Why can't I focus on reading anymore?

Because sustained reading needs an unbroken stretch of attention and most days no longer contain one. It is a conditions problem far more often than a capacity problem — the same people who cannot get through two pages of a novel can follow a three-hour film. Remove the interruptions and the capacity returns.

How long should it take to get absorbed in a book?

About ten minutes from a standing start, and longer if you have just come off a feed. Treating those ten minutes as the cost of entry rather than as evidence of failure is most of the fix.

Does reading on a phone or tablet make focus worse?

Generally yes, for a structural reason rather than a mystical one: on a device, every page is one gesture away from something engineered to be more immediately rewarding. A paper book has no competing surface and no notifications.

Is a short attention span permanent?

There is no good evidence that ordinary heavy phone use permanently reduces capacity, and plenty of everyday evidence against it — people who cut the interruptions report reading at length within weeks. Persistent, disabling difficulty concentrating is worth raising with a doctor rather than an app.

Does music help concentration while reading?

Instrumental music, sometimes; anything with lyrics competes with the words on the page for the same processing. Silence is usually better, and the wish for background noise is often a wish for the phone with extra steps.

How to focus while reading (and why you cannot)

There is a specific and very common experience: you sit down with a book you chose, that you want to read, and ten minutes later you have covered a page and a half and could not say what happened in it.

That is not a defect of character and it is almost never a defect of capacity. It is what attention does in the first stretch after a feed, and it is fixable in about a week.

What is actually happening

Attention has an entry cost, and you are quitting before you have paid it. Getting into a book takes roughly ten minutes: long enough to rebuild the world, remember who everyone is, and stop expecting the next thing. Almost everyone who says they cannot focus has been abandoning the attempt inside that window and taking the difficulty as the answer.

The feed reset your baseline. An infinite feed delivers a new stimulus every second or two, unpredictably. Come to a page directly from that and the page is, briefly, unbearably slow. It is not slow. Your comparison is.

Nothing is actually holding you. A book asks you to keep going with no reward for doing so. A feed rewards you for continuing, unpredictably, which is the most persistent schedule of reinforcement there is. Against that, “concentrate harder” is not a plan.

Reachable beats visible. A phone in the room costs attention even when you never look at it, because the option is live and declining it is work — work drawn from exactly the pool you were trying to spend on the page.

Five changes, in the order they pay

1. The phone in another room

The single highest-return change, and the one people most often water down. Face down on the table is not it. In a bag is not it. Another room.

You are not trying to resist the phone during those twenty minutes. You are removing the thing that has to be resisted, which is a different and much cheaper operation.

2. A fixed time

Reading at no particular time competes with everything continuously. Reading at 9pm competes with nothing, because at 9pm that is what happens.

The fixed slot also removes the decision to start, and the decision — not the reading — is where most of the effort goes.

3. Ten minutes before you judge it

Set the expectation deliberately: the first ten minutes will feel slow, and that is correct rather than diagnostic. If you can hold that as the entry fee rather than the verdict, you get past it. If you read it as proof that you have lost the ability, you stop, and the belief hardens.

Nearly everyone reports the same shape afterwards — the twenty minutes that felt long in week one feel short by week three.

4. A book with pull

Difficulty is not a virtue. A gripping book supplies the attention that discipline would otherwise have to supply, and the habit built on it will carry a harder book later.

If a book is a slog, that is information about the book. Put it down. Guilt about an unfinished book has ended more reading than any amount of busyness.

5. Paper, if you have the choice

A paper book cannot notify you, shows you visibly how much is left, and offers no alternative surface. On a phone or tablet every page is one gesture from a feed, and the gesture is one you have made ten thousand times.

What does not work

Trying harder. You are not more determined than a system optimised by thousands of people to hold attention.
Reading in bed while tired, as the whole plan. It works for some people and puts most to sleep in six minutes. Judge the method somewhere else first.
Background noise. Lyrics compete with the page for the same processing. The wish for a podcast in the background is usually a wish for the phone.
A concentration app that lives on the phone you are trying to escape. Useful only if the phone is not the problem, and it usually is.

If the ten minutes never arrive

If the honest description is that you never get as far as opening the book — that the hour disappears before reading is ever on the table — this is the wrong page. That is a different problem with a different fix, and how to stop doomscrolling addresses it.

If you get to the book but the sessions never repeat, how to start a reading habit is the one.

And if what you want is the phone genuinely out of reach at the same time every night without having to arrange it: BookGate rings at the hour you chose, shields the apps you named for the length of the session, and gives them back when you close it.