A drawn-out stressful situation can make simple tasks feel more difficult than they used to be. I experienced it myself since my German Consulate Office in Davao reopened. Both, my consulate clients and I got the same feelings.
Feel like you can’t concentrate on anything at the moment? You’re not alone. The extra anxiety caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has impaired our working memory, experts say. As writer and journalist, Kate Morgan stresses several days ago: we all know the feeling. You walk into a room with a mission and then stop, confused, and a little disjointed, realizing you have completely forgotten why you’re there.
Since the coronavirus’ spread began, almost all of us have been having that feeling of forgetting why I’m in another room dozens of times a day. We're finding it almost impossible to focus on anything at all.
I can’t keep a phone number in my head long enough to dial it, and it takes forever to write a simple email. I start in on a task, and it’s only a few minutes before I’m distracted. My productivity has plummeted. Meanwhile, when at my home office alone, it's getting better step by step...
What was happening, is a malfunction of working memory: the ability to grasp incoming information, form it into a cohesive thought, and hold onto it long enough to do what you need to with it. “Think of it as the mental platform for our cognitive operations, for what we’re thinking now,” says Matti Laine, a professor of psychology at Åbo Akademi University in Finland. “Working memory is closely related to attention. You’re focusing on some task, some goal, some directive or behavior you want to get accomplished.”
In other words, working memory is the ability to reason in real-time, and it’s a big part of what makes the human brain so powerful. But research has shown that rapidly changing circumstances, worry, and anxiety can all have a significant impact on your ability to focus.
Rapidly-changing circumstances, worry, and anxiety can all have a significant impact on your ability to focus
“Long before the pandemic, we completed an online study with a large group of American adults who filled out self-assessment questionnaires,” says Laine. “We saw a trend of a negative relationship between anxiety and working memory. The higher the anxiety, the lower the working memory performance.” When you’re having an acute anxious experience – say, someone, threatening is walking behind you on your way home in the dark – it means you might have trouble recalling the details of their face. A drawn-out stressful situation can also ravage the working memory, making even the simplest tasks feel more difficult than they used to be.
“We’re talking about anxiety and stress that’s not acute,” says Laine. “It’s related to a deeply uncertain future. You don’t know – does it continue this summer, this autumn? Nobody knows. It’s leading us to a more chronic anxiety situation.”
New situations. New experiences.
While collecting data for an as-yet-unpublished study on working memory training this spring, Laine says he and his team asked about 200 people from the UK and North America whether they had anxiety specifically linked to the pandemic.
Sustained anxiety can also cause insomnia, explains Oliver Robinson of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. “Lack of sleep is a really good way of impairing working memory,” he says. “If you’re not sleeping as well, that’s a great way to wreck it.”
Even if you’re not explicitly aware of being more on edge, “it’s something you’re processing,” adds Robinson. Working memory problems might also be due in part to a cognitive load that’s overwhelming your brain’s capacity.
Ducking out to the shops used to be a mundane activity. Now with Covid-19, there are many more steps in the process that increase anxiety and mental load, wrote Kate Morgan.
The good news is you can exercise working memory. There are lots of ‘brain games’ out there, but playing most of them, experts agree, doesn’t do anything except make you better at that game. “Cognitive training games don’t make me better at remembering my shopping list,” says Robinson. “That’s like trying to train people to play tennis by having them run.”
In other words, rebooting your working memory may also mean cutting down on your news consumption and considering a break from social media. But the most effective thing to do might simply be to convince yourself it’s OK to be struggling. That helped me a lot for several days....
