How To Fall in Love With Reading Again

When doom scrolling dominates our lives, how do we fix our focus and rekindle our love of books? The secret isn’t as simple as turning off the phone.

It’s after midnight and I am curled up beneath a blanket, watching a video about propagating succulents by sewing their little green leaves together. I don’t grow succulents, but the colorful visuals and cheerful music are making me consider becoming a gardener.

The reel ends. I scroll to a series of screen-capped social media posts about how our ancestors used sunscreen. The succulents forgotten, I continue doggedly onward through the content mill, reasoning with myself that I’ll stop as soon as I’m tired.

Years ago, I was still awake after midnight, but the glow was from a flashlight and the content was a four-hundred-page book about talking mice fighting against a villainous snake. My pulse raced and my mind was a full-feature movie complete with sound effects, different voices for each character, and daring, death-defying stunts.

So, what happened? At what point did I exchange long-form stories for byte-sized posts about growing succulents and how our ancestors used mud as sunscreen?

The reasons are nuanced—some of them logical and others downright silly. For one, I don’t sleep with a flashlight anymore. I also struggle to remember what I’ve read the morning after a lengthy night with a book. But is that because I’m not a young reader for whom each story is something new and exciting? Perhaps I’ve become a jaded adult with too many responsibilities and not enough brain space to allow for inspiration and curiosity.

Or maybe consuming tidbits of trivia and humor and meaningful quotes from people I’ve never heard of has made me forget how to enjoy immersing myself in a single book.

It’s an experience shared by many book lovers in the age of constant information. There is an entire realm of genuinely intriguing content available on our little backlit devices, whether it’s a video of a surrealist landscape artist working in the forest or a personal essay about overcoming grief. The problem is not that the content is bad, it’s that we’ve forgotten how to redirect the part of our brain that craves enrichment to engage with the “real” world outside of our phones.

We have moments of familiar joy when purchasing books and placing them on a shelf to be read—we remember what it felt like to open the pages and read an entire novel in a single night. The accomplishment, the exhilaration, the sense of fulfillment—and sometimes sadness when the story is over.

But too often, those new books go unread. I pre-ordered Girl, Serpent, Thorn years ago with giddy excitement because I loved Girls Made of Snow and Glass, and did the same with House of Roots & Ruin as soon as I finished Erin Craig’s first book. Both are still on the shelf below my desk, waiting to be opened, waiting for me to make it past the first page.

The TBR stack I curated last year may be untouched, but I finally managed to tiptoe back into literature this year after an embarrassing number of months where nothing could hold my interest—except Instagram and Pinterest.

I started the year with Carmilla by Sheridan Le Frau and followed it with Haunting of Hill House. Both are a different pace and vibe from young adult fantasy, my usual go-to genre. They’re also much shorter, allowing me to ease my way back into reading, and well-known as classics. It helps that Mike Flanagan’s adaptation is one of my all-time favorite television shows. I’d already read Turn of the Screw, the inspiration for Haunting of Bly Manor, so it was safe to assume I would like Hill House too.

The books were easy to read and thoroughly enjoyable, but then they were over, and I was left aimless and uncertain what to read next. The ease of scrolling through social media instead of committing to a new book eventually won out. Why read for hours when I could pick up my phone and set it down a hundred times a day after scrolling for a few hollow minutes?

I began doing just that—doom scrolling during work, after work, in the car, and  long after bedtime. It ruined my ability to focus and, more importantly, my mood. I was relying on reels, posts, and stories to cure my boredom but instead I became more and more bored. With the constant content bleeding through every minute of the day, anything of value was quickly lost in never-ending feeds.

Still, I was determined to resurrect my interest in reading. I had plenty of books available and I knew at least one of them would stick. I just needed a reason to put down the phone, to force myself to focus on the story and avoid the temptation of opening up those colorful little digital apps.

I’ve always enjoyed audiobooks. My first one was A Wrinkle in Time, loaned in cassette tape form from the library. The second was Martin the Warrior, the dramatized version with a full cast of talented voice actors. Listening to a narrator bring my favorite stories to life gave a new joy to the experience of reading. And most importantly, I could be doing other things while listening to the book.

Being able to listen to an immersive story while cooking or working out at the gym or driving across country overrides the goblin part of my brain that says laying on the couch with a paperback is lazy self-indulgence.

I started out a chapter at a time, just fifteen to thirty minutes of listening, sometimes reading along with the print version if I really wanted to absorb the story. Eventually this stretched on to an hour, then a few hours, then an entire book in a couple days. I only managed that once—but it was fun. I was finally enjoying the act of reading again.

My ability to enjoy books was gradually returning, but I needed to do something to curb the doom scrolling habit. The more I read, I realized how bad social media made me feel—not only the content, but the scrolling itself. It screwed up my focus and disturbed my sleep, gave me headaches and brain fog that lasted for hours.

Habits are as hard to break as they are to form, so I was gentle. I challenged myself to avoid social media for single days, looked for other engaging tasks when I felt compelled to open Instagram, but allowed for mindless scrolling when I was too tired to do anything else.

After a while of this, I decided on a whim to download another app, this time a simple word puzzle game. When I found myself picking up my phone, I’d divert myself at the last minute to the game, which was just engaging enough to hold my interest, but not enough to keep me glued to the screen for hours. It was simple, but this strategy was—forgive the pun—a literal game-changer.

I no longer felt the need to fill quiet moments with constant content. A few weeks of mood reading, playing my little diversion game, and limiting social media, and my previously cluttered mind eased into something more like balance. Instagram wasn’t evil, but it wasn’t necessary either. Eventually, I even completed a crossword puzzle in the local newspaper. I was never very good at crosswords, but the experience of putting pencil to paper and getting clues wrong and erasing letters and then getting clues right without looking at the answer key—even the ads could be easily folded away and out of sight.

The process I took to begin reading again isn’t final or universal. I still struggle with keeping my focus, because we live in a busy world with plenty of distractions—both good and unpleasant. But the tools are there now, the strategy in place to prevent mindless scrolling, and when I lay down with a book that I know I’ll love—I almost feel like that kid hiding under the covers after midnight, drinking in every word with the thirst of childish imagination.

I even bought myself a booklight.