Why can't I focus when someone is talking to me?

How to focus around talking, and during conversations

1. Mask nearby speech. If colleagues talk near you, use noise-cancelling headphones with steady sound such as brown noise or instrumental music without lyrics, which makes speech harder to make out.
2. Save verbal tasks for quiet times. Writing, reading and calculation are most vulnerable to overheard speech. Do them when the room is quiet and keep routine, visual tasks for busy periods.
3. Turn towards the speaker. In conversation, face the person and look at their face. Lip movements and expressions give your brain extra cues and reduce effort.
4. Stop rehearsing your reply. Planning what you'll say next takes the same mental resources as listening. Let the person finish, then pause before answering.
5. Summarise back. Say "So you're saying…" every few minutes. It keeps you engaged and catches anything you missed before it becomes a problem.
6. Reduce competing noise. Pick a quieter table, turn off the TV or move away from the coffee machine for important conversations.

Why other people's speech is so distracting

Your brain can't simply switch off language processing. Classic experiments by Salamé and Baddeley showed that people remembered sequences of digits worse when speech played in the background, even in a language they didn't understand, while plain noise of the same loudness had much less effect. Researchers call this the irrelevant speech effect: changing speech sounds get into verbal working memory automatically and compete with whatever you are holding there.

In conversation, the challenge is different. Following someone means continuously decoding words, linking them to what came before and suppressing your own thoughts. Background noise, a tired brain or a hearing loss make the job much harder. The NIDCD notes that some people have difficulty processing sounds despite normal hearing, particularly in noisy places; an audiologist can test for this if conversations regularly feel exhausting.

Common mistakes

• Using music with lyrics to drown out talkers, which adds yet more speech to process.
• Nodding along when you've lost the thread instead of asking the person to repeat.
• Trying to write a report in an open office at its busiest time.
• Assuming you're just not listening hard enough when hearing difficulty might be the cause.