7 Things You Should Know About Your Attention During COVID-19

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A lot of us may reflect on recent years with mixed emotions, as some of the deepest-rooted problems in our own society came to light for a number of reasons. A pandemic prompted a number of crises for both the economy and just about everything we thought we knew about ourselves. Volatility. Uncertainty. Complexity. Ambiguity. Those might be just some of the words you will use when looking back on past years, and even when looking ahead to the near future with some trepidation. The neuroscientist Dr. Amishi Jha refers to this as “VUCA” — to describe what are high-stress, high-demand situations for our brains to react.

With her research team at the University of Miami, Jha focuses her research on people for whom VUCA conditions are all in a day’s work. Her test subjects are soldiers, firefighters, organizational leaders, and so forth. Most crucially, her team investigates the powers as well as the vulnerability of their attention system, seeking out what elements degrade and weaken the ability to pay attention, while searching for the best ways to retool and strengthen it.

As the stress of living under the COVID-19 pandemic continues, it’s not abnormal to find yourself less productive than usual — whether it’s having a hard time staying on task, or difficulty filtering your own emotions when working or formulating a response. Luckily, this facet of the mind isn’t entirely unknown — so here are seven important things to bear in mind when it comes to getting through times when VUCA conditions seem to prevail.

1. Remember That Your Attention Is Responsible For Creating Your Reality

We have an attention span to tackle one of the brain’s biggest challenges: The world around us contains significantly more sensory information (as do our own minds) than what the brain can fully process. This is why you’re able to drive to work each morning without being totally distracted by mundane details along the way — you can set your mind to consider things like the traffic and the route that will get you there on time instead. The attention system allows you to filter and zone in on smaller subsets of information. It’s why you can filter out other noises in the room when talking to your friend, or why you can conjure up specific memories at any given moment.

2. Your Attention Can Be Threatened By Stress, Physical Threat, And Poor Mood

While your attention span is capable of all of these things, it does have its limits — and in many ways, this triumvirate can act as a barrier — quickly degrading your brain’s ability to focus. In many ways, COVID-19 is a perfect storm for producing them, with new and unsettling headlines each day and an exacerbated sense of threat.

3. Remember That Your Attention Is Limited — As Is Your Working Memory

Working memory goes hand in hand with attention. Without it, you have no way to immediately engage your brain with the details you’re focusing on — why you can remember the quickest way to get to work or the keywords you’re going to put in that recommendation letter. It does have its limits, however. You can fit maybe three or four items before it’s maxed out — and anything you commit to it has limited staying power — disappearing a few seconds after your task is completed.

Unfortunately, much of our short-term memory is committed to the basic routines we’ve taken up to prevent the spread of COVID-19 — such tasks as hand washing and avoiding doorknobs, which leaves little cognitive room for much else.

4. Your Attention Tends To Wander

At any given moment in time, there’s about 50/50 odds that you’re not actually living in that moment. According to Jha, there’s actual statistics to back this up. Half the time, we aren’t paying attention and the most likely reason for the distraction is our own thoughts and anxieties peeling us away. The more this happens, the more our focus is dulled and the less information we’re likely to take in from our physical surroundings. Right now, COVID-19 — the possibility that just a few moments ago, you yourself might have been exposed, stands out in peoples’ minds. It gets worse when accompanied by the feelings of isolation that many other people are also experiencing.

attention

5. Your Attention And Your Emotions Are Closely Linked

We talk a lot about letting our emotions get in the way and clouding our thinking — but the two actually go hand in hand, particularly when it comes to our own attention. Think about it — when you’re recalling a happy memory like one of your favorite Christmases from childhood, that’s making use of both your attention and working memory — meaning they have to hold onto specific images and thoughts that make you feel happy.

At the same time, you need to use the full potential of your attention in order to regulate emotions when they happen — the ability to take your mind off feelings of hopelessness by focusing on some other subject — or changing your own perception of a particular problem. For example, you might be overwhelmed thinking about how well your last presentation was received, but you can try and de-escalate the sad feelings by simply thinking that the project wasn’t as important as you thought — or that your co-workers will move onto thinking about something else in a week.

6. Your Attention Helps You Connect With Other People

We think of our own attention span as a private thing that only we can sense and channel at will, and momentarily, lose it and have to bring it back. However, you also direct it toward other people when you interact with them — trying to stay on the same page as you refresh your memory about the last time you and your friend interacted, before they took that vacation.

In fact, as you talk to each other, you’ll be actively collaborating with your working memories — unlocking shared thoughts and feelings. The COVID-19 pandemic, requiring social distancing, makes this connection a bit more difficult to do — something that can’t always be communicated during a Zoom conference call.

7. And Of Course, Your Attention Is Trainable

With VUCA conditions happening around us all the time, this could all seem overwhelming and give way to despair — but there’s no reason for that to happen. The key to stay on top of it all, is practicing mindfulness. The act of trying to live in the moment for as long as possible and maintaining an awareness, makes it harder for VUCA to set in. It also makes it easier to regulate your emotions.

Just as little as 12 minutes of practice a day for three to five days a week can show noticeable results. Devote time to focusing on the small visual details around you for that time — something as simple as watching a sunset in the evening and recognizing the sounds of birds or the trees in the foreground. This also has a ripple effect, in which the longer you spend your time practicing mindfulness, the easier it is to overcome VUCA emotions on the worst days. The more you are able to assert your own control, the easier it will be to call your attention into focus, while also strengthening your working memory.

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