"How Can I Keep My Focus While Reading?"

Dear Milo, 

Do you have tips on better focus when reading a book? I struggle with it and get distracted a lot.

Sincerely,

Look, a Squirrel!

Dear Look, a Squirrel!,

This is a great question and one I’ve heard a lot from folks. First, a disclaimer: I’m not a doctor, psychiatrist, neuroscientist, or anybody else with the appropriate training to discuss neurodivergence, ADHD, learning differences, PTSD, depression, anxiety, head trauma, or other brain-related reasons a person may be struggling with their attention spans while reading. If you believe you’re living with such a situation, it’s best to talk with a professional.

But if you believe your attention span while reading isn’t related to the above—and, more importantly, it’s something you’d like to work on simply because you feel your attention span is keeping you from engaging with books—then the below may help.

If you’re struggling with reading, it’s not just you. The average human apparently now has a shorter attention span than a goldfish. Reading comprehension and endurance are becoming particularly noticeable in college students. According to Adam Kotsko on Slate:

As a college educator, I am confronted daily with the results of that conspiracy-without-conspirators. I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch. For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation—sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts. (No human being can read 30 pages of Hegel in one sitting, for example.) Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument—skills I used to be able to take for granted.

With smartphones, snack-sized content on social media, and ads aplenty, most of us (me included) don’t have the attention spans, reading comprehension, or reading endurance we used to. And if you grew up in this current environment rather than entered into it at a later age? Eep. From the same article:

I once found myself boasting at a faculty meeting that I had read through my entire hourlong train ride without looking at my phone. My colleagues agreed this was a major feat, one they had not achieved recently. Even if I rarely attain that high level of focus, though, I am able to “turn it on” when demanded, for instance to plow through a big novel during a holiday break. That’s because I was able to develop and practice those skills of extended concentration and attentive reading before the intervention of the smartphone. For children who were raised with smartphones, by contrast, that foundation is missing. It is probably no coincidence that the iPhone itself, originally released in 2007, is approaching college age, meaning that professors are increasingly dealing with students who would have become addicted to the dopamine hit of the omnipresent screen long before they were introduced to the more subtle pleasures of the page.

Outside of school, we’re all bombarded with ads, banners, and various distractions while trying to read a simple article online. It’s become so common that most of us probably don’t even notice the level of distraction we’re exposed to every day. Here are a few screenshots of articles I read recently. (If you’re wondering what the hell is going on with my algorithms, I use a VPN.)