And hello to you and welcome to the Richard Nichols podcast, the Personal Development

podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate and motivate you to be the best you can be.

I'm psychotherapist Richard Nichols and this is episode 214. It's titled Mental Focus.

And if you're ready, we'll start the show.

Hello, hello! It's a new month, or at least it will be when it goes live, because I'm recording this on what would normally be

the bank holiday Monday at the end of May and it's not actually June until Wednesday.

But instead of a bank holiday Monday, we've got a bank holiday Thursday this year to commemorate

the Queen, making it to 70 years on the throne. And they're

given us a bank holiday Friday as well. So this week, everyone's trying to cram in a week's

worth of work into three days. Good luck, folks. So there's a lot going on, although even without that,

people are saying to me that it's been

quite hard to concentrate lately. Maybe people are trying to catch up on their socialising when

they had two years of doing less of it, and now they're making up for lost time. I don't know.

Maybe a lot of us are just trying to do extra hours at work to try and pay off the loan we took

out just so we could heat the house and put

fuel in the car. Whatever it is, I know I'm not alone in feeling a bit out of focus lately.

So, when we lose our concentration, our mental focus, it is definitely worth looking at what's

going on, because there are lots of reasons as

to why it might be happening, and some not so obvious ones as well, actually. It's not always,

because we've got too much on and don't know what to do first. Sometimes it can be plain old

procrastination. I've met many clients who come to me for help with

their studies, for example, because they can't concentrate and they're easily distracted, and they want

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