I Kicked My Screen Addiction And Fell Back In Love With Reading – Here's How
'I loved reading as a child,' former voracious bookworms wail, 'and now I can't finish a novella.'
I can't judge them – I am them. I used to tear through titles as a kid, ravenously reading through entire series of books in a week.
It did not feel good to realise that, like lapsed bibliophiles before me, my childhood habit had been replaced by short-form video and 'doom scrolling.'
A particularly damning Saturday this month saw me spend seven hours and twenty-seven actual minutes on TikTok (I am as mortified as you'd be). I was sick at the time, but that doesn't justify a 12+-hour screen day, does it?
Seeing that stat made me realise something needed to change. Namely, I needed to 1) touch grass and 2) turn page.
Speaking to BBC Science Focus, Dr Peter Etchells, an expert on the psychological effects of digital technology, had some good news for my beleaguered brain.
'To the best of my knowledge, there isn't any good science to support the idea that short videos are specifically or uniquely bad in terms of effects on the brain,' he said.
But that's only one half of the equation. There's not much proof it's good for me, either; while reading books has been linked to higher dementia defences, boosting confidence and self-esteem, and even living longer.
Personally, I've felt my ability to follow through with a chapter fade over the years while my capacity for hypnotically 'okay' clips became enormous.
In short, I'd had enough, and knew I had to rekindle my love for reading.
I am not joking when I say that last year's attempt to reconnect with reading started with George Eliot's notoriously lengthy Middlemarch.
This was, as instinct should have told me, a terrible idea. I thought my love for the author would help, but – as with running, or eating more fibre, or any good habit – starting small is key.
This time around, I started off with George Orwell's short stories, and I made a conscious effort to set myself time limits, too.
Twenty minutes before bed, I'd open the pages and settle into the story; over time, that became half an hour, and I began reading on my lunch break too.
It's crucial to pick a book you really enjoy, not just one you feel you 'should' read. Your child self wasn't looking to impress an imaginary audience of literary peers, after all – you probably just really liked Jacqueline Wilson.
Once I'd finished the shorter books, I got going on another, longer novel (Adam Bede, which is by George Eliot but is shorter than Middlemarch, as most books are).
The reading minutes shrank again at first; I went back to 20-minute, pre-bed slots as the denser writing took its toll.
But removing the pressure of having read at a certain pace – though I had marked myself as reading the novel on Goodreads, I felt alright finishing it ten pages at a time if I had to – was key.
Paradoxically, that easygoing approach brought me back to the lights-under-the-blanket keenness I remember feeling as a kid. By the end of last Saturday, I was breathlessly tearing through the pages, ranting about the plot to my bemused boyfriend like I was sharing family gossip.
And for what it's worth, I'm now dawdling through Middlemarch. My TikTok time last weekend was a measly(ish) hour and a half.
Go slow. Too much, too fast, will put you off restarting; enforce time limits if you have to.
Choose authors you like. We don't stick to things we hate; no need to suffer through that tome about economic theory if you don't want to.
Mix accountability with permissiveness. Telling a friend, a book club, or your Goodreads account you're working through a novel can be helpful; accepting that you might not finish it at the speed you expected, or even at all, is key.
Build reading into your routine. I now can't sleep without reading (incidentally, my sleep has gotten better since I quit late-night TikTok binges).
Embrace the smug. I am a lover of deeply smug hobbies, like running, pointlessly baking food I can buy better versions of for less money, and now, reading. From my experience, The Smug is fuelling, sustaining. If bragging about reading more gets you through it, post those 'aesthetic' storiesof you reading all you like; or, as I did, force people to read a whole article about it.
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