How emotions affect concentration

When we talk about focus we mean the ability to maintain our attention on a specific task thereby raising the level of our performance and decision-making ability, making us more effective.

In the era of multitasking and/or relentless external iputs (e.g., emails, phone calls, texts, social networks, etc.) to which we usually attribute a great deal of responsibility for loss of attention or focus, we forget how emotions also play a key role in draining energy, limiting our concentration and decision-making ability where they are not managed. This sometimes leads to making us feel “overloaded” and/or stressed, even to the point of generating a real block or “paralysis.”

Take, for example, emotions such as fear: “fear of failure,” “fear of not being up to the mark,” which originate from thoughts such as “what if I don’t complete the project?” and “what if I am given this responsibility and I don’t make it?” These are situations in which thoughts and related emotion constantly project us into future dynamics generating so-called “brooding,” and causing us to live in a perpetual state of anxiety, depriving us of concentration on the present moment and not allowing us to do what we actually want to do and/or make the decisions we should.

Or again, let’s imagine that we have an important meeting where a strategic decision has to be taken for the fate of the company’s business, and a few minutes before leaving home we argue with our partner or children and get angry. We brood over the argument throughout the home-to-work commute, and during the meeting a series of negative thoughts about what happened continues to crowd our mind, diverting our attention from what is being discussed to the point of inhibiting our decision-making ability. The meeting is postponed and the deal falls apart.

Similarly, even a pleasurable emotion such as joy in its highest intensity (euphoria), may at certain times take our attention away from what we are doing and/or what we have to accomplish because our thoughts “fly” elsewhere.

Our brains, indeed, generate 50,000 thoughts a day (source Psychology Today), and although there is a correlation between what we think and what we feel, we often fail to manage the emotion because we do not identify it.

What happens, then, in cases where instead of navigating the emotion is the emotion overpowering us? A loss of energy and focus with respect to the tasks that need to be done and the results to be achieved. We are projected into something that is not the present time, and non-presence to ourselves does not help us understand what we are feeling, how we can behave and what is important to do.

Emotions can be interpreted as if they were a message having the purpose of guiding us. By acting each day aware of how we feel and the goals we need to achieve, we can develop greater self-control and remain in the driver’s seat of our attention and our lives.