Active Reading: Questions to Regain Agency

When we sit down to read and realize we’ve “read the same paragraph four times,” it can feel like proof that we’re broken. In this episode of Rhythms of Focus, we explore a kinder, more rhythmic way for wandering minds and adults with ADHD to meet the page and actually feel alive in the words.

### What we explore

We look at why reading can feel like climbing a mountain, especially when working memory, emotions, and confusion fog the “now” of our attention. We also unpack what “active reading” really means for wandering minds and how we can use confusion, sleepiness, and resistance as gentle signals instead of verdicts against us.

Together, we:

• Reframe mind wandering and re-reading as part of the brain’s natural “formatting” process, not personal failure.

• Practice questions like “What does this have to do with that?” and “What do we know, think, and not know?” to restore agency on the page.

• Explore simple, environment-based supports (like single-path attention and fewer “infinite gravity pools”) that make sustained reading more possible for ADHD minds.

This episode also features an original solo piano composition, “Alight,” inviting us to feel how staying alive in the notes mirrors staying alive in the sentences. If this resonates, we invite you to subscribe and visit rhythmsoffocus.com to keep traveling these gentler paths of agency, mindfulness, and rhythm together.

## Hashtags

#ADHD #WanderingMinds #mindfulproductivity #readingwithADHD #workingmemory #activeReading #neurodivergent #focusstrategies #gentleproductivity #RhythmsofFocus

## Transcript

“I’ve Read This Paragraph Four Times” – When Reading Feels Impossible

I think I've read the same paragraph four times without absorbing a thing. How the heck do people read?   📍 ​

Wandering Minds, Books, and the Mountain of Focus

 for some wandering minds, reading a book is about as difficult as climbing a mountain, mountaineers notwithstanding. Getting to the book at all is one hurdle, and staying with the book is yet another. We might blame that wandering mind, this sense I just can't focus, or maybe I'm not a visual learner well either, might be true.

Interestingly, though, I've met quite a number of those with wandering minds who find reading delightful. This ready made path, easily followed without needing to hold back.

The guardrails of the words and the passage lead them along this gripping story. Now, sometimes they might fall into other troubles like an attention tunnel hyperfocus. It's hard to break out of. While the troubles of being inflow are certainly important and worthy of our attention, I wanna focus today on the other side of matters, which is getting into the book.

When a Book Feels Dead – Boredom, Assignments, and Resistance

There's a sense of deadness, the words, the boredom. We could argue that sometimes a book just isn't very engaging. It's the book's fault, not mine. No, certainly that can be the case too, but I would just say, okay, we'll find another. And then you're saying I'm assigned this one. Well, okay. Okay. I give up.

Let's see what we can do, anyway.  

Chapter 4: Single-Path Attention – Why Planes (and No Wi‑Fi) Help Us Read

There are any number of approaches we can take. In recent episode I describe being on a plane with a book without wifi. We're able to allow our mind to wander about, as opposed to having the internet, hobbies, or other infinite gravity pools pulling, we have the singular path forward for our attention.

Cracking open the book, we can weave back and forth between being and engaging a word here, a sentence there. And sometimes we can even dive deep pretty quickly.

But sometimes if you're like me, you might just fall asleep.

Sometimes I'll even go through waves of falling asleep, open the book, read another sentence, and I'm out again. But after a while, sometimes something clicks and I'm off and running.

Three Ways We “Read” – Sleep, Edit, or Write Something New

My own psychoanalyst years ago would describe his own process of reading, and he said one of three things would happen. One, he'd fall asleep.

Two, he'd start editing the paper, or three, he'd start writing a new paper altogether. Funny enough, he left out reading the paper itself.

The Hidden Stage of Reading – Formatting, Meaning, and Confusion

As we read, I think there's a formatting stage that isn't often discussed. Especially when we're first starting a book, new concepts are coming to mind.

For them to make any sense, we need to reflect on them between what we know, what we don't know, as well as connect things together. When our minds have this tendency to wander, the initial sensation of discovering, difference, and discrepancies isn't always about wonder sometimes that would otherwise draw us in.

Instead, it's about confusion. And because the birth of confusion is often unconscious, we don't recognize what caused it. Confusion appears when something doesn't make sense. Usually two or more things somehow don't connect. Maybe this sentence and that don't seem to have anything to do with each other. And we just went by not realizing it. Maybe an idea just appearing seems to conflict with something Only vaguely remembered from this last page, last paragraph, last chapter.

Or maybe the words stir a set of associations, some thoughts and daydream. Something gets touched off within a recollection, A moment of sadness, joy, shame, excitement. The grocery item you just forgot. Another matter of confusion is how large of a cloud it can create within our minds. Blocking out our working and short term memories.

Working Memory, Fog, and the “Reading the Same Line Again” Problem

Working memory is that part of us that's engaged in this moment. It's the central fovea in the lens of consciousness. Short term memories about the small handful of ideas bouncing in and out of that center is that peripheral vision flowing from into the lens of consciousness. Together, these create the now.

And when confusion appears, it can be this large billowing fog obstructing much of whatever it is that we would see, dragging us off into one thought after the next emotional waves pulling this way in that, mostly unconsciously, until hopefully we can find some clearer skies. We daydream, read the same sentence, the same paragraph over and over.

Sometimes we don't even do that, and instead fall asleep. The wandering mind myopic and magnified it as it is and its views of the now are particularly susceptible to emotions, huge in swallowing as they can be. So how do we regain ourselves? How do we engage and feel alive again?

What “Active Reading” Really Means for Wandering Minds

 We often hear this importance of being active in our reading. Well, what does that even mean? My analyst mentioned either editing or writing, and I agree that these are useful, but sometimes we still need to read that thing, don't we? We can use these feelings, exhaustion, confusion, and the like to recognize that some things somewhere has a disconnect.

I like to use the question, "what does this have to do with that?" We identify. One sentence, one idea. Wherever my mind went, perhaps with something else, perhaps what I just read. Sometimes I discover a connection, and when I do, I'm often feeling alive again, and sometimes I don't. But having asked the question itself somehow helps contain that confusion.

A Gentle Framework – “What Do I Know, Think, Not Know?”

In those times that I've particularly been able to engage, I pause and wonder to myself, what do I know? What do I think about this? What do I not know? In this way the initial stage is not active in some physical sense. In fact, I go in the opposite direction. I pause, I stop reading. I ground myself with what I know, and now when I go back I can argue, I can say, wait a second.

That doesn't make sense. Oh wait, I agree with that, but your foundation is wrong. But I like your conclusion. Maybe I'll even start to write whatever the case. I am alive.

Why You Fall Asleep While Reading – A Theory of Brain “Formatting”

Now, of course, even this is not foolproof. Sometimes I still fall asleep. I have this theory that as I sleep, my brain is formatting itself.

I'm consolidating whatever I'm reading. I know it's more than a theory. There's science to say sleep is good for you and your ability to remember. But I think it goes beyond that. It's this consolidation. It's this bringing together of worlds of thought and idea between myself and another person. And the deeper the resonance into the unconscious worlds, the greater the mysteries of sleep are ready to do their work.

Or I just ate a Turkey sandwich.

  📍 ​

Staying Alive in the Notes - "Alight"

 Today's piece of music is an older piece. I think I wrote it some 20 years ago or so, and as with all my pieces of that age, they tend to evolve. I need to be alive in the performance. If I'm fading out, I think you can hear it in the notes, but it's the life of a piece and the performer that resonates with an audience.

Same thing happens as we read.

 It's that resonance with the author. The following piece is in F Minor. It's called alight, and I hope you enjoy it.  

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