How to Overcome the Inability to Concentrate and Enjoy Reading: A Reflection on Modern Distractions

I bought dangerous friendships of Choderlos de Laclos last year, and there is that bundle of pages full of tiny letters staring at me from the shelf while collecting dust. According to Howlongtoread, the page that tells us how long it will take us to read each book, it will take me seven hours and 42 minutes to finish. That is to say, if I put it on on a Sunday afternoon after eating, I will have finished it by night. No way. I know I’ll need at least three Sunday afternoons to even make some progress. Seven hours? More like blackjack.

It is physically impossible for me to be able to concentrate for seven hours and forty-two minutes, not only because of the required breaks (a glass of water, a visit to the bathroom, a glass of water, a visit to the bathroom) but because of what are thinking: the unavoidable glances at the cell phone, every time longer and more dispersed as fatigue takes its toll in my concentration. A page, a look, a page, a look.

I have a very bad habit that I do not recommend to anyone. I allow myself to glance at my phone every time I finish a chapter, which is fine if it’s a nineteenth-century novel, not so much if it’s an experimental novel or one of those best sellers of five-page chapters. The cycle is always the same. Look WhatsApprespond to WhatsApp, look at Twitter, look at Instagram, look at WhatsApp again, respond to WhatsApp, look at Twitter… Until I discover, shocked, that It took me an hour to advance twenty pages And anyway, I’m too tired to continue reading, so I leave it.

There is a magnificent chapter of little faiththe series of Montero y Maidagánwhich perfectly illustrates these vicious circles. Bertathe character played by Esperanza Pedreñois left alone at home during Easter because her partner has to work, so she decides to take it easy and read a book titled The lost woodcutter. He is incapable: he starts tidying up the kitchen, he goes down to the fishmonger, his mother calls him and she has him on the phone for an hour. When she finally manages to sit up, she falls asleep on the couch. As she acknowledges: “It’s just that when you don’t have the habit…”

We feel like it takes us twice as long to do everything.

I feel almost privileged. In the end, with multiple interruptions and slowly, I’m still able to read books. But I am terrified by the number of educated and reading people who have lately confessed to me that they are unable to read a book. I am not referring to those people who have legitimately never had an interest in reading, but rather those who had it and who, due to various circumstances, put it aside and have not been able to recover the habit.

Usually the explanation given is that they don’t have time, but underneath that lack of time there is a lack of concentratione is another way of calling lack of time. While it is true that as we get older it is more difficult to find time to read, it is also true that our free time is much more full of distractions. The difficulty in focusing on a task causes it to take much longer, so we have the feeling that we must allocate much more effort and time to what was more or less easy for us in the past. Another common explanation is that they can’t find any book that hooks them. Actually, what they mean (we want) to say is that There are other things that hook us more.

A man in Malta, fighting boredom. (Reuters/Darrin Zammit Lupi)

Sooner or later, we all experience an epiphanic moment in which we realize that we have lost the ability to concentrate. Reading is the most obvious example, but it can also be playing a game. board game or cards, watching a movie or even watching a soccer game that we could previously watch without blinking. It’s sad for me to meet people who enjoyed playing an instrument, or crocheting, or cooking pastrieswho recognizes that they no longer have the patience to do so.

Because the effort involved in these activities does not provide the same dopamine reward as the stimuli with which they compete. The clearest example is video games. How many of us have returned to games that drove us crazy three-and-a-half years ago and that bored us after five minutes. How was it possible that as children we were glued to the screen every afternoon? Today I just hold on los games copulsive and addictive to it Vampire Survivorsand I would be unable to concentrate on a strategy or city-building game.

There is nothing sadder than realizing that you are unable to derive pleasure, satisfaction or comfort from all those things that you loved in the past because we are brain-fried and we are unable to generate serotonin naturally. We cannot put all the blame on “the screens” because they are part of a more complex ecosystem that conspires to take away our natural pleasures. A network of causes and consequences where we see as banal everything that does not have an immediate application; an ultra-competitive world in which we get frustrated when we perceive ourselves to be mediocre, when we get stuck in a puzzle or in a paragraph of a book that we do not fully understand. Instead of trying to overcome adversity, we put it aside because We are not here to waste time with nonsense.

The other day I breathed when I saw that a book I want to read has less than 200 pages

Time folds

The other day I found myself breathing a sigh of relief when I discovered that a book I want to read is no longer than two hundred pages. But what kind of person have I become! Short books have an advantage that thick books lack. dangerous friendships o The lost woodcutter: no and that sensation oppressive that behind every word there is another word and behind every page is another page with no end in sight. One of the most common complaints I often hear (or utter) in book clubs is that certain books are too redundant for what they tell. But perhaps the problem is ours, because we no longer aspire to have a deep knowledge of anything, but rather we settle for the brief, the superficial and the basic. We’re not here for much more.

I read this week the striking testimony of Hugh McGuirea literary editor who not so long ago was unable to read more than four books a year (an amount that, for an editor, is very low). As usually happens in these cases, the text published in Medium It was presented as a process of redemption and success in his process of “relearning to read books” after realizing his concentration problems. It is easy to empathize with him when he describes that tickling sensation that she feels when, talking to a friend, she is tempted to look at her phone to check if she has any notifications.

One of the most interesting reflections of the article was that, contrary to what logic suggests, the author felt more tired on his less productive days. Not so much because of the feeling of satisfaction we get from those days in which we thrive, but because the lost days are those in which we fall into a spiral of continuous distractions that force us to divide our attention. It’s not that McGuire couldn’t concentrate because he was tired, but that he was tired because he couldn’t concentrate. As he recalls quoting Daniel J. Levitinauthor of Your brain and music (RBA), “it takes more energy to shift your attention from task to task than it does to concentrate.”

We prefer to perform another task rather than face our inability to enjoy

One of the most common feelings in the 21st century is that we have less and less time despite the fact that we have more technological advances that should help us eliminate unnecessary tasks. In Time (Peninsula), from the teacher Carol Kaufman-Scarboroughfrom Rutgers University, that it’s not so much about our inability to organize as it is about “our feelings and thoughts,” since even the most meticulous people share that feeling of not having time: “The inability to concentrate It is one of the three sources (along with the stress and the reluctance) of the time pressure that so many people feel.

The Bermuda triangle of the inability to enjoy that we experience so often and that pushes us to the worst of paradoxes: that we prefer to do yet another boring task (like organizing the kitchen jars) rather than face the harsh reality that we have stopped being able to do what we liked most, that we have lost the ability to concentrate and, with it, the ability to extract pleasure from our hobbies. That we have turned our lives into a list of infinite tasks that we cannot, nor do we want, to complete.