Posts
- Spend time thinking about why you want to read more books. The more motivation you have, the more likely you are to succeed. Start out reading books you enjoy, and don’t be afraid to quit books you don’t like.
- Lay the groundwork for your new reading habit by making books salient in the physical and digital environments you encounter every day.
- Set modest goals, at least at first. Aim to read just a little each day.
- Look at your daily routines and your existing habits. Consider where you could build in a new habit of book reading, in effect piggybacking on your existing habits. The more specific you can be, the more likely you are to succeed.
- Try as hard as you can to always read whenever you are in that situation, time or place. Eventually, you will form a new effortless reading habit.
- Track your progress by recognising every day that you managed to read, rather than by ticking off completed books. After two weeks, you should start to feel that your new habit is deepening.
- Consider whether your social world supports book reading. You could try joining a book group (see the Links and Books section below) to chat with like-minded readers.
- Cultivate your identity as an avid reader of books. Write a sentence outlining the kind of person you want to be, and think about how book reading will serve that aim.
Christian Jarrett, Senior Editor at Psyche suggest, Modern life can feel too frantic for books. Use these habit-building strategies to carve out time for the joy of reading.
 |
| Modern life can feel too frantic for books. Photo: Jeenah Moon/Reuters |
I envy voracious book readers. They seem worldly and wise. Also, whatever is happening in their lives, they’re never completely on their own – they always have their books. My mother is one of these life-long devourers of literature, for whom books are a constant companion. She recalls contracting tuberculosis as an eight-year-old girl, before there was a vaccine, and being sent to spend six months at a convalescent home in Margate, more than 100 miles from her family. ‘Books saved me from what would have been unbearable, allowing me to escape from that bed to have adventures in other places and other lives,’ she says.
Avid readers often look back on their book-reading with fondness. ‘My first memories of reading are of my late mum taking me to our local library, and both of us taking out as many books as we could carry,’ says Clare Reynolds, author of the Years of Reading Selfishly blog. ‘We didn’t have a car so had to make sure we could manage them all on the bus.’
Reynolds’s passion for reading continued through adolescence and led her to study English literature at the University of Leeds, but then the demands of work and family caught up with her, and for years she found herself in what she calls the ‘reading wilderness’...
What to do
It will take significant effort for you to read more books, at least at first. To succeed long-term, you need to develop new reading habits, so that reading is something you do without resorting to conscious effort and willpower. But before getting into details of how to do this, there are some preliminary steps to ease the way.
The first is to reflect on why you want to read more books. Benjamin Gardner is a social psychologist at King’s College, London and an expert on the psychology of habits.
His theory of habit formation begins with the need for sufficient motivation...
A further idea to help you grow your reading habit is to think about your social world. Just as making books prominent in your physical and digital environments will help to lay the foundations for more reading, your social environment is also important, especially for deepening and sustaining the habit. Sharing a pleasure multiplies it. If none of your close family or friends reads books, then reading will only ever be a private activity, separate from your personal relationships and to be squeezed in around them. If this is your situation, I’m not suggesting you ditch all your buddies, but I’d recommend seeking out one or more friends who read, for instance by joining a book group – physical or virtual ‘Reading was, and still is, a way for me to connect with people,’ says Reynolds.
Read more...
Source: Psyche
