Why Can't I Focus?
As printed in My Village News May 2020
My usually reliable task-focused mind has been splintered these last few weeks. I hadn’t really noticed until recently when the evidence started mounting in our home.
As my toddler’s precious nap hour arrives each afternoon I take a few minutes to wander the house and collect her strewn belongings but in these dragging COVID-19 days I have been discovering that just like her I have been distracted in everything I do, leaving piles of intention everywhere.
There’s the wet clean washing sitting in a basket at the line to be hung, a mug beside the hot coffee machine poised for a refill and an open work laptop beckoning me to mine for more focus and energy.
A trusted friend of serious intelligence admits she’s suffering the same severe absence of attention. So while the real doctors are scarily occupied I turned to the rarely trusted Dr Google for answers and found a decent research paper linking social isolation to poor attention span.
The 2014 study by The Ohio State University found memory and concentration issues among breast cancer survivors who had high degrees of loneliness. The leading researcher Dr Lisa Jaremka says there’s now evidence, “social connections can be as fundamental to someone’s well-being as a healthy diet. Just as we must have nutrition to live and thrive, we also need the sustenance of our social connections as well.”
So if face-to-face catch-ups are the ‘green smoothies of the brain’, what will the quality of our minds be after such prolonged physical isolation from one another? We have advanced technology at our fingertips to circumvent this but am I the only one who can’t be bothered after a long day balancing this new normal to FaceTime friends and family? I wonder if it even fills us up the same way an actual cuddle from Mum or side-by-side companionship can.
