We’ve noticed a common concern among busy parents, professionals, and folks who are both that usually sounds something like this:
- “I just can’t seem to focus on a book anymore.”
- “I used to read all the time as a kid, but now I don’t.”
- “No book has really interested me or caught my attention in a while.”
- “I don’t have time to read anymore.”
Sometimes these reasons for not reading as much are pretty straightforward. If you work 40+ hours per week and then come home to family responsibilities, you’ll be hard-pressed to find free time.
When that free time comes, it may be less effort and more relaxing to kick your feet up, turn on the TV, and turn off your brain.
But why is that the case? Didn’t we once turn to our favorite book series and authors for the same reasons?
For some of us, reading has become more difficult. Even as our reading comprehension has improved with age and experience, our ability to focus on a book and stay engaged has declined.
Human Brains Seek Out Novelty
One of the things that makes books so appealing in the first place is also a contributor to our inability to focus on them. We’re wired to seek out novelty.
According to Alane K. Daugherty Ph.D., novelty and dopamine go hand-in-hand. In an article for Psychology Today, she writes,
Dopamine is known as a feel-good neurotransmitter. When it is balanced, dopamine contributes to a positive mood and emotions and helps with motivation and goal-directed behavior. [...] A sense of novelty activates the dopamine system directly. As a result, it enhances mood, positive outlook, motivation, and goal setting. A positive sense of novelty has also been shown to increase creativity in dealing with stress, lower perceived stress, and anxiety, and lessen depression
This has multiple implications for us. When it comes to reading and our ability to focus on a book, however, one of the clear takeaways is that we are wired to seek out activities that lead to a strong dopamine hit.
The stronger the dopamine hit, the more likely we are to pursue an activity.
And when that dopamine-inducing activity is nearly effortless? We may not even realize we’re seeking it out.
Our Attention is the Currency of Today’s Economy- And We’re Paying the Price
For effortless hits of dopamine, look no further than the device you’re reading this on.
Today’s phones and computers are designed to pack as much power and functionality into a single device as possible, making it possible to do more, learn more, and interact with more– with as little difficulty as possible– than ever before in human history.
Apps and social media platforms leverage the same bright colors, sounds, alerts, and rewarding feedback loops as casinos to keep us engaged. For many corporations, their ability to generate revenue is directly tied to their ability to keep us on our screens.
As a result, content that keeps us online longer is more likely to be promoted by platforms’ algorithms. The more we interact with content– our screen time, our likes, our comments, our sharing– the more these algorithms learn what will keep us on our devices.
We often end up doing this without realizing it… or wanting it.
If you’re on TikTok, how many times have you opened the app to see a video showing a clip from a TV show positioned above a screen recording of either satisfying or frustrating gameplay, usually of some silly game where the point seems to be collecting a high enough number of some superfluous item?
Or, if you use Facebook or Twitter, what do you often see at the top of your feed when you log in? Is it mundane posts by friends and colleagues, or perhaps something polarizing, flashy, or scary?
Whether we’re talking about split-screen videos that stop you from scrolling away or rage-baiting, the reason we see these posts is not because they’re the best pieces of content available to us. It’s because of algorithm learning that these are the types of things that keep our eyes on the screen.
The more we’re scrolling, the more they’re earning.
How Our Tech Behaviors Influence Our Reading Behaviors
I bring up the attention-grabbing power of algorithms for a few reasons. Most importantly, this algorithm-backed attention economy has conditioned many of us to crave the most engaging forms of novelty at all times.
Books aren’t as passive as interactions with smartphones and favorite social media platforms. To read and focus on a book, we have to consciously decide to take in the words on the page before us and process their meaning.
Doing so is relatively slow. Our eyes aren’t constantly bombarded with something new and different to tickle that part of our brains that revels in color, sound, and novelty.
Additionally, to understand and retain what we’re reading, we often must avoid multi-tasking or taking in simultaneous sensory inputs.
Research confirms what many of us know from experience: background noise, such as music, can have a negative effect on our reading comprehension.
We’re more likely to lose our place on the page, divert our attention when a song changes, or slip into daydreaming if we try to read while listening to music or having the television or YouTube on in the background. The words around us compete with the words on the page for our brain’s limited processing power.
A similar thing happens when listening to an audiobook. If you’re listening to an audiobook and trying to answer a text or scroll through social media, chances are, the narrative in your ears will become jumbled, and you’ll have a hard time recalling what was said.
(In my own experience, that’s why I had to listen to Ambergris by Jeff Vandermeer twice while painting my baseboards.)
While these things make it harder to focus on reading, they make it easier to do something else: getting that novelty-induced hit of dopamine our brains crave.
The more accustomed we are to distractedness, the harder it is to switch into a low-stimulus mode where the surge of novelty is smaller and less frequent.
Going from mindlessly scrolling on our phones– or perhaps even the flurry of activity and notifications that make up the average work day– to a low-stimulation activity like reading can feel like you’re trying to quit smoking cold turkey.
