World's tiniest attention span! :/

[Spongeballz]

I'm not kidding, I have the world's tiniest attention span. It's preventing me from working for uni, I can't concentrate in my lectures, I do about 2 minutes of an essay then get distracted by literally ANYTHING, there seems no way of preventing it! It's procrastination to a new level, I've tried erradicating all distractions, for example yesterday I sat in the library most of the night to do an essay for today, and managed to get distracted just by a window, by food, even by my own finger for christ sakes, I started playing games with it. I have no idea how to erradicate this and actually focus :(
Have managed to get an extension on this particular essay, hence the time to post here, but it's seriously worrying. And this isn't just work, it's everything. I'm zoning out in almost every conversation I have, am losing interest halfway through playing games or singing, am even losing track of where I am in my own utterances because I'm boring myself, nothing can hold my attention. I mean it's always been a slight problem, but this is just ridiculous. Any suggestions would be more than welcome, this is driving me insane >.<

[PokerFace]

I have this problem! Anxiety definatley made it worse but I've always been very easily distracted. Don't worry, I do it in conversations, when I'm watching TV, pretty much everything! I'll sit down to watch the tele and about half an hour later I'll zone back in and have NO idea what's been going on in it even though I've been staring at the tele so!

Maybe, for when you're doing your school work, set yourself little breaks so it doesn't seem so much like distraction. Maybe every half hour you can get up and walk around the room a couple of times so your brain has seen something new then get back to work for another half an hour and so on! Of course, it doesn't have to be done in half hourly slots, you can make up a time limit that suits you.

Anxiety is probably making this a bit worse for you too because it makes us so preoccupied. We're used to thinking about 100 things at once (usually what ifs) so concentrating on 1 thing for a long amount of time is hard to do. So, for the non school related zoning outs, are you getting enough sleep at night/eating right? I know things like that get in the way of everyones concentration.

Hope this helped a little bit xx

[deepreason]

I think you mentioned you've recently started taking Citalopram in another post? That could have a bearing.

[vickyh]

I too have that problem, especially at work. But I just set myself one small thing to do at a time and that seems to help. Listening to conversations is the hardest as I really zone out in them. I am taking Citalopram, only started a few days ago and have been experiencing some side effects, i think this may be linked but I guess in a couple of weeks I will start to feel better. I have found setting out what i need to do in the day and just breaking it up into small chunks has helped.

[paula lynne]

I have a tiny attention sp..........


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