For many people, difficulty concentrating is a familiar experience during periods of stress or emotional turmoil.
Whether it’s the mind drifting during a conversation or zoning out in front of a screen, lapses in attention often coincide with moments of persistent worry or rumination.
But are these just parallel symptoms—or part of a reinforcing cycle?
A new study by Paige L. DeGennaro and colleagues, published in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders (2025), explores the daily interplay between difficulty concentrating and perseverative thought, also known as repetitive negative thinking.
The researchers found a two-way relationship: moments of increased difficulty concentrating predicted more repetitive negative thoughts later in the day, and vice versa.
This bidirectional link suggests that struggles with focus and patterns of persistent worry may sustain one another in everyday life.
Perseverative thought refers to persistent, intrusive, and hard-to-control thoughts, such as rumination or worry, that are common in conditions like anxiety and depression.
Meanwhile, difficulty concentrating—defined here as a subjective sense of impaired attention—is a core symptom across many mental health disorders, including generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), major depressive disorder (MDD), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Theoretical models have long speculated that these two features may be linked, but most studies have focused on one direction of influence or used artificial laboratory tasks.
To explore how these experiences play out in real time, the study used ecological momentary assessment (EMA), a method that captures thoughts and feelings as they occur in daily life.
The research team at the University of Pittsburgh recruited 200 adult participants, of whom 155 met compliance criteria for inclusion.
Over a two-week period, participants received eight surveys per day via smartphone, prompting them to rate their current levels of difficulty concentrating and perseverative thought.
Participants were oversampled for moderate to severe levels of repetitive thinking, and many met clinical thresholds for anxiety, depression, or stress.
The use of EMA allowed the researchers to detect within-person changes on a moment-to-moment basis—an advantage over studies that rely on retrospective self-reporting or one-time assessments.
The data revealed that higher-than-usual difficulty concentrating at one time point predicted more intense perseverative thought at the next check-in, even after accounting for previous levels of repetitive thinking.
Similarly, when participants reported elevated perseverative thought, they were more likely to struggle with concentration at the next prompt. These effects, though small in size, were statistically significant and consistent across multiple sensitivity analyses.
This pattern supports the idea of a “vicious cycle” between cognitive control difficulties and repetitive negative thoughts.
One possible explanation is that when people are unable to concentrate, they may be more vulnerable to intrusive thoughts. In turn, those thoughts may deplete the attentional resources needed to shift focus or stay on task.
The findings align with existing psychological theories, including the impaired disengagement hypothesis and processing efficiency theory, both of which suggest that worry disrupts attentional control and that such cognitive interference can perpetuate further worry.
The practical relevance of these results lies in their confirmation that subjective experiences of poor concentration and unrelenting thoughts are not just symptoms of distress, but dynamic processes that may sustain or exacerbate one another.
For individuals with anxiety or depression, this could help explain why symptoms feel persistent or hard to interrupt. It also highlights the importance of interventions that target both attention and repetitive thinking.
In everyday terms, the study suggests that managing either component—improving attention or reducing negative thought loops—may have downstream benefits for the other.
This opens the door for dual-target interventions, such as attention training exercises or “just-in-time” strategies that help disrupt worry episodes as they occur.
The authors note several limitations. The study relied on self-reported, momentary ratings rather than objective cognitive performance tasks.
While this allowed for the capture of subjective experience—arguably more relevant in clinical settings—it limits the ability to distinguish between actual deficits in attention and perceptions of being distracted.
Additionally, since the sample included many individuals with elevated distress but was not exclusively clinical, future research in treatment-seeking populations could clarify how these patterns manifest in more severe cases.
Despite these caveats, the research marks a valuable step toward understanding how everyday struggles with focus and persistent negative thoughts may feed into each other.
By showing that these experiences fluctuate together across the day, the study underscores the potential of early, real-time interventions to break the cycle—and perhaps, improve mental health outcomes one moment at a time.
Citation
DeGennaro, P. L., Blendermann, M., Alberts, B., Silk, J. S., Gianaros, P. J., & Hallion, L. S. (2025). A temporal investigation of the relationship between difficulty concentrating and perseverative thought. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 111, 102987. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2025.102987
