How to Avoid Reading Burnout
You may have thought of reading as a way to relax in the past, but somehow, you can't even imagine picking up a book these days. Or, you may have set a goal to read 50 books in a year and then suddenly found yourself with no desire to read anything. This is reading burnout―and it sucks. There are, however, ways to avoid reading burnout. The first is to stop reading worthless stuff. The second is to slowly build a reading habit. And lastly, the third is to stop trying to remember everything.
Stop reading books you don't like
Many of us believe that once we start a book, we must finish it to the end. Or else we're a loser, an idiot, and a failure. This type of attitude leads to reading burnout. You have to learn to stop reading stuff that's useless and stuff that you don't like. In the same way that you don't watch shows, watch youtube videos, or eat foods that you don't like.
There are a lot of books out there that repeats the same ideas over and over and over again. And, you don't have to read any of it. If a chapter is talking about the same concept in the previous chapter, then skip it. If you're halfway through the book and you realized that the same ideas are the same as the previous books you've read, then stop reading. Or, if the author's style is boring, pompous, and repetitive, then again, stop reading. You're doing it incorrectly if you read every single word of every single book. The purpose of reading is for you to benefit from it, not for the reader to benefit from you.
If it's invaluable, don't read it.
Slowly build a reading habit.
If you're a beginner at fitness and your first training session is a 26-mile marathon, then you probably wouldn't want to train for the next days/weeks. Similarly, if you're beginning to start reading books and you've set a goal of 100 pages per day, after a few weeks or days, you probably would stop reading altogether. Overwhelming yourself, especially if you're starting out, will lead to burnout. So, it's important to slowly build a reading habit. But, how exactly can we do that?
You can slowly build a reading habit by scheduling your reading time, measuring each session in minutes, and increasing those minutes as you go on. If you're, for example, starting out as a reader, I would recommend scheduling your reading with 15-minute sessions every day. Once you're comfortable with that, you can add 1 minute of reading time to your regular reading sessions, one session at a time, like this:
• Session 1: your regular writing time + 1 minute
• Session 2: your regular writing time + 2 minutes
• Session 3: your regular writing time + 3 minutes
This process makes reading more enjoyable and less painful. Slow and steady wins the race.
Stop attempting to remember everything.
An average nonfiction book probably has 2-3 valuable chapters in it. So, stop trying to remember everything. You don't need to overwhelm yourself with a massive database full of notes to remember all book's stuff. You don't need to highlight and take notes because, according to studies, highlighting and taking notes are worthless. In fact, you don't need anything, except the darn book.
The thing about human memory is that we remember thing's that's useful and something that we use. You remember, for instance, the contents in a fitness book by implementing the tips on that book into your lifestyle―not by highlighting and taking notes. You'll remember the concepts you read if you can find a way to incorporate them into your life in some way.
You can apply this tip by asking yourself the question, "how does this apply to my own life?" each time you finish a passage or a page.
Conclusion
If there's one thing that causes reading to burn out, it would be because we're trying to do so much at the same time. We're trying to finish every book and every chapter that we buy. We're trying to read hundreds of pages in many hours per day. We're trying to remember everything. But, the truth is, we don't have to do any of that. We need to remind ourselves that it's okay to only read what's valuable, that it's okay to start reading slowly, and that it's okay to not remember everything a book has to offer. Stop overwhelming yourself, and take it slow.