Concentration Problems: What to do if you have trouble concentrating?
Concentration is incredibly important when you are at work. Good concentration ensures that you focus only on your task and, as a result, you do that task better and often finish it faster. Having concentration problems is therefore incredibly annoying. You miss deadlines more often and you make more mistakes. This then also results in additional stress. To see what you can do about concentration problems you should read this blog
Concentration problems the cause
To solve problems, it is important to find the cause. Concentration problems can arise from many things. A traumatic event is often the most obvious as a breaker of your focus.
Perhaps this traumatic event is something that is fresh on your mind and you know right now what you need to do. Process this event, give it a place, so to speak.
Sometimes the reason for your concentration problem is less clear, in which case you really need to investigate. What causes you to lose focus?
Journal for charting concentration problems
You can keep a journal for cases like this. Each time you notice that your thoughts are wandering, write down what you are working on, what emotion you are having, what you are feeling and what you are thinking about.
After a week or maybe 2, you can see if there is a trend in events.
Perhaps it’s the fear of a deadline that’s throwing you off track; fear of failure or the risk of burnout could be factors contributing to your concentration problems.
The exact opposite may also be true. Your job no longer offers a challenge, and you’re suffering from a bore-out. You find yourself thinking about all the things you could be doing that would actually provide a real challenge. In that case, too, there’s work to be done to challenge yourself at your own level.
Hypnosis for finding out the cause
Is keeping a journal not helping you find the cause of your concentration problem? Then a hypnotherapist can help you find the cause. There are several techniques for this, such as Socratic conversation or regression.
In a Socratic conversation, the why question is repeated several times while you are under hypnosis. The hypnotic state makes you worry less about how things should be, allowing you to be very honest with yourself and getting to the cause sooner.
Another technique is regression. With regression, you go back to the moment when a belief was formed that is now causing your concentration problems. This can be quite surprising because most beliefs originate in childhood (think of elementary school age).
Restoring concentration
Once you’ve identified the root cause of your concentration problems, you can work on restoring your ability to concentrate. In many cases, this will involve changing your beliefs or working through your issues.
For example, a hypnotherapist will help you change beliefs that interrupt your concentration.
A hypnotherapist can also use multiple techniques for this purpose, such as:
- The concentration bubble
- Hypnotic suggestions
- Visualization
The concentration bubble
Is it mainly external factors that cause your concentration to be broken? A colleague who keeps tapping his/her pen? Negative energy from people around you (that colleague who is always complaining).
Then you can visualize that there is some kind of invisible bubble around you. Like an energy shield in Star Trek, and that bubble dampens all the negative energy and irritations around you that prevent you from focusing properly.
Are you done with the work you needed the focus for? Then just turn the bubble off again.
Volume button
Another technique similar to this is the volume button. You then visualize a kind of volume knob with which you turn up or down irritations that prevent you from focusing.
Hypnotic suggestions
Thoughts that bother you during work, for example about the quality of the work or the deadline can be very disturbing when you just want to focus on your work. Hypnotic suggestions can then help change your thinking. A hypnotist can help you find the right hypnotic suggestions that you can repeat yourself during self-hypnosis, these can be for example:
"I stay in the here and now with my mind."
"When I get distracted I take 3 deep breaths and focus back on my work."
"The quality of my work is better when I focus on my work."
These are just examples of hypnotic suggestions. Depending on the problems and beliefs you have with your concentration, a hypnotherapist may choose to give you other suggestions for self-hypnosis.
Visualization
Unsure about how something will go in the future? Then a (guided) visualization can help you have less anxiety about the event in the future.
For example, if you’re giving a presentation at work and keep getting distracted by fears of criticism from colleagues during the presentation or something else, visualizing the perfect scenario can help reduce that anxiety. In visualization, you don’t just picture what the situation looks like. You also visualize how you feel ( confident), how you stand, what your facial expression looks like, how you answer questions well-prepared, how people react during the presentation, and how you stay calm if something threatens to go wrong. You also visualize how everything feels—the temperature at the venue, a breeze on your face, things like that.
If you find it difficult to visualize this on your own, a hypnotherapist can help you with a guided visualization. This can then also serve as inspiration for a visualization that you then perform yourself.
Increase concentration
So hypnosis is great for restoring your ability to concentrate. You can also use these techniques to permanently increase your concentration when you actually no longer have concentration problems at all. So these tips you already have.
There are also a number of other practical tips you can apply for increasing your ability to concentrate.
Implement routines
Having routines during and before work can help increase your concentration. This is also a technique used by athletes to maintain focus during a competition.
A clear daily schedule can be incredibly helpful in keeping your focus because you know what's coming.
Making a to-do list can be very helpful in this regard. To maintain a routine, you can divide your day into day parts and divide your to-do list into those day parts. For example, in the morning you do all the hard stuff and in the afternoon you do the easier stuff, such as checking your e-mail.
Move
Are you distracted and falling asleep? Then get up and do 10 squats and push yourself up 5 times. Or otherwise move briefly. This raises your heart rate and your brain needs to do something other than think for a very short time. This mini-break then allows you to refocus better on your task. In addition, this can improve your creativity, allowing you to solve a problem you're worrying about faster.
Eat Healthy
Absolutely, a healthy diet can affect your ability to concentrate. Vitamin B12 and magnesium, for example, are good for your brain. Magnesium is important for reducing muscle tension, which is a key factor in improving your ability to concentrate. Your emotions affect your body, and muscle tension and how your body feels, in turn, affect your emotions. If your body is tense, it can make you feel tense, and that can be incredibly distracting.
Concentration pills
If you can eat to improve your concentration, wouldn't just a pill be enough to make your concentration problems disappear? Unfortunately not always, as this depends largely on the cause for the impaired ability to concentrate.
Do you have a physical cause? Then nutritional supplements can reduce that cause. Omega 3, vitamin B12 and magnesium, for example, are very helpful in keeping your nervous system healthy, and this can be good for your ability to concentrate.
However, if the cause lies in uncertainties about the future, time pressure, or something else, then it’s truly important to eliminate those uncertainties and use mental techniques to reduce your concentration problems. Hypnosis is a technique that often has a significant enough impact after just one session to restore your ability to concentrate.
Would you like to learn more about hypnosis? Then come to the workshop or take a course at the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands.
Sources:
The Psychology of Concentration in Sport Performers: A Cognitive Analysis, A. Moran; 2016