If you’ve been finding it harder than usual to focus because there is too much happening externally to you, you’re not alone.

It’s like trying to do serious cognitive work inside of a jungle gym full of kids. The background hum of uncertainty creates a distracting environment that makes it difficult to sit down and think deeply, to write the next section of the grant, to engage fully in a mentoring conversation, or to simply do the work that brought you to research in the first place.

The current landscape—shifting funding priorities, institutional budget pressures, broader policy uncertainty—has created conditions that are difficult to work inside of. How can we stay focused with so much else demanding our attention? Especially when some of those external shifts seem more consequential than the day-to-day of running experiments, meeting with collaborators, or thinking about where the research should go next.

We’re not going to tell you that the uncertainty isn’t real, or that a good morning routine will fix it. This article is about the practical aspects: what tends to help researchers stay connected to their work when the external environment is doing its best to pull attention away.

Why Turmoil Disrupts Focus Differently

Most PIs are no strangers to pressure. Grant deadlines, publication timelines, departmental commitments, the rhythms of a busy research group… these create stress, but it’s a familiar kind. There are patterns to them, and those patterns allow for planning.

External turmoil is different because it’s unpredictable and ongoing. When funding mechanisms shift without warning, when colleagues in your network are facing real disruptions to their programs, your nervous system responds even when there’s nothing immediately actionable to do. The result is a kind of chronic low-level vigilance that competes directly with the sustained concentration research requires. This competition shows up in lots of ways: difficulty getting started on writing, shortened attention during meetings, a nagging unease that doesn’t have a clear source. Also, it is harder to focus on the long arc of your research program when the people and projects you’ve invested in feel at risk. 

What all of this means is that you’re having a very human response to a situation that feels threatening. But even this very real response can feel somehow wrong when you see colleagues who seem to be able to focus on, and do, all the things as well as ever.

Being aware of what’s happening and how it’s affecting your connection to your work is an important step. The goal isn’t to force focus as if the situation isn’t what it is. It’s to make deliberate choices about where your attention goes—and then protect those choices.

Focus on What’s Within Your Control

One of the most reliable touchpoints in a turbulent environment is a clear-eyed accounting of what is and isn’t within our individual control right now. A practical step that helps: write down both lists. Seeing them separated on the page makes it easier to notice when your attention is zeroed in on the out of control parts (which feels bad!), and to consciously redirect it. For example:

Outside your control:

• Federal budget decisions and programmatic shifts at funding agencies
• The broader policy climate
• How your institution or colleagues are affected

Within your control:

• The experiment that needs to run this week
• The mentee check-in you’ve been meaning to schedule
• The manuscript draft waiting for one more revision pass
• Staying current on institutional guidance and funder requirements

Deliberately putting energy toward the second list allows for action, which often alleviates anxiety. Note that this isn’t the same as disengaging from things that matter professionally. Staying informed and taking action in ways that feel possible for you are legitimate uses of time and energy. The distinction is between engaged awareness and passive, repetitive monitoring and dissecting that consumes hours without producing anything of value.

Work a Shorter Time Horizon, for Now

Long-range planning is one of the first casualties of uncertainty. When it’s not clear whether our position or funding will still look the same in two years, building a five-year vision can feel disconnected from reality or even impossible. But abandoning this expansive thinking tends to demotivate further.

One reframe that helps: give yourself permission to work on a shorter time horizon, temporarily. Not indefinitely, and not as a permanent abandonment of the bigger vision, but as a practical acknowledgment that right now, the useful unit of planning might be months rather than years. When conditions stabilize, returning to the longer view is worth the effort.

A few questions to center your short-horizon plan:

• What can we accomplish in the next quarter that would be meaningful regardless of what happens with funding?
• Which experiments, manuscripts, or mentoring investments hold their value under a range of future conditions?
• What would it mean for the group to finish something (anything) in the next 30 days?

A short list of three to five concrete priorities, written down and shared with the group if appropriate, can do a lot to replace a sense of being adrift with a sense of direction. And finishing something contributes a lot to counteract the feeling of treading water that turmoil produces.

Protect Some Time for Deep Work

Research is a heavily cognitive task that often requires periods of uninterrupted focus and the mental space to gain that focus.

When external cues are constantly bombarding us, that space erodes first. The inbox fills with updates, the news cycle demands attention, colleagues want to process together, and the calendar absorbs what used to be protected writing or thinking time. Each of these feels justified in the moment, because many of them are. But the cumulative effect can be weeks where the core intellectual work barely advances.

Still, protecting time for deep work is one of the most important things you can do for yourself and your program right now. If you haven’t mapped where your best energy is actually going, start there. The PI Energy Audit walks you through exactly this kind of assessment and can help you identify where the erosion is happening.

Even a few hours a week, with notifications off, the door closed, or the location changed, can make a meaningful difference. Treat that time like a meeting you can’t move. Block it on the calendar and let the people around you know what it’s for. To help yourself focus during those times, plan ahead for what you’re going to work on, read, or think about. Give yourself a few mini-goals for progress. And remind yourself that you can still check in for updates later, but that you’ll feel better having come away with something for your time and effort.

Talk About It, Honestly and in Moderation

One of the more isolating features of sustained uncertainty is the sense that everyone else is managing fine, even when nearly everyone around us is navigating the same thing and is most likely not fine. Talking honestly about what’s happening lessens that isolation, and shared challenges enable shared resilience.

There’s a balance, of course. Expressing constant anxiety to your team creates a different kind of problem because group members take emotional cues from their leaders. But staying completely silent signals either that you’re not paying attention, that the difficulty isn’t supposed to be named, or that anyone who feels is experiencing the situation as a difficulty is doing something wrong.

If it’s difficult for you as leader to set the emotional tone, ensure adequate time and space for you to process what you’re feeling first. For example, seek out peers and mentors outside your group, those with whom you can speak more candidly because you’re not in a position of leadership over them. And, know when you’ve had enough discussion. Sometimes you might find it most beneficial to redirect conversations to something neutral or positive so that you don’t feel like you’re always being pulled back toward the negative.

Hold on to the Longer View

Your work contributes something of value: to your field, to those you mentor, to the public, and hopefully to your own fulfillment. Even if your periods of focus are more brief than they used to be, don’t give up. The goal right now isn’t to have everything figured out. It’s to stay connected to the work, protect your capacity to do it, and keep going.

What’s one thing within your control that you could act on this week?