Reading for Mental Strength

“A little food well digested will give more nourishment to the body than the large quantity that overloads the stomach, clogs the system, and brings on disease.”

There is wisdom in those words for us as we sit at the table to eat and as we sit at the table to study. A few ideas thoroughly digested will provide more benefit to us than the rehearsal of many ideas superficially. Eating slowly and in a happy frame of mind, will benefit us in the absorption of ideas as it does in the absorption of nutrients. How this way of studying and reading provides mental strength will be the subject of future posts.

Our devices and the internet have made us hasty eaters. Skimming, cursory reading, and multi-tasking characterise our habits of reading online. We can’t seem to take in all the information fast enough. Our attention is eroding, and so are the capacities that help us construct meaning from text. Eating physical food quickly, can lead to overeating, which weakens our minds. Similarly, the method of reading that has become our dominant of way of reading— hasty, superficial reading— is weakening our minds. Reflecting on a decade that he had been a computer user; writer Nicholas Carr wrote:

“I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

Has the internet made you a hasty eater? Has it robbed you of your mental strength? When someone sends you a ten-sentence WhatsApp message, does it feel like they’re asking you to read an encyclopaedia? When you read the summary of a book, do you wish someone would send you a summary of the summary? Does a 300-page book seem intimidating?

The wonderful thing about our brains is that they can regain the strength we’ve lost if we’ll practice reading slowly, deeply, and attentively. We can once more read for mental strength.