A Hug for the Amygdala

Embracing the mind & becoming the reader you want to be

When people find out I’m a book person, one of the first things they do is explain why they don’t read very much. That, or they say, “I’m just not a reader.” Then they point to their partner and say, “They’re the reader.” As if each single family has a Designated Reader. I’ve heard it all: ADD, ADHD, can’t focus, too busy, visual learner, not good at reading, mind wanders, anxiety, phone eats up time, the golden age of television, etc. And you know what? Me too. This “I’m just not a reader” posture makes me sad, because it exposes the American education system that has failed so many of us. I’m a prime example.

I didn’t do well in school. I skirted by with Bs and Cs did just enough not to get noticed. I even got the occasional D. (Look at me now, Mr. Hyde! Ha ha.) I shrunk from all attention, only studied if it really counted. Reading aloud in class or trying to read silently in class was grounds for a low-grade panic attack. I remember going through The Iliad in 10^th grade and feeling helplessly lost.

“Anxiety” and “depression” were not in the family lexicon. “Nervous” was not, either, so I just went around thinking I was a weirdo in hiding for half my life. (News flash: You/we are never as snowflake-y as we think.) The only reason I read 50 to 70 books a year? I’m stubborn, and I find creative ways to get it done. I’m driven by lot of things, I suspect, but mostly? A deep desire to understand the inner-workings of stories and by a desire to be taken under. You know what I’m talking about: the what-happens-next undertow. Let the coffee go cold. Forget the phone call to the relative. Submit and get swept out to sea.

I chase this “reader’s high,” crave it, and it’s a wonderfully consistent flow state to find—and maybe it’s the key to kicking your languishing— and I want others to have it, too.

I discovered some strategies on my own over the years, and I want to share them. I never had the support many kids now have in school—I’m not throwing a pity party here, it’s just the truth—with literacy tutors and tech tricks for every neurodivergence under the sun. Seriously, how amazing is that? But unfortunately, many of us missed out on said tricks, including me, so I had to fight my way through.

Everyone can find more time to do the thing they want to do unless you are working 100 hours a week. And if you don’t believe me? Just look at your screen time breakdown, look at your internet history, look at your Netflix watch list. We make time for the things we want to make time for. I’m simply extremely stubborn. There’s much to write, much to read, and much to understand.

Because we live in the golden age of anxiety—ding, ding, ding, says the iPhone—I’m guessing your mind occasionally wanders, too. Maybe you have a hard time sitting still. Maybe you find yourself scrolling and chastising yourself for scrolling so much. Maybe you sit down to read and inevitably wind up distracted. And hey: that’s OK. I’m right there with you. But let me issue this challenge, if I may: there are many strategies for reading that a lot of us are neglecting simply because we have told ourselves the story that we are “just not readers.” Everyone can be a reader. Yes, it will take a little effort, it will take a little time, it will take a little patience, but I truly believe everyone out there can be a reader if they want to be.

“What’s going on here? Why isn’t he talking about books? Or a specific book? Crap! I want my time/money back!” Well, I told you there would be some surprises in 2024, and this is one of them: this topic of sustained attention is dear to my heart. I’m following the draft of energy. (Or maybe that’s just the cold draft coming in through the cracks in our 100-year-old house? Hard to say.)

***the internet gurus say I should quit right here, because attention starts to lag at around 800 words, so if you find your attention lagging right now, stand up, stretch, print this out, transfer to a different screen, sit down, stand up, do a down dog, cat/cow, mambo, samba, waltz, walk on the dusty treadmill in your basement for a minute. Deep breath, you can do it! I’m just getting to the good part***

Anyway, you don’t have to be a perfect reader, and you don’t have to read 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 books a year to be a reader. You don’t have to be a compulsive holder at your local library or bottom feeder at your neighborhood independent bookstore like me. You don’t have to belong to a book club. You simply have to try, and why do you have to try? Because reading is one of the great pleasures of the modern age. All in all, a book is still a relatively new technology, and how wonderful is it that we get to live in a world where many exist free of charge? Little free libraries, public libraries, the “free books” box in your alleyway, etc. Reading is still, in my opinion, the greatest way to organize a large chunk of information or tell an epic story.

Now, I don’t know much about you all. My “top readers”? I don’t know your ages or quirks or reading habits. All I know is that if you’re reading this, you’re probably already a big reader, or a consistent one, or you want to be one, or maybe you just like me and my writing—which is really bizarre and almost unfathomable— but I want to help you become more of yourself. That is: I want to help you become a better reader. Or a more confident reader. Or a reader, period.

OK, enough preamble. Some tips I learned the hard way:

• If your mind wanders, stand up, walk around, read out loud for a bit.

