The advice I keep hearing: if you want to read more books, put down your phone, turn off the television, carve out sacred time, exercise discipline, and become the sort of person who reads. This advice is technically correct in the same way that “eat less and move more” is technically correct advice for weight loss. It describes the desired end state while offering nothing useful about how to get there. Worse; it frames reading as something you achieve through deprivation, through the heroic denial of your baser impulses, through winning a daily war against yourself. Most people lose that war. Then they feel guilty about it.
I want to suggest a different approach, and I want to start from the premise that your existing habits are not the enemy.
You’ve spent years building behavioral infrastructure: routines, triggers, comfortable patterns, well-worn neural pathways that carry you through the day without requiring conscious decision-making. This infrastructure is valuable. It represents an enormous investment of biological resources. Trying to demolish it and build something new from scratch is not only exhausting, it’s probably unnecessary. The trick is to redirect the infrastructure you already have rather than fighting against it.
Kurt Lewin, the psychologist who essentially invented social psychology in the 1930s, proposed that behavior is a function of both the person and their environment. Change the environment, change the behavior. But we keep insisting on changing the person, on fixing our defective willpower, on becoming better and more disciplined. We keep failing for predictable reasons. What follows is an attempt to outline what it actually looks like to work with your existing patterns rather than against them.
The Substitution Principle
Your phone is not going away. You can leave it in another room during designated reading hours, and that’s a fine tactic, but at some point you’re going to be lying in bed or sitting on the couch or waiting in line, and you’re going to reach for it. This is a deeply ingrained motor pattern reinforced by thousands of repetitions, not a character flaw. Your thumb knows where Instagram lives.
So change what the thumb finds when it gets there.
Move a reading app to your phone’s dock. Put it exactly where the app you reach for reflexively currently lives. Kindle, Apple Books, Libby, whatever you prefer. The goal is to intercept an existing behavior at the last possible moment and redirect it. You’re accepting that the reaching will happen and arranging for it to land somewhere useful rather than trying to stop it altogether. This works better than you’d expect.
Behavioral psychologists call it “stimulus substitution,” and it’s considerably more effective than pure inhibition. When researchers study addiction recovery, they find that people who replace a problematic behavior with a substitute behavior have better outcomes than people who simply try to stop. Alcoholics Anonymous understood this intuitively when they started serving so much coffee at meetings that the organization became one of the largest purchasers of coffee in America. You’re giving the urge somewhere else to go.
The phone dock is the most direct application, but the principle extends. Do you collapse onto the couch after work and turn on the television out of sheer exhaustion? Put a book on the couch cushion before you leave in the morning. Not next to the couch. On the cushion, so you have to move it to sit down. Your evening decompression ritual doesn’t have to die. It can simply involve a different input.
Habit Stacking Your Reading
BJ Fogg, the Stanford behavioral scientist, popularized the idea of “habit stacking”: attaching a new behavior to an existing one so that the existing behavior becomes the trigger. After I pour my morning coffee, I’ll read one page. After I get into bed, I’ll read until I feel sleepy. After I sit down on the train, I’ll open my book app. The syntax matters. You’re not creating a new habit from nothing. You’re piggybacking on the substantial infrastructure already in place for the anchor behavior.
The crucial insight is that you’re not adding reading time to your day but borrowing time from activities that already exist in your schedule and that already have reliable triggers. The morning coffee is going to happen regardless. The commute is going to happen regardless. Getting into bed is going to happen regardless. These are moments when your brain is already in transition, already shifting from one activity to another, and transition moments are when behavioral intervention is easiest.
This is also why the advice to “find time to read” mostly fails. There is no free-floating time waiting to be found. Time is always already allocated to something, even if that something is mindlessly scrolling or staring at the ceiling. Instead of asking “when can I read?” you’re better off asking what you’re currently doing that reading could replace without requiring additional willpower.
For most people, the highest-value candidates are micro-moments: waiting for food to heat up, sitting in a waiting room, the five minutes before a meeting starts, standing in line at the grocery store. Individually these moments are trivial. Collectively they add up to hours per week, and they’re hours you’re probably spending on your phone anyway. The substitution principle applies. You’re transmuting existing phone time into reading time, not creating something from nothing.
The Content Matching Problem
One reason people struggle to read more is that they’re trying to read the wrong things at the wrong times. Attempting to get through Dostoevsky while exhausted before bed is a recipe for reading three pages, absorbing nothing, and eventually abandoning the project. You can read before bed, but you’re setting yourself up for failure when you mismatch content to context.
