Introduction
It will be difficult for you to focus on your daily activities if you are suffering from major depressive disorder (MDD). For instance, you may find it difficult to follow the plot of a novel or a daily show. You might experience troubles when it comes to remembering tasks or following instructions. All these signs are considered as the normal signs of a mental health illness is known as depression. But, in order to develop your focus skills, there are many strategies and techniques that you can learn to develop yourself.
Major depressive disorder (MDD) means if you are feeling sad without any reason and going through that phase for a long time. Emotions such as joy, excitement, surprise, sadness, anger, fear, contempt, disgust, shame, and guilt are a part of life. There are many incidents in our life that we don’t wish to happen will occur some times. From that point of life, people go through and experience a range of emotions, sometimes people get depressed and stay in that period for such a long time.
Sadness, tearfulness, emptiness, hopelessness, angry outbursts, irritability or frustration, loss of interest or pleasure in most or all daily activities, difficulty in sleeping or sleeping too much, tiredness, lack of energy, showing minimal interest in all the activities, reduced appetite, weight loss, anxiety, agitation, restlessness, slowed thinking, speaking or body movements, feelings of worthlessness or guilt, fixating on past failures or self-blame, trouble thinking, unable to concentrate on the things, difficult to make decisions or taking bad decisions that results in terrible loss to company or himself, facing difficulties when it comes to remembering things, always thinking about death, or getting frequent thoughts about death, suicidal thoughts, or making attempts to commit suicide and unexplained physical problems such as back pain or headaches.
People who are suffering from the major depressive disorder will face lots of struggles in their life because depression will make it hard to focus on one’s problems and it will result in unable to resolve the issue. For children, lack of concentration due to major depressive disorder will result in the loss of interest in studies due to the poor marks in the examination.
Depression in teens leads to dangerous activities such as committing suicide or getting frequent thoughts about suicide and trying to commit suicide in various ways. They also face struggles in society due to their bad image. Most of the teenagers who are unable to concentrate on the things may feel worthless, irritability, sadness, anger, minimal interest in normal activities, and using recreational drugs or alcohol.
The effect of losing concentration:
Are you facing difficulty in concentrating? Well! You are not the only person. Based on the study conducted at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the absence of concentration is the usual symptom of depression.
To even make minor decisions, one faces trouble, because of a lack of concentration. One of the reasons depressions has such a huge social effect, is not being able to concentrate based on research in PloS ONE.
You can be psychologically affected by depression:
Several areas of the brain are injured, when the person is going through depression. Which leads to conditions like the hippocampus and amygdala. The attention spans gets affected, as the volume of the hippocampus gets smaller. The functioning of the neural circuits also alters. When there are several situations where the depression is not treated, the seriousness of the symptoms that are mentioned above increases. These alterations in the brain make it difficult to concentrate when you going through a state of depression.
Keep a tab on the sugar levels of your blood:
In people who experienced depression and the people who are not going through expression low levels of blood sugar is a huge issue. You focus can be increased by regulating the blood sugar levels in an efficient manner. Increased levels of blood sugar levels have a bad influence on depression and intellectual operations, based on research in the International Journal of Diabetes in developing countries. The increased levels of blood sugar cause symptoms like losing concentration and declining memory power to get more worse and severe.
Have a word with your physician regarding drugs
People who are suffering from major depressive disorder (MDD) may already start taking antidepressant drugs. Your physician may suggest to you if you are not using the antidepressant medications. But before choosing an antidepressant drug consulting your healthcare provider regarding the which type of antidepressant medication works best for you. As you are not aware of the side effects of the drug it’s better to discuss with your physician.
Your physician will assess the overall condition of your body and recommend the best type of antidepressant drug works best for you. Consult your doctor immediately if you still have problems concentration while using the antidepressant medications and he may advise you to try a different drug or he will look for any underlying conditions in your body causing this problem.
Following are the antidepressant drugs that work well in improving concentration than others.
Bupropion: This antidepressant drug used in the treatment of depression and increase the levels of feel-good hormones such as serotonin and dopamine. This will ultimately result in improving your mood and boost your focus.
Vortioxetine: This medication is new to the market and very helpful in improving cognitive abilities along with the concentration.
Duloxetine: It belongs to the class of serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) medication and can increase your concentration levels.
Escitalopram: This antidepressant drug belongs to the category of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and showed positive results in improving cognitive abilities such as the speed of information processing, and pattern recognition.
You may need to add another medication along with the older drugs. Because certain physicians prescribe their patients some new drugs known as stimulant medications and the people get benefitted by adding these drugs to their treatment plan. These drugs include
- Methylphenidate (Ritalin)
- Modafinil (Provigil)
Stimulant medications are known to increase cognitive abilities such as concentration, attention, memory and also treat some of the symptoms of depression.
Look for a therapist who can give you cognitive-emotional training
In order to treat your depression problem, your physician follows two types of standard procedures, one is therapy and the other one is prescribing medications. you may already start seeing a therapist for the treatment of the major depressive disorder (MDD), but we would advise you to ask your therapist to train you on improving cognitive abilities such as memory and concentration. This training is known as cognitive-emotional training. You will learn how to control yourself, and how to manage more responsibilities during the course of this training.
It will also help you how to react in emotional situations, how to handle and tackle the situation. This training is all about using your brainpower and how well you are concentrating while you are trying to find the solution to the problem. As a result of this research, researchers found that people are able to concentrate well on their tasks and this study is published in the Anxiety and depression association of America.
Role of Exercise in treating MDD:
Everyone in this world gets benefitted from doing physical exercises. This is absolutely true when it comes to the people who are suffering from major depressive disorder (MDD). You have to make efforts to do these physical exercises, even though it’s hard for you. Doing these exercises daily will minimize the levels of blood sugar, which will ultimately result in the improvement of your mood and health. It has been observed that exercise can improve the overall mood of a person, memory, increases the concentration levels and is published in the Journal of Clinical and Diagnostic Research. Hitting gym 5 times a week and doing work out for 30 minutes in a day will boost the concentration levels of the person.
Doing Meditation and reducing the outside distractions
In order to improve your concentration levels, trying meditation perhaps helps. It has been observed that meditation reduces stress in people who are above 45 years of age based on research conducted in aging and mental health report. This theory can also be applied to all age groups which means that meditation helps reduce stress in all age groups.
We would advise you to begin with shorter duration’s of meditation and gradually increase the time and also the sessions. Several apps have been developed to assist you in the mediation process if you are not aware of the meditation procedure.
It is really difficult to focus on this modern world as there are numerous distractions. It becomes difficult to concentrate on a single activity if you are juggling through several tasks. We would advise you to perform single tasks at one time. For example, using your smartphone while watching T.V, switch off either TV or smartphone.
Be Self-Confident
Not being self-confident is one of the usual features of major depressive disorder (MDD). Not having a belief that you cannot achieve something can also mean that you might not even try. But backing yourself to get to know new things enhances your confidence and builds up your brain.
Lack of concentration levels is one of the most common symptoms of major depressive disorder (MDD), but people can manage it. Trying the right form of treatment that suits you will automatically improve your concentration levels.
Sirisha B