In today’s fast paced world, we find stress around every corner. We’re all managing our own deadlines, personal commitments, and the unpredictability of our lives. It’s so common to feel stressed nowadays. We don’t take seriously how it can truly affect our mental and overall health. It can have deep effects on our ability to concentrate, process information, and stay focused. According to the Mayo Clinic, too much stress can have harmful side effects like anxiety, headaches, and problems sleeping. When left unchecked, stress can cause issues like high blood pressure and heart disease. It’s important to find healthy ways to manage stress so that we can gain back productive hours in our day.

The Science Behind Stress and Focus

When you get stressed, your body releases a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol is essentially your fight or flight response. Your body and awareness becomes hyper-vigilant to the potential threats lurking nearby. While this is useful if you’re about to be attacked by a wild animal, it doesn’t really help when you have a looming deadline at work. However, you’re body can’t tell the two scenarios apart. Cortisol will flood the brain, particularly in the areas known for decision making, problem solving, and maintaining focus. When this happens, any non-emergency tasks get put on the back burner while the brain assesses the potential threat. That is what makes it so hard to focus when you are feeling stressed out.

Chronic Stress Breaks Down Focus Over Time

It’s widely known that a little stress can boost your productivity. There’s a reason why projects have deadlines – it motivates you to get it done. When you feel highly alert to an upcoming deadline, your concentration sharpens for a little bit. Johann Hari, author of the book Stolen Focus, says that “before he gives a speech, that feeling of pressure wakes him up. It helps him pull himself together”. While feeling mild amounts of stress is normal, it still has an affect on your body. Hari states in his book that there is clear scientific evidence of the harmful effects of stress on the body. He writes that a recent study summary said, “It is now obvious that stress can cause structural changes in the brain with long term effects”. When you are stressed for long periods of time, the exposure to cortisol can lead to cognitive fatigue. This makes it harder for concentrate for long periods of time. As time goes on this leads to burnout. Burnout is when your mind feels completely depleted and even completing a simple task feels hard and overwhelming.

How to Fix Your Stressed Attention

Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, former Surgeon General of California, studied her pediatric patients living in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco. She found that most of her patients diagnosed with ADHD, or other attention disorders, were living in situations where they experienced high levels of stress. After correlating the root cause to their attention problems, she said, “you have to scale the tools that you offer to be the same scale as the problems folks are having”. There are many tools to help you work through a stressful situation so that you can regain focus. Here are a few ways to help:

• Practice mindfulness: Deep breathing and meditation help to calm your mind allowing you to give your mind a small reset and regain focus. Yoga is also a great way to center your mind and get some movement in too.
• Take regular breaks: Stepping away from a task or situation you are facing is another way to help give your mind a reset. Try going for a walk to clear your head and get fresh air.
• Break up your tasks into smaller chunks: Sometimes it’s overwhelming when you are facing a big project. Taking that large project and chunking it into smaller, easy to digest tasks can help to relieve the stress of an upcoming deadline.
• Exercise: It’s a proven fact that exercising can lower cortisol levels and promote mental clarity. The exercise doesn’t need to be intense, just getting your body moving will help.
• Ask for help when needed: Many times, we can feel stressed out when we have a lot of different things to do. There’s nothing wrong with asking for help when there’s too much to do. Delegating tasks to people who have more experience or bandwidth can relieve the pressure you feel.

Start Living With Less Stress

We don’t have to let stress ruin our lives and our focus. If you understand how your stress affects your attention span, you can take steps to implement ways to manage it. The key is to staying focused isn’t to power through it and deal with the repercussions later. It’s important to have healthy self-care habits to protect your productivity and mental well-being.