Welcome back to Field Notes – my running log of small discoveries that shape how I think, lead and create. This week’s exploration? Reading is an antidote to the noise and polarization of our painful world.

Picture by me, 2018: Lovely bookshop (I don’t remember the name) in Downtown Burlington, Vermont.

🔍How This All Started

Winter 2019. I was lying awake at 3 a.m., my thoughts bouncing back and forth like  popcorn in a popcorn-machine. After years of struggling with depression, I’d been handed a diagnosis: Borderline Personality Disorder (traits). My career had stalled. My relationships were strained by my irritability and unpredictable moods. And my constant companion was unrelenting, sharp anxiety.

One day, fed up with the cruelty of my inner voice, I decided to stop arguing with it. If I couldn’t silence the noise in my head, maybe I could drown it out with something more interesting. So, I picked up a book for the first time in years: The Power of Why by Amanda Lang, which promised to show “how curiosity and the ability to ask the right questions fuels innovation and can drive change not just in business but also in our personal lives.” Curiosity instead of self-loathing? That felt like a good trade.

But there was a problem: I couldn’t read more than half a page without checking my phone.

🧠 Recognizing Addiction

At first, I was amused. But quickly, I became alarmed.

Even with notifications turned on – so I’d know if anything was coming in – I’d compulsively check my phone every ten minutes just in case. Turning notifications off only made it worse: my hand would twitch for my phone like a nervous tic. That’s when I realized: this wasn’t distraction, it was addiction. Years of scrolling, inbox refreshes, and always-on-call work habits had splintered my attention so completely I couldn’t follow a paragraph without wondering what I was missing elsewhere.

If I didn’t have control over my attention, I didn’t have control over my own life.

So, I decided to retrain my brain. It was slow going at first. It took me a week to finish a single chapter. But I kept at it, and one chapter became two. Then, one day, I could read as long as my bladder would hold out. My concentration muscle, neglected for years, was getting stronger. It took me almost a month to finish The Power of Why. But by year’s end, I had read 24 books. In turns out there were many more interesting thoughts to chew on than anxiety fueled negative self-talk!

For the first time in my adult life, I felt a sense of agency over my inner world.

📉 Anxiety Out, Attention In

Later, I’d learn from psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Esther Perel that my atrophied concentration muscle wasn’t a personal failure, it was by design.

Haidt argues that social media doesn’t just fragment our attention; it hijacks our emotional regulation. The constant churn of novelty, outrage, and microdoses of dopamine keeps our nervous systems on high alert. Perel adds another layer: as traditional structures of belonging (extended family, neighbourhoods, faith communities) have frayed, we’ve retreated into hyper-individualism while craving connection we can’t satisfy alone. Algorithms exploit this hunger, feeding us validation for our biases, outrage to feel alive, dopamine to keep us hooked on this proxy-connection.

The result? Polarization, anxiety, isolation… and attention spans so fractured that sustained thought and creativity are nearly impossible. Reading interrupts this cycle. Books demand something the internet does not: patience, deep focus and a willingness to explore complexity

📚 Reading as Resistance

When the pandemic hit in March 2020, there was no such thing as a peaceful mind. Lockdowns. Political upheaval. Economic shocks. Rising death counts. New restrictions every few hours. The only way to stay on top of the chaos was to stay online, constantly refreshing the news.

I felt the gravitational pull of the algorithm: the doomscrolling, the anxiety spikes, the hijacking of my nervous system by strangers online. Yet, thanks to the reading habit I’d begun in 2019, I had something to compare to. Next to a book’s depth and continuity, the internet’s fragmented urgency felt cheap and exhausting. Reading offered not only information but also context – something my anxiety was craved but couldn’t find in the news headlines or Twitter threads.

Back when I thought of reading as mere entertainment or self-improvement, it was easy to justify choosing alternatives like a good TV show or an online course. But during the pandemic, I began to see reading as an act of resistance. Not necessarily in the grand political sense – though it can sometimes be that too – but as a small, stubborn pushback against systems designed to splinter our attention into monetizable clicks.

Every hour with a book serves two purposes:

1. An hour not feeding the algorithm
2. An hour rebuilding our capacity to follow a thought from beginning to complicated end – a skill increasingly rare in both leadership and civic life.

Because when we lose our ability to focus, we lose our curiosity, our tolerance for ambiguity, and our ability to resist reacting to every emotional stimulus. Our ability to think critically, engage deeply with each other, resist manipulation, and make wise decisions is at stake, nothing less. Reclaiming our attention is the first step towards reclaiming our lives.

💡 How I’m Integrating It

Over the past six years, reading has shifted from hobby to ritual. Here’s what keeps my practice alive:

1. Phone in another room: not just on silent, but out of sight and reach.
2. Timers for reading sprints: 45 minutes of uninterrupted focus before checking anything.
3. Atmosphere matters: soft lighting, a comfortable chair, a cup of tea, these are signals to my brain that it’s safe to relax into curiosity.
4. Match books to energy levels: heavy non-fiction on weekend mornings when my mind is fresh, lighter reads at night, and mysteries when I need escape.
5. Track progress lightly: I count how many books I read each year, not as pressure but to hold myself accountable.

I used to read to escape my thoughts. Now I read to inhabit my life more fully: to tackle the problems that need tackling, to lead better, to weave communities full of diverse opinions, to think more clearly in a chaotic world.

📣 From Me to We

If you’re thinking I don’t have time to read or I’m just not a reader, I get it. I spent my twenties and early thirties saying the same thing. But this isn’t about becoming a reader. It is about reclaiming our attention from the systems designed to fragment it, because fractured attention makes us easier to manipulate, easier to exhaust, easier to control. Rebuilding attention is foundational for love, work, and building a meaningful life.

So I’m curious: What helps you think your own thoughts again?