point you would have had limited distractions and if you went out for the day you wouldn’t be contactable. So you would have had plenty of time to think and focus. You may have got home to a message on your answering machine, but other than that the time was your own without the constant distractions of today. There simply wasn’t the same amount of things vying for your attention back then.

Email came along and at that time was mainly photos from family, and friends sending jokes and memes to make you laugh, but in smallish quantities so you could easily go back to what you were doing without losing too much focus.

Then we got mobile phones which originally only had texting and calling facilities. It cost loads of money to make calls and send texts so again there were limited distractions.

Compare this to a modern phone with apps and games and social media platforms all vying for what’s left of your concentration, and companies emailing you to persuade you to buy this or that, or demanding for you let them know how highly you rated your trip to the public loo yesterday.

All these notifications make us break our focus and concentration, even if it is for a few seconds at a time. We are used to the excitement of  notifications, especially if we’re looking forward to hearing from someone special or waiting for the outcome of a job interview. On the one hand the notifications drive us mad but on the other we crave those likes on our Facebook posts, those comments on our tiktok videos and people favouriting our items on Vinted! 

We’re also faced with having way too many choices. Back in the day if we went out for coffee we would have a choice of filter coffee or tea. None of this would you like a skinny decaf frapalapacino nonsense back then. Our brains get faced with so many choices about the most mundane of things which cause us to be overstimulated and overstimulation is bad for concentration. We go into shops and are faced with a barrage of sights and sounds and smells, often cleverly crafted to help us make impulse purchases that we think we need but don’t. So we end up overstimulated, running on adrenaline and unable to concentrate fully.

What is the solution? How do we make it stop?

Firstly try turning off any unnecessary notifications. Unless you need your phone to ping at you constantly put it on silent or do not disturb. Hide notification badges for any app that you don’t consider to be crucial.

Take some time out where you switch off the tv and radio, put your phone in a different room on silent for a couple of hours. Turn the lights down low or switch them off . Just sit for a while. Sit in silence with no background noise, listen to your inner knowing, let the thoughts that you have come to the surface but don’t engage with them, let them float away, Take some big, long, deep breaths. Turn your email settings onto receiving emails way less frequently. Instead of every few minutes how about having them set to twice a day? *Obviously if you need to see them more often don’t do this, but if you can, try it.

Ensure you put time in your diary to do absolutely nothing so you can sit without distractions and let your body come back into its own natural balance. You will find that you will likely sleep better as you will naturally feel calmer and your stress levels will be reduced. Pencil in times of unbusyness so you can truly switch off and unwind.

Often we don’t realise how busy our lives are until we stop. I know that I didn’t appreciate quite how busy and at times noisy my life was until the other week when I went to a vigil at our local cathedral. There we had low lighting and silence. There were no mobile phones pinging, no notifications from any social media platforms, just companionable silence. Time to sit in silent contemplation. It was almost hypnotic and I could have stayed for longer as it felt super calming and soothing. It was then that I realised what a contrast that was with my usual everyday life.