• If you find yourself reading a page, but not really reading a page, try the bookmark strategy. Hold your bookmark underneath each line of text to eliminate distraction until you get into a flow state. So much of my own reading experience is about the journey into that flow state, and once I’m there, I’m usually locked in, but it honestly takes me a while to get there. And it can be really frustrating, but press on. It will come.

• Try putting on some instrumental music. Brain Eno’s Music for Airports would be a perfect place to start.

• Don’t stop and look up unknown words in your dictionary app. Mark the word and come back to it later. Or just skip over it and don’t sweat it. You are smart. Gather meaning by context. The moment you open your phone, you’ve lost. Do everything you can to not do that.

• On that note, put your phone on “do not disturb” if you can.

• Find yourself a book club, or a friend to read a book with, that way you put yourself on a deadline. Do your very best to get through it. Skim parts that feel skimmable. It’s totally OK.

• Have you tried audio? Some of us are visual learners, some kinesthetic, some verbal, and some of us are aural learners. I am an aural learner. (But also maybe a mix of all? ) I remember names because I make up little songs in my head to remember them. I remember tones of voice, the way people say things, inflection, stress of syllables, tempo. I sometimes close my eyes at readings or in class settings because visuals are distracting. I talk out loud when I’m reading or mutter to myself. That said, I love the deadening silence of a quiet room with nobody home and noise-canceling headphones. It feels like a hug for the amygdala. A brain koozie. Give it a try.

• Do you hate silence? Go to a coffee shop and read. Go to the library and sit among the old men by the newspapers. Flip, flip, crinkle, crunch.

• Back to audio. If you don’t like an audiobook, try a different audiobook because not all narrators are created equally. Try different genres because not all audio works for every book for every reader. For a while, I was tackling huge, dense books as audio like Infinite Jest, Ducks, Newburyport, and Moby Dick, and well, can you imagine what that did to my anxiety? Now I use audio mostly for rock ‘n’ roll memoirs, re-reads, big, fun novels, and/or informational books where the prose doesn’t necessarily equal sumptuousness.

• Do you get bored easily? Try to read a couple books at the same time. For better or worse, our brains are accustomed to flicking between tabs, watching nineteen shows at a time, and holding five different conversations at any given moment with DMs, emails, texts, and real-life interactions. So, why not embrace it? Try two books or three at a time to change the pace. I used to have rules about how many books I would read at the same time—one poetry collection, one novel, one story collection, one nonfiction, for instance— but I stopped doing that because life is too short to impose upon it so many rules. I read what I read and I read when I read it. Eventually one in the stack generates enough force, and I submit to the undertow. I also know people for whom rules work. And that’s great, too. Experiment and stay open to trying new things and break your own rules.

  *You made it through another 800 words! We’re almost done, I promise. You’re doing great.*

• Have you been reading the wrong stuff? Why not try to find something that you would truly be interested in? Have you tried horror? Crime? Literary fiction? Plot-fueled firebrands? Aimless, plotless European novels? Are you a music obsessive? Read a bunch of books about music. Do you love underwater basket weaving? Read a bunch of books about that. Knitting? Try The Knitting Circle. Fairy tales? Try Aimee Bender or Helen Oyeyemi. Baseball? Try The Resisters or Roger Angel or Jill Bialosky’s poetry. Do you dig rock duos from the 70s? Try The Final Revival of Opal & Nev. Do you have a thing for the Prohibition-era West and/or London? Try Great Circle. Bleak and haunting stuff set in Hungary? Try Krasznahorkai. (Shameless plug, sorry.)

• Try rulers, highlighters, pens, dog-earring, tabs (I love tabs), Post-its. It’s just paper. Mark that shit up.

• A friend just told me about bionic reading. Seems cool. Give that a try?

• Before reading, meditate or do some cardio or go play tennis or do some Zumba. I guarantee you’ll be more focused afterward.

• Try some YA or graphic novels. They’re fun.

• Maybe you need to lower your standards. For real. (I know I do.)

• Maybe you need to confront the real burning issues in your life (wonky finances, tension with partner, kid struggling with bully) to free up some brain space. Too harsh? That always helps me.
  

Dirty secret? Half the time I “write” my first drafts in my Notes app with voice-to-text. I do this when my brain is hurtling down the superhighway of ideas and I can’t sit still long enough to even tap out of sentence. (Forget pen and paper.) I recently learned that anxious minds tend to require a lot of verbal processing, and this makes a lot of sense to me and my experience of rumination, incessant brain chatter, and turning situations over and over again. Voice-to-text and dictation help me unload the character/situation/thought quickly, and then I’ll go back and revise and refine in a Word doc. Which is exactly what I did yesterday for this very newsletter after I dropped off my daughter at school. Just another strategy to keep the magic alive.

Nobody’s perfect, and if you wanna be a better reader, then learn about yourself. Learn about your weird mind, embrace your strengths and flaws and quirks. And please let me know: What strategies do you use for focus? I’d love to hear about them.