In this older and more bookish sense, distracted means your mind is in pieces: you are so anxious or upset that you cannot think clearly. She was too distracted with worry to eat. He gave a distracted smile, still on the hospital phone call. It sits close to distraught — pulled apart by feeling — and you will meet it in stories more than in the corridor. Though actually, most people now use distracted in a milder way: your attention has been pulled off to something else, a phone, a noise, a worry that is not quite panic. “Don’t get distracted.” “I got distracted and missed the stop.” Both are real. Teachers almost always mean the attention sense. The anxious sense is the one novels still reach for when a character cannot gather their thoughts. If you only learn the phone sense, the book sense will surprise you; if you only learn the book sense, everyday English will sound too heavy.