Reading is hard.
It wasn’t always, but now, it is.
You know that feeling: you finally sit down with a book you’ve heard great things about—Song of Achilles, for example—and then it hits you.
Your brain doesn’t work the same anymore.
You’re no longer that wide-eyed child, eagerly tearing through books like they’re a bag of candy.
Your brain has been trained to skim, scroll, and hop from one thing to the next.
So, each night ends the same way.
You reach for your phone, scroll mindlessly for forty-five minutes, and fall asleep while wondering where your curiosity disappeared off to.
Don’t worry; this isn’t a moral failing.
It’s inherently a wiring issue, a flaw in your current design.
One that runs on, “What have I been training my brain to do all day?” The good news is that the same science that explains that smooth-brain instinct to reach for your phone can also help you reach for something more nourishing, like books.
In his YouTube video, “How to Read More Books,” user Ali Abdaal outlines ten rules to gently retrain your mind to read again.
We’ve outlined them below.
Some context Over the last twenty years, the number of adults who read for pleasure has dwindled.
It’s fallen by 40%.
It’s reported that today, only about 16% of Americans even pick up a book on any given day.
At the same time, we have never had more content at our fingertips.
It’s ironic, isn’t it? We are constantly consuming words: emails, Instagram captions, text messages that are nothing more than veiled scams.
Only now, words arrive in bite-sized formats and notifications instead of chapters.
But the research also tells us this: just six minutes of reading can reduce stress by 68%.
That’s more than music or a walk around the block.
Reading quietly, even for a few minutes, can lower stress, sharpen memory, and improve emotional well-being.
In other words, reading builds the kind of cognitive endurance that doomscrolling erodes.
Som why do you keep avoiding it? Here’s a secret.
Most people who “wish they read more” (a.k.a.
all of us) do not lack interest.
Nor willpower.
Our brains have been trained to operate in overstimulation mode, always expecting novelty, speed, and interruptions.
It’s a far cry from the stillness, focus, and flow that reading requires, certainly.
These ten habits work because they help reduce the mental effort it takes to begin reading.
They can feel almost like a gentle kind of magic, slowly making it easier and more comfortable to stay with a text just a little longer.
Rule 1: Put the book where your brain is tired Place your book or e-reader on your nightstand tonight.
Charge your phone in another room.
That’s it! That’s the whole rule.
Behavioral scientists call this micro-shift “choice architecture.” Developed by economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, this theory demonstrates that small, subtle changes to your physical environment can profoundly alter your behavior, with little to no impact on your freedom.
It requires little conscious effort.
You are making the easiest option also the most nourishing one.
By bedtime, your brain is running on automatic habit mode.
It reaches for whatever’s closest, most familiar.
Over time, that tiny swap makes reading feel like the natural way to end the day.
Your brain begins to associate printed words with rest and comfort, not effort.
Rule 2: Make your home screen a little library The average person picks up their phone dozens, if not hundreds, of times per day.
Each glance at your screen, every flash of artificial LED light, represents a mental crossroads.
If the first thing your eyes land on is a social app, your fingers will go there before your conscious mind even checks in.
However, if the first thing you see is your Kindle, your brain gets a different cue.
Research refers to this instinct as “habit stacking” and “cue design.” The idea is to take something your brain already does (picking up your phone to scroll) and sneakily insert reading, gently redirecting the automatic cue.
This way, each idle moment—waiting in line, commuting on public transit, a quiet moment in the morning—becomes a reading window.
So, your favorite reading app deserves prime digital real estate—the middle of your home page—while distracting apps are buried away in a folder, two or three swipes away.
Rule 3: Let audiobooks borrow your most boring moments Commuting.
Washing dishes.
Dusting the annoying decorative trim at the bottom of the walls.
These moments are tedious, irksome.
But they’re also perfect opportunities to treat your brains to the worlds of Tolkien, Woolf, and García Márquez.
This represents habit stacking at its purest.
The technique, pioneered by behavioral researcher BJ Fogg and popularized by James Clear’s Atomic Habits, exploits the brain’s existing neural pathways.
Since the anchor habit (commuting, exercising) is already wired into daily routine, the desired behavior (listening to a book) simply rides in on the coattails of the existing habit.
Plus, it’s a great way to devour literature: if you spend even half an hour a day listening to audiobooks, you can easily finish 15–20 books per year.
Rule 4: Serve your brain a reading menu School taught us to be faithful, monogamous readers.
One book at a time.
Cover to cover, start to finish.
And no switching.
Too bad adult brains don’t work that way.
The reality? Your energy shifts.
Your focus changes.
Some days, your mind craves ideas and changes.
You want nothing more than to read about how basketball can help you succeed in life.
Other times, you wish to get lost in the strange, bizarre universe....
