Why It's Hard to Settle Into a Book, and What Helps

You sit down with a book you actually want to read, get through half a page, and find your hand reaching for your phone. Most people know that feeling, and it is easy to read it as a personal failing. It usually is not. Settling into a long piece of reading asks something particular of your attention, and an ordinary day gives very little practice at it.

The numbers suggest a lot of us are in the same position. The Reading Agency's State of the Nation's Adult Reading 2025 report, a Censuswide survey of 4,000 UK adults aged 16 and over carried out in April 2025, found that 53% describe themselves as regular readers. That is up slightly from 50% the year before, though still down from 58% in 2015. Among people who have lapsed or never read regularly, 36% said they struggle to focus for more than a few minutes when reading, against 21% of regular readers. And 61% of lapsed readers said there were simply too many distractions.

Some of that is habit rather than capacity. Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, has spent nearly two decades measuring how long people hold their attention on a screen before switching. In 2004 the average was about two and a half minutes. By 2012 it was 75 seconds. In her more recent work it sits at roughly 47 seconds. That rhythm does not politely stay at the desk. You carry it to the sofa with you.

A book asks for the opposite of that. The first few minutes are the expensive part, when you are still holding whatever you were doing before and the world of the page has not quite arrived. Give up during those minutes and the book gets quietly filed as boring, when what really happened is that you never got past the entry fee.

A few things help, none of them dramatic. Put the phone in another room rather than face down on the arm of the chair, because face down is still within reach. Decide on a small amount of time, twenty minutes rather than a whole evening, so there is no vague finish line to drift away from. Read something you are enjoying rather than something you feel you ought to be reading. And give those first ten minutes a bit of patience before you judge the book or yourself.

The room matters too. A completely silent house can be its own kind of distraction. The fridge, a car door outside, someone moving about upstairs, each one arrives sharply because there is nothing for it to land on. A steady, unchanging sound underneath softens those edges. Rain on a window, a stream, wind moving through trees. Nothing with words in it, since language pulls at exactly the part of your mind you are trying to give to the page.

There is reasonable evidence that natural sound does more than mask. A review by Rachel Buxton and colleagues, published in PNAS in 2021, pooled 18 studies and found natural sounds were associated with lower stress and better mood and cognitive performance. That is not a cure for a wandering mind, and it would be wrong to promise one. But as a way of making a room easier to sit still in, it is a small and cheap thing to try.

If you want to test it tonight, make a zen that asks nothing of you. Rainfall on its own, or a stream with a little wind behind it. Set it low, quiet enough that you stop noticing it after a minute or two. Then open the book, and give it until the end of the chapter before you decide anything.