To put it another way, imagine you’ve got the munchies, and someone offers you some raw fruits and veggies or your favorite junk food, but there’s a twist: there’s no real consequence to whatever you pick.
Even if you know that fruits and veggies are technically better for you, and perhaps you even consciously want them because of what they do for your body, you also know that it’s just one serving of your favorite junk food. And you know that junk food will make you happy, even if only temporarily. Besides, you can always have your healthful foods tomorrow. Plus, you’d have to wash and cut the veggies, and on and on and on.
Many of us have the same subconscious thought process regarding our free time. Even if we want to read more, because reading doesn’t come with as instant or as strong of a rush of that fast-acting dopamine, it often loses out to activities with stronger but shorter-term effects on our mood and perceived stress levels.
Even as I wrote the above paragraph, I saw my phone screen light up with a new notification– something I had looked at on Wayfair earlier this week was on sale now– and without thinking about it, I reached for my phone, cleared the notification, and opened Twitter.
Tech’s dopamine influence has put us on autopilot without us even realizing it.
How to Fall Back In Love With Reading Again
With so much competition for our attention and precious, limited downtime, how can we get back to reading like we once did?
Whether your goal is to read more or just feel distracted less, there are a few strategies you can employ to disrupt your brain’s novelty-dopamine-distraction loop.
Use the Brain’s Novelty-Seeking Patterns To Your Advantage
The good news is that the distraction-to-dopamine cycle is not some unwinnable battle. When we’re aware of what’s happening, it’s easier to intervene and break the pattern to have more control over how we spend our time and attention.
Make Your Source of Distraction Less Novel
For most of us, our smartphones are our biggest sources of distraction. For all the reasons we’ve already mentioned, they give us a huge hit of dopamine with very little effort on our parts.
But we’re not anti-tech, and we won’t advocate getting rid of your phone or going back to using a Nokia brick to decrease your number of distractions. Instead, you can use some of your phone’s features and settings to make them less hypnotic.
- Set your display to grayscale. Apps and social media platforms’ use of color is meant to be as appealing as possible. Less color, generally, correlates with less stimulation.
- Reduce push notification permissions. Most apps will prompt you to enable push notifications by default. Do you really need to know the second someone likes your post? Or precisely when a couch that was $799 is marked down to $789?
- Make use of Focus and Do Not Disturb features. Sounds and haptics, such as vibration, alert us to something new happening on our phones. Our brain wants to leap at newness. By setting our phone to avoid making noise or vibrating during certain hours and excluding certain conditions (such as a family member trying to call us), it can sit quietly on your nightstand and charge while you invest in yourself and your personal satisfaction.
Don’t Put Yourself in a “Cold-Turkey” Situation
It is incredibly difficult to go from over-stimulated to under-stimulated at a moment’s notice. So, try to either taper down your level of novelty over time or engage in an activity like reading while your mind is still fairly quiet.
- Try doing something physical, like cleaning, yard work, or exercise after a long work day or time spent mindlessly scrolling. The activity gives you something to do, which activates that sense of novelty but can also occupy you enough that you’re not intentionally multitasking or scrolling. Plus, physical activity can help stimulate our ability to focus and relax.
- Try reading at the start of your day instead of the end of your day. A brain in motion will stay in motion, but a quiet brain will stay quiet… or whatever Isaac Newton said. After a good night’s rest, your brain will be at a relatively low level of stimulation and activity, making it the perfect time to brew coffee and reach for a book. If your phone hasn’t grabbed your attention for the day, you don’t have to work so hard to pull yourself away from it or ignore new notifications.
- Bonus points if you use an alarm clock to wake you up instead of your phone so that the degree of temptation is even lower!
Bake in a Form of Accountability
When applied healthily, peer pressure can be great!
Similar to my example above about choosing between veggies or junk food, when we’re in a state of stimulation-seeking, it’s easy to get into a “there’s always tomorrow” mindset.
Having an external deadline to read something and knowing that other people will have read the same thing will help offset the tendency to put reading off.
The truth is that reading vs. scrolling is not a life or death matter, and we know that. So that feeling of “I need to do this” may never really be there to back up the feeling of “I want to do this” when it comes to reading.
But when other people are in the mix, there’s social pressure to adhere to the group’s dynamics. Nobody wants to be that person who can’t participate in the conversation because they didn’t read– that’s negative school flashbacks all over again.
Joining a book club or reading group (both of which we will be launching soon, and you can sign up for updates here) can give you that social validation and support needed to get back on board.
Up Next: Read a Book
Because our brains seek novelty and our attention has been monetized into multi-billion dollar industries, a lot competes with our ability to focus on reading and getting lost in a good book.
By using psychology to our advantage and prioritizing our personal goals, we can regain lost ground and devour just as many books as we did when we were teenagers. As an added bonus, we don’t have to sneak reading lights under the covers any more… but you totally still can if you want to.
Great Books About Attention, Technology, and Focus
- The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
- Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
- Deviced!: Balancing Life and Technology in a Digital World by Doreen Dodgen-Magee
- The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World by Adam Gazzaley and Larry D. Rosen