Different books are suited to different mental states. Light fiction is perfect for low-energy situations when your brain is basically mush. Narrative nonfiction works well when you’re moderately alert but don’t want to work too hard. Dense philosophy or technical material is best attempted when you’re fresh and can actually concentrate. Audiobooks are ideal for contexts where your hands and eyes are busy but your ears are free.
This sounds obvious, but most people don’t actually implement it. They have one book going, they feel obligated to read that book, and so they either slog through it in suboptimal conditions or they don’t read at all. Having multiple books in progress, each suited to a different context, solves this problem. The tired-before-bed book. The commute audiobook. The weekend deep-reading book. You’re choosing which reading mode fits your current situation rather than choosing whether to read at all.
Katy Milkman, the behavioral economist, writes about “temptation bundling”: pairing something you should do with something you want to do. She found that people exercised more when they could only listen to addictive audiobooks at the gym. The pleasurable thing (the audiobook) became linked to the virtuous thing (the exercise), and both happened more. Reading can work the same way. If you have a book you’re genuinely excited about, reserve it for a context you’d otherwise avoid. The book becomes the reward, and the context becomes tolerable.
Environmental Design For Readers
In 1890, William James wrote in The Principles of Psychology that habits form through the gradual grooving of neural pathways, and that the best way to establish a new habit is to make its execution as seamless and automatic as possible. He was talking about removing friction, about arranging your environment so that the desired behavior is the path of least resistance. This was smart advice in 1890, and it’s still smart advice now.
What does a low-friction reading environment look like? Books are visible and accessible everywhere. The ebook reader is charged and has the cover of an appealing book on its lock screen. The audiobook app is logged in and queued up with something good. Reading glasses are in every room where you might want to read. Lighting is adequate. There’s a comfortable spot without distractions.
But the more important half of environmental design is increasing friction for competing behaviors. Every obstacle you can place between yourself and your phone’s attention-capture apps makes reading relatively more attractive. Moving apps off the home screen. Using app timers that create annoying delays. Keeping the phone in another room during reading-compatible times. Logging out of apps so you have to actively log back in each time.
You’re not trying to make scrolling impossible. You’re trying to make reading slightly easier and scrolling slightly harder, enough to tip the balance in ambiguous moments when you could go either way. Small friction changes compound. An app that’s four taps away gets opened less than an app that’s one tap away, even though the absolute difference in effort is trivial.
The Ulysses Contract
In Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses knows he’ll be unable to resist the Sirens’ song, so he has his crew tie him to the mast and plug their own ears with beeswax. He doesn’t trust his future self to make good decisions under temptation, so he constrains his future self’s options in advance.
Behavioral economists have borrowed this idea and named it the “Ulysses contract”: a commitment made in a clear-headed moment that binds you during moments of weakness.
Reading offers several opportunities for Ulysses contracts. Joining a book club creates social accountability that makes abandoning the book awkward. Announcing on social media that you’re reading something commits your reputation to finishing it. Using apps that track reading streaks exploits your loss aversion, making you reluctant to break the chain. Paying for a year of Audible in advance makes you more likely to use it because you’ve already spent the money.
The underlying psychology is that we have multiple selves competing for control: the aspirational self who signs up for the book club, the tired self who wants to watch television instead, the social self who doesn’t want to show up without having done the reading. Ulysses contracts let the aspirational self recruit allies (the social self and the loss-averse self) to gang up on the tired self.
Yes, this is manipulating yourself.
But you were going to be manipulated by something.
It might as well be a force pushing you toward what you actually want.
Why This Works When Discipline Doesn’t
The discipline-based approach to reading more treats your current habits as enemies to be conquered. It positions you against yourself. This is exhausting, and exhaustion is anti-correlated with reading. You’re more likely to scroll when you’re tired, and fighting yourself all day makes you tired. The whole enterprise is self-defeating.
Working with your existing patterns treats your current habits as raw material. You already have reliable triggers, comfortable routines, and well-established environmental cues. Instead of demolishing this infrastructure, you’re repurposing it. The energy expenditure is lower. The success rate is higher. And because you’re not framing reading as a chore you must force yourself to do, you’re more likely to actually enjoy it, which means you’re more likely to continue.
The interventions that stick are usually the ones that feel like cheating, the ones that seem too easy to possibly work. Putting a book on the couch cushion is a stupid trick. Moving the Kindle app to where Instagram used to live is a stupid trick. Having three books going at once so you always have something appropriate for your energy level is a stupid trick.
These stupid tricks work because they don’t depend on you being more disciplined or motivated or virtuous.
They work with the person you already are, and that’s the only person you’ve got.
Stop trying to break your habits. Start trying to redirect them.
The infrastructure is already there.
