Promoting attentional health: importance to women's lives

Promoting attentional health is an important opportunity to support and empower women to actively participate in their own health care and function effectively in multiple roles. Attention, the ability to focus or concentrate, is a necessary cognitive resource used throughout the life span in participating in self-health care. However, women can inadvertently overuse this essential capacity, especially when responding to life's multiple demands, resulting in mental or attentional fatigue. When women experience this mental fatigue, many daily activities, including self-health care, are more difficult. An attentional perspective in women's health allows approaches to improve daily functioning and reduce the risk of attentional fatigue. In this article we present the conceptual dimensions of directed attention and its relevance to women's health; practice and research implications are identified.