How anxiety affects your focus

How anxiety affects your focus Alamy A drawn-out stressful situation can make simple tasks feel more difficult than they used to be Feel like you can’t concentrate on anything at the moment? “I am incredibly busy,” one writer friend said recently, “doing nothing but dishes and taking walks.” Alamy A drawn-out stressful situation can make simple tasks feel more difficult than they used to be Soft focus What’s happening is a malfunction of working memory: the ability to grasp incoming information, form it into a cohesive thought, and hold onto it long enough to do what you need to with it. It’s leading us to a more chronic anxiety situation.” While collecting data for an as-yet unpublished study on working memory training this spring, Laine says he and his team asked about 200 people from the UK and North America whether they had anxiety specifically linked to the pandemic. Alamy A lack of sleep “wrecks” your working memory, says Oliver Robinson of University College London “We added a question about pandemic anxiety because at that time it was all over the news,” says Laine. Spending hours on sudoku probably won’t help Usually, in therapeutic treatment for anxiety, “we rely on showing people that things aren’t as bad as they think they are,” says Robinson.