Help! I Can’t Read!
Reading is my greatest pleasure in life. Well, one of my greatest pleasures.
There’s music, and the Lake Michigan beaches and my family and my daffodils and a few other personal items on that list. But I absolutely love to read.
My idea of a perfect afternoon is a good book and a glass of wine and either a toasty fire or a shady patio. We travel west every February for a few weeks of Arizona sunshine, and I usually log a dozen or more books that month, fiction and non-fiction. This year, I read 15, before a looming pandemic chased us back across the country and home.
So you would think I’d be buried in books during the enforced home stay, tucked up and cozy, in my quiet household. But no.
I am finding it incredibly difficult to read books. And I am not alone.
According to Christian Jarrett, PhD, a clinical psychologist based in the U.K.: “Research shows that chronic stress affects the way the front of the brain works—the area…[that] normally controls our ability to concentrate and switch attention from one thing to another.” Simply put, during something as stressful as living through a global pandemic, “we lose our usual mental flexibility and become highly focused on the source of the threat,” making it difficult to lose yourself in another world.
Which makes sense. Because it is not that I am finding it impossible to read. It’s that CONTINUE READING: Help! I Can’t Read! | Teacher in a strange land
