Difficulty keeping your attention on everyday tasks is a common problem for women approaching menopause. Mindfulness for concentration can help you build the mental muscle to keep your train of thought.
An inability to focus, general forgetfulness, or difficulties concentrating for long periods of time, or on complex tasks, become more common in midlife. Hormone fluctuations are partly to blame. Oestrogen effects the production of three neurotransmitters which are important for your cognitive ‘thinking’ abilities, so when you are short of these, you cannot concentrate as well.
And other symptoms of the peri- and menopause do not help. Lack of sleep, general fatigue, depression, anxiety and stress can all impact your ability to think and focus. Which can cause problems at home and in the workplace.
How mindfulness for concentration can help
Mindfulness and concentration sit side by side. Mindfulness is all about our ability to be in the present moment, without self-judgement or criticism. As such mindfulness has been shown to help rewire the brain, strengthening areas associated with focus and concentration.
Research has shown that the brain areas that produce norepinephrine and serotonin – two of the neurotransmitters important for concentration – grow in size over the course of an eight-week mindfulness training course.
Learning mindfulness can also help you set aside distractions and be more compassionate towards yourself when you are finding it hard to concentrate. And mindfulness helps some of the other problems that inhibit concentration, such as anxiety and stress.
Overall mindfulness helps concentration because with practice, you get better at noticing when your mind has wandered off. Which gives you chance to bring your attention back. And the more you return to your focus – whether on your breath, or an object – the better you get at maintaining the focus.
Five ways to boost your focus
There are other things you can also do to help yourself.
- Take care of your diet. Include Omega 3 and 6 (found in fish and walnuts, for example). Get enough VItamin D, from time outside or supplements, and cut back on caffeine, alcohol and sugar.
- Prioritise getting quality sleep. See my blog on sleep problems for ways to improve your sleep.
- Regular physical exercise, including some aerobic and some resistance work, is beneficial for your whole body and can help lift your mood.
- Give your brain a workout – try puzzles, travel somewhere new, learn a new task. Maybe take up a creative hobby that you find absorbing, to help you practice concentrating.
- Do one task at a time. Paying attention to single tasks, rather than multi-tasking, is associated with higher levels of satisfaction. And improves your chances of concentrating well.
To help boost your focus, try this mindfulness exercise. Read a book for 30 minutes, setting a timer to alert you every five minutes. At each alert, ask yourself, ‘has my mind wandered?’ If so, bring your attention back to your book. This trains you to notice when your mind wanders and strengthens your ability to maintain focus on a single task.
Mindfulness for concentration is simple, but not easy. It takes time, but you can literally rewire your brain for greater focus. Try this practice using your breath as an anchor, to improve your concentration. It is 12 minutes long.
Mindfulness tip: mindfulness is an exercise for the parts of your brain involved in concentration.
