I THINK I’m suffering what might be called late-onset attention deficit disorder.

I used to be able to happily read for hours or sit riveted to watch my favourite television series. But these days, I’m up and down like a yo-yo.

Five minutes of reading is often spread across half an hour of breaks to put on the kettle, whip up a batch of cupcakes, tidy up after the kids, go to the loo and maybe make a quick phone call. Even when I’m watching a good movie, I’m generally surfing the web, catching up on emails or browsing ebay.

I think it’s all a matter of focus, or rather lack of it. I’ve been blaming the children, for the constant interruptions that cut through any thought process requiring more than a few seconds.

The other day I had to leap out of the shower with my hair still thick with shampoo after the five-year-old came to tell me the cocker spaniel had stolen the barbecued chicken off the kitchen bench and was devouring it under her bed.

Later, when getting ready to go out, I was left wondering why the hair brush was stuck in my hair, which suddenly had the consistency of barbed wire. A momentary and totally understandable lapse in concentration, right?

But I am convinced that my lack of focus is becoming more pronounced; I find myself unable to relax like I used to.
Once, when I sat down to write, I could type for hours and knock out 30 or more pages of text. Now the instantaneous wonders of microblogging are sucking me in – why labour for hours when you can punch out a quick tweet in 140 characters or less.

In the back of my mind is the knowledge that, should I forget a phone number or what the title of that book is or that name of that fab Indian takeaway, it’s all just a search engine away.
I’m not alone in this, with recent academic studies showing concentration spans and memory retention are decreasing because the internet and social media are leading people to live ever-more frantic lives.

I’m not at all sure if this is a good thing. Memory and the ability to concentrate are much like our muscles. If we don’t use them they shrink and wither. In my case, this might not be ideal but when it comes to our children, who actually might require a good memory and decent span of concentration to achieve whatever they want to achieve in life, well, maybe, this is a phenomenon that requires a lot more attention than it’s getting.