Reading Anxiety: Why I Always Need a Book in My Head

Confession: I always need to be reading a book. Not want, need. If I have a story in my head, I can't hear my own anxiety. It doesn't have room. The spiral that would otherwise set up camp between my ears gets evicted by fictional people with fictional problems, which are somehow infinitely more manageable than my own.

Nora Ephron once wrote that reading is everything: that it makes her smarter, gives her something to talk about, and is, in her words, "the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself." That it's escape and the opposite of escape at once. That it's bliss. I've read that quote probably a hundred times, and it still feels like someone finally put words to something I'd been doing my whole life without being able to explain it. Science has confirmed this, which I'm sure Nora would find both satisfying and slightly beneath the point.

My current read is This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum — part thriller, part slow-burn love story about best friends who host a survival podcast, one of whom disappears, with her own unpublished memoir slowly revealing why. I started it on a Tuesday night and my husband had to physically tell me it was 11:30, which, with three kids under eight, is genuinely not okay.

There's something medicinal about fiction that I haven't found anywhere else. Not podcasts, not TV... those leave too much room for my brain to wander off and catastrophize. A really good novel requires just enough of me that worry can't find a foothold, and the part of my brain that would otherwise be composing worst-case scenarios gets handed something better to do with itself. 

I've been doing this since I was a kid reading under the covers with a flashlight, long after my parents told me lights out — and if it's a coping mechanism, it's the one I'd pick every time.