Concentrate

I once heard a blonde joke that went like this:

Why did the blonde stare at the orange juice carton for an hour?

Because it said “concentrate”.

I have nothing against blondes, but I remembered this joke when I thought about how we focus our attention when we concentrate. Focusing our attention on specific objects and ignoring others is called selective attention[1]. As college students, this is something we often have to practice—when we work on a paper, study for an exam, and even listen to a friend. On a general level, when we talk about long-term goals, we have to focus our attention on the things that will help us achieve those goals. A quote by Andy Stanley says, "Direction, not intention, determines our destination." Peter Tanchi added to this by saying that it is our attention that determines our direction which determines our destination. So what we pay attention to in our everyday life will determine our where we're going.

But what is life without stress? We already know about some physiological effects of stress, but have you ever thought about the effect of stress on attention, specifically selective attention? A study by Hedva Braunstein-Bercovitz[2] looked into just that.

The study involved two negative priming (NP) experiments. Negative priming is the slowing down of processing of a stimulus after the stimulus has been ignored. To make this clearer, a NP experiment involves a pair of displays per trial. The prime display in this experiment contained three numbers, the center number being the attended stimulus, and the two identical flankers being the ignored stimulus. The probe display shown after the prime display will have either the same target as in the prime display (attended repetition or AR condition), the flanker from the prime display as target (ignored repetition or IR condition), or a new target (control or C condition). Response times were recorded for each trial and NP was exhibited by a slowed response time to a target stimulus that was previously ignored.

Experiment 1 tested the effect of perceptual load on selective attention in a low-stress condition. Load was manipulated by adding a shape similar to the target stimulus in the high-load condition. Experiment 2 tested the effect of stress on selective attention. Stress was induced by increasing task difficulty and relating task performance with intelligence in order to affect the self-esteem of the participants in the high-stress condition. The results showed that in the low-stress condition, NP was lower and, therefore, selective attention was lower in the high-load condition. The high-stress condition, on the other hand, yielded opposite results: higher selective attention in the low-load condition. In other words, stress does indeed impair selective attention.

This tells us that if we want to concentrate better, we have to lessen the distractions (perceptual load) in our environment (which most of us already know and do), and we have to deal with our stress effectively. We can’t always control the difficulty of the tasks we do, but we can use stress relievers to lessen the stress and help us focus. We should just be wise in the use of stress relievers so that they themselves don’t become distractions.;)

Click here for one type of stress reliever I would recommend. Enjoy!:)