getting into literature, art, or music can often be unpleasant at first. the important thing is to muster sufficient internal discipline to keep powering through it, even despite the initial lack of enjoyment.

what you’re essentially doing is re-training your brain to act the way you want, and not the way it’s used to, similar to how one may train one’s muscles in order to prevent atrophy. and, similarly to physical training, it can sadly indeed be annoying or even painful at first.

Have you tried audio books? They are a big help for me, with nonfiction in particular.

i do want to read book dont get me wrong

What books are you reading? Maybe you just need to find the right kind of book that you genuinely enjoy. If you are reading mostly serious books maybe try something lighter like fiction. If you are doing something you enjoy it no longer feels as exhausting. And the more you do something the more you get used to it and develop your endurance.

I have the same problem.

When I hit that phase, I just switch to audiobooks and documentaries.

Hobbies/relaxation and rest are not necessarily the same thing. Taking long walks or running can be de-stressing and a hobby but are also very tiring. And eating 10g of cannabis and melting into the couch can feel like resting but also be very unfulfilling.

i badly want to read more but i just cannot.

If it’s not good why do you want it? Reading books for leisure won’t make anybody better than other people. If you’re not feeling compelled to keep reading you don’t have to.

That’s not to say your relation to infinite scrolling is not worrying. It has the typical signs of an addiction, including sucking the pleasure out of other activities.

I have app timers no longer than 10 minutes on each of my socials and I installed a sudoku app and an ereader (that I intentionally made it so they don’t count towards my screen time) just to have something to do when I’m bored, sometimes I do cheat and give myself an extra 10 minutes or whatever on the socials but it’s working fairly well

Same issue here, I’m trying to resolve it by deleting all western social media from my phone and keeping it on my iPad exclusively so if I want to engage with the internet I need to actually want to do it intentionally. And my hope is that when I get my brain used to boredom again I’ll be able to do tasks that don’t immediately reward dopamine.

Having social media on a separate device may not work for you but for me it seems to be enough because I’m only on my iPad when I’m using it for entertainment so I don’t really care if I watch Netflix or doomscroll because I intentionally wanted entertainment by using the device anyways.

I think it’s probably best to “detox” your brain before you try to engage with books and such because if you have much easier and rewarding dopamine accesible to you then you’ll feel worse when reading, whereas if your baseline is complete boredom a book might feel far more compelling.

Get a flip phone if at all possible and go to the middle of the woods or park and just sit down.

Haha yes yes, very funny, my advice is touch grass, but sometimes when I’m utterly overwhelmed the Buddhist principle of, “But can you hear the birds?” helps me quite a bit.

You get so in your head about relaxation being an activity or trying to force yourself to love whatever you’re doing that you can never truly embrace the joy in any given moment.

Stop being hard on yourself and don’t look at this all as a race. You’re not competing in a relaxation Olympics, there’s no one you’re inferior too. You’re you, and sometimes you just need a break.

You should probably detox for a bit. You have to lower the level of dopamine that your brain is used to (currently elevated by 24/7 reels) so that reading a book feels rewarding. A good way I do this is by blocking distracting apps until the end of the day or on weekends. I recommend Freedom.

If you’re on iPhone, you could also try using Habits First, an app made by the productivity YouTuber Reysu that blocks distracting apps until you’ve spent a certain amount of time doing your habits (e.g. read inside an e-book app, reviewed flashcards in Anki, exercised in Apple Health). That way, you can turn your addiction to reels into a reward after learning.

Firstly, I would like to preface by saying this is a tough addiction to beat, and is the addiction that defines our generation. Do not beat yourself up about this. I’m sure I speak for most of us comrades here to say that we care about you and your health.

That said, I’ll echo what other commenters here have said: 100% try a dopamine detox for u, for a full week or two. If it’s possible for you, inform your close friends/family what your are doing and that you may be harder to reach for a week. Basically, I would just turn off your phone and only use it when absolutely necessary, turning it off as soon as you’re done. Make sure to get a plethora of material that can at least somewhat entertain you without digital devices necessary and make them as convenient as possible to get to while making your phone as difficult as possible to access. Stick your phone in a drawer or something and have a stack of good books and maybe a crappy cheap MP3 player on your desk if you can find one. Granted, this is just about the most extreme option.

If the nuclear option is a bit impractical (which, for most people, it will be) I would set your phone to completely 100% grayscale and use the app ScreenZen or Mindful to set screentime limits for apps and block websites and such. If you care about privacy, I would turn off the network access for these apps as they require a lot of permissions that can be easily misused, and can work 100% offline. Mindful is open source and has privacy in mind, but if you’re properly paranoid (me), you’re gonna wanna get rid of its network access anyways. I personally find ScreenZen without network to be more useful as a leash to keep yourself on. It’s the only app I have found that allows you to set time limits for websites and allow cooldowns for apps rather than just completely blocking it after a certain point. Mindful might be more your speed during your detox phase because it completely hard locks sites and sets strict time limits for apps, but it’s up to you. Both have anti tamper protections that will prevent you from changing the settings unless absolutely necessary. I can let you know more about how I would personally configure them if you’d like. I would keep Mindful on for at least some long stretch of time—even after the detox has ended—before loosening the leash a bit by switching to ScreenZen, because you don’t wanna end up in the same place again.

On computers things get a bit more difficult, but scrolling is honestly not as stimulating on pc, at least to me. Regardless, you wanna take steps to prevent the scrolling from happening anyways. Fair warning: I never personally struggled with desktop scrolling, so I never did this, but there are anti scroll browser addons like this one for only chrome and this one for firefox and chrome (I can’t find one for safari on desktop lmao). I’m sure there are other methods too in order to bypass. You’ll have to experiment with that yourself unfortunately.

Best of luck to you in your journey. May you reclaim your brain.