As an absolute bookaholic, I never traveled or studied without books. Then something changed. I would sit down, read a sentence or two, feel an itch in my pocket, check my phone, return to one more line—and give up. Not because the book was bad or because I was busy, but because sustained attention had quietly become one of the hardest things to hold.
The attention economy ate our ability to focus
Every app on your phone is engineered by rooms full of brilliant people whose single job is to keep you inside it for as long as possible. Social media platforms, news sites, and video apps are optimized to hijack attention through short hits of novelty: outrage, reward, repeat.
Over time, your brain rewires itself around this pattern. It starts expecting a new stimulus every few seconds. When you pick up a book—which asks you to stay with one idea, one voice, one world—your brain treats it like sensory deprivation. It protests.
Reading is not difficult because you are lazy. It is difficult because your brain has been trained, very effectively, to need something reading cannot give it. This is not a moral failure. It is a biological response to a designed environment.
Our culture does not treat reading as rest
There is also a cultural story we tell ourselves about productivity. Rest, we are told, looks like switching off—watching TV, scrolling through videos, lying on the couch. Reading, by contrast, feels effortful. When you are already exhausted, doing something that asks more of you can feel backwards.
So reading gets shelved as a ‘someday’ activity: something you will do when you are less busy, when you go on holiday, when life slows down. But life does not slow down, and the book on the nightstand gathers dust.
What we rarely say is that reading, once you push past the first fifteen minutes of resistance, can be deeply restorative. It builds empathy and exercises the imagination in ways passive media cannot. The effort is the point—and the reward is real.
No one taught us how to read as a person
School taught us to read in the technical sense—phonics, vocabulary, comprehension tests. It rarely taught us how to build a reading life: how to choose books we will finish, how to create conditions where reading feels natural, or how to abandon a book that is not working without guilt.
Many people carry an unconscious rule that they must finish every book, that reading has to be educational or serious to count, and that enjoying a thriller or fantasy novel is somehow cheating. Those rules make reading feel like homework. Nobody does homework for fun.
How to actually start—and keep going
Start with five minutes, not fifty. The biggest mistake is deciding to read for an hour and then giving up when you cannot sustain it. Commit to five minutes a day. The goal at first is not the reading; it is the habit of sitting down with a book at all.
Read what you actually want to read. Forget the books you think you should read and the classics sitting on your shelf like a silent accusation. Pick something that makes you want to turn the page.
Put your phone in a different room. Physical distance matters. Reading and smartphones do not coexist well—one of them has to move.
Give a book fifty pages before you judge it. Some stories take time to unfold. If you still hate it at fifty, put it down without guilt. Life is too short for books you dread returning to.
Create a reading environment: a comfortable chair, decent light, a drink you enjoy. Small rituals tell your brain it is time to shift mode. You are not fighting your environment; you are designing it to work for you.
Reading is not a productivity hack. It is a way of borrowing another person’s mind for a while—of living more lives than one, and sitting quietly with an idea until you understand it from the inside.
Our world makes that harder than it has ever been. Harder is not the same as impossible. Start small. Choose freely. Protect the time. The books are waiting.