My head is spinning in all directions

Ever had that feeling after a hard and long test where you can't just focus in any task afterwards? This might have to be with the fact that you just spent all your energy and focus in the demanding work that just concentrating and answering the incognites of the exam asks for, leaving you with a reduced amount of "concentration" to get other challenging cognitive tasks done. In the presented article, I will talk about Focus, our limited reserves of this precious resource and how distractions can pose a threat to our capacity to dedicate uninterrupted time to a particular pursuit. Let's begin by defining what Focus exactly is.

What Focus Is?

Focus, or better defined as concentration, refers to the ability to pick a particular subject or stimulus, and dedicate our attention to this sole topic for a particular period of time. This skill is one of the keys to learning as an active process and to getting meaningful work done.

Is It Limited?

Most of us can actually see that this is the case. After some time of focusing on anything, we'll begin to see a degradation on the quality of our concentration, as we begin to make more mistakes in that activity and our attention drifts more to other thoughts involuntarily when we try to put our attention to work Itself. There Isn't a fixed amount of hours that people can dedicate to uninterrupted focus, due to the fact that this can vary from person to person according to their habits, the presence or abscense of pathologies related to the capacity concentrate and the amount of distractions they are exposed to from day to day.

Threats to our ability to concentrate:

Not to put all the blame on technology, though one of the main causes of an increase in attention deficit in modern days is the presence of constant and everchanging stimuli, which bombard us with information that is hard to avoid andto figure out what is worth paying attention to and what not to. When we sit down to actually absorb information we let our conscience filter the data in an adequate way, separating our mind from anything else, process that becomes harder when there's a source of distractions providing us more and more ways to shift our focus to everything but what we intend to concentrate in. An example of this, and probably the most common nowadays, is keeping our phone close when we are making a report. All the notifications and incoming messages will make us turn to this device instead of to our work and when we actually come back to voluntarily get the task done, we'll find that It'll become way harder to get our mind back on track where we left off. This distractions will reduce the amount of time we can spend in a state of deep focus and will create bad habits that will constantly make us change to other task.

Even though distractions can diminish your capacity to concentrate, there are actually practices dedicated to increasing our focus, such as meditation, exercises and reading books, though the most effective thing to apply as a first step is to remove the source of the distractions, so one good thing to do is to put your phone away from the desk, in silent mode or turning It off when you're studying/working, which will make It much more easier for you to concentrate. As always, I thank you for your support and I wish you the best of luck