The waiting mode: another spoke in the wheel of our ability to concentrate

The day to day passes like an almost inevitable cycle of running from here to there with all the tasks that have to be done.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
30 August 2023 Wednesday 11:16
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The waiting mode: another spoke in the wheel of our ability to concentrate

The day to day passes like an almost inevitable cycle of running from here to there with all the tasks that have to be done. Work, studies, errands, an endless number of things that, often without hardly knowing how, end up coming out. Then comes the time to sleep and, the next morning, start over. So why does it seem like the days when you have the most time to attend some sort of appointment are the most time wasted? This happens when you fall into waiting mode or the inability to concentrate on a nearby event.

Sometimes you don't realize it until you have realized that you have found yourself in the same situation several times. Especially when, having realized it, he makes sure that the next time will be very different. And yet the pattern repeats itself again. That behavior of doing nothing and feeling that one is in the "wait mode", for which this phenomenon receives its name. But what exactly does it consist of?

The “waiting mode”, translated into Spanish as the waiting mode, has to do with a problem related to the regulation of the attention and concentration capacity that occurs before the proximity of an event or social gathering. This causes people to be totally inactive even hours before the appointed appointment. In that time that elapses between the current moment and the time of the event, people who get stuck in the “waiting mode” are unable to perform, start or finish tasks.

This is due to a combination of anxiety caused by the closeness of the meeting and, in turn, the feeling of wasting time instead of carrying out activities that are productive. Which creates even more anxiety. Certain profiles of people, such as those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, depression or anxiety-related disorders, have a greater tendency to experience it.

If you have detected a certain propensity to get caught up in this state of waiting before meetings or social events, there are some formulas to prevent it from happening again. One of them is to start a task that does not require a lot of energy, one that is simple and maybe even tempting due to some type of interest that arouses. This will help you get out of that phase of inaction.

Another effective tip is to put all those ruminating thoughts that anxiety generates on paper. For this, it is recommended to write them in such a way that they remain there expressed and extracted from the mind, where they agglomerate. It is also a good technique when organizing the tasks that you want to do before the appointment.