Menopausal mind-funk

I have had a heck of a time concentrating for the past 48 or so hours (not helped by virtually no sleep at all for two nights due to constant waking with hot flashes).

I can think clearly (if somewhat laterally) most of the time, but for the past couple of days I keep reading the same sentence or paragraph over and over again, and cannot make any sense of it, mostly from a complete inability to concentrate for more than 3 seconds on anything. My mind keeps wandering all over the map, and to the most irrelevant and unrelated things.

"You really have to get to work on that garden." "The chicken soup you made yesterday was good...but you needed bread with it. Pity the noodles have soaked up the remaining broth in the soup...it would have made a good lunch." "I wonder how Dad is doing visiting Donna in Italy." "Did I take my shot this morning?" "I really should get myself a kitten. The house is lonely without a cat around."

And so on, and so on ...

All of it is a constant distraction to whatever task is at hand. I am not even going to admit how long it actually took me to get the vegetables ready for the soup, but it was well over 10 times as long as it should have taken. I would notice something on the coffee counter, and stop the chopping to go and clean it. And then would chop two mushrooms more before deciding I needed something from my office (no idea what or why), would go upstairs for it, and forget what it was by the time I reached the top, only to have the idea pop back up the minute I started the chopping again. It has been like that since mid-Monday, and I am truly getting nowhere fast. At the best of times I distract incredibly easily, which drives my sister Donna quite nuts, but these past couple of days seen my distractibility quotient rise to an entirely new level.

There is a set of funny 'prayers' for the Myers-Briggs personality types that a friend found once and passed over to me. I am Myers-Briggs type ENFP (Extraverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving), and the prayer for my type is "God, help me to keep my mind on one th--Oh, Look...a bird!--ing at a time." That is so-o-o Me, except that I rarely return to the original thought!

Sometimes I can focus quite intently, to the exclusion of everything around me. (When I was renting the second kitchen at a restaurant in Kingston for my small business, the restaurant's head chef used to climb very quietly up the stairs, stand right behind me and, after making sure I didn't have a knife or anything else dangerous in my hand, say 'boo!' right into my ear. I was always caught totally off guard and would jump clear out of my skin. He never tired of that game, saying that he liked my 'finely-tuned flight response'.)

I have a bunch of banked overtime at work, and I am thinking that rather than sit here and try to accomplish things when I am in this state that I should go through all the busy-work I have to do--which should take about half an hour--and then use up some of that banked time getting distracted from household chores rather than my job.