How to Break Bad Phone Habits and Rekindle Your Reading Habits

Hannah Schneider
4 min readSep 19, 2023
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

I have been in a serious reading slump lately; not only have I neglected my books, I have also traded my love of writing for time spent on my phone. Overall, creatively, I have been lazy due to my screen. As much as I tried to get myself to read and write, my routine was down the drain and I would wake up only to go on social media and stare at a screen all day. Each chance I had I would reach for my phone, not for any productive reason, but to zone out into the world of the internet.

The problem was I was in a cycle of consuming, not creating.

I wasn’t achieving anything by looking at my phone and I became self aware of the fact that these apps were controlling my life. I had not picked up a book in so long and when I did, I could only read for a short time before I found myself bored, picking up my phone, and scrolling for the next hour. I tried to set up habit trackers and force myself to read and write and after a while I slowly learned what worked best to rewire my brain back to the real world; here is a list of the easy changes I made to improve my reading habit and get out of that DNF slump (seriously, I had half-read 3 books in a row).

Number 1: Pick up a faster paced, or smaller book.

--

--

Hannah Schneider

Books. Writing. Movies. Art. Interested in just about everything in our beautiful little world. Also a chronic internet user.