Anxiety & Reading

My mental health is not doing great and it is significantly affecting my reading. Between anxiety and nightmares every night, mixed with the grief from my husband’s death and being in the middle of a move from our only home and all of the Corona Virus stuff going on, I can’t focus on books for long. Each week on my bookish check in here I find myself in the middle of more and more books. Even though I’m finishing things, 34 books so far this year, I’m in the middle 12 more books.  9 physical books and 3 ebooks.

In January I read 12 books, in February I read 17 books, and so far this month I’ve only finished 5 books.

Anxiety doesn’t usually effect me in this way. I am more likely to throw myself in to books then I am to not be able to focus on them. It makes me sad and that feeds in to the anxiety and depression and it’s a vicious cycle for me.

I always read multiple books at once and I love it. It’s so much fun for me, usually. But currently I’ve been doing a lot of sticker by number pictures and a lot of drawing with Pepper and I think I may need to look at the books I’m currently reading to see what I can pause for now so that they aren’t hanging over my head any longer.

Do you like to read multiple books at once? Or do you stick to just one book at a time? It’s not uncommon for my currently reading list to make it up to the low 20s.