David R. MacIver's Blog
Losing yourself in an audiobook
This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/losing-yourself-in-an-audiobook.
I’ve been listening to a lot of audiobooks recently, so on the principle that anything worth doing is worth paying attention to, I thought I’d write a bit about what that’s like.
Partly, this is interesting because I’ve previously failed to get into audiobooks at all, but in the last couple of months they’ve become a big part of my life. This isn’t entirely a positive, although I think where it’s negative it’s more a symptom than a cause of of problems.
This post is mostly paid, but before we get into the more personal sections, here’s a spell for you:
Bedtime Story
When trying to fall asleep, if you’re struggling to calm down, or have a thought loop going on, put on an audiobook to listen to and listen to it for as long as you want.
A good choice of audiobook for this is:
Fiction. Probably some choices of nonfiction work well for this too, but I’ve not explored this much yet.
A familiar story - Ideally one I’ve actually read before, but if not a familiar and unchallenging genre.
Familiar narrator.
Not that good. Royal Road /Kindle Unlimited level quality is often ideal. This matters less when you’re rereading than when you’re reading something for the first time.
“Basic” narration. Radio plays, books with sound effects, etc. are very bad for this. e.g. I was listening to the Peter Whimsey radio plays
Put the audiobook on on a timer for half an hour, and then lie in bed with your eyes closed and maybe a sleep mask on. If you don’t fall asleep before the timer finishes, just extend it.
If you wake up in the middle of the night, just put the audiobook back on.
Because I side sleep, especially while trying to fall asleep, I’ll typically use a single earbud from my airpods while doing this, and swap it between ears if I shift about, but use whatever sleep setup works for you for this. If you’re sleeping alone you can even use it on speaker mode.
This has significantly improved my sleep reliability. It’s much better for falling asleep to than reading a book, because you’re able to drift off while it’s still going on, while with actual reading you need to maintain focus.
I’m possibly slightly too dependent on it, which is one of the downsides, I’m going to talk about in the paid sections, but that’s still a lot better than struggling to sleep, and even on nights where I can’t sleep I’m a lot less frustrated because I’ve got a good (or, at least, enjoyable) book to listen to while I fail to sleep.
Audiobooks and attention
The biggest thing that stopped me from getting into audiobooks is that I read much much faster than speaking speed, and I don’t like having to pay full attention to audio as a result. It feels frustrating compared to actual reading. I’ll zone out, lose my place, etc. Getting into audiobooks required learning to be fine with this.
The easiest way for me to do that was to listen to material I’ve already read, because that way even if I zone out and skip a whole chapter because I’m focusing on other things, I’ll still more or less know what happened in that chapter, so it’s fine.
Eventually, with experience, it gets to the point where it’s fine just because… well, it is. In much the same way that you can pick up a book that’s later in a series without really remembering what happened in the previous books, you can pick up a book midway through without really remembering what’s happened previously. Worst case scenario, you can just page back a couple of chapters. As long as you’re comfortable with rereading, you can be comfortable with forgetting or missing bits.
Particularly if I’m using an audiobook to fall asleep to, I’ll often listen to the same chapter multiple times, because whatever chapter I’m on when I wake up is probably at least two or three chapters ahead of where I remember being when I fall asleep.
It’s not, it turns out, like I’m a particularly detailed reader even when I’m reading fiction normally. e.g. I often skip detailed descriptions of what’s going on and mostly read the narrative. As a result, when listening to audiobooks I often actually get more detail even when I’m zoning in and out. Certainly different detail.
The result is that this need for attending to the audiobook and its associated frustrations are largely just solved by giving yourself permission to not pay that close attention.
This is also, I think, why they’re so good to fall asleep to: They can absorb all of your attention, or none of your attention, and any amount in between. When you need to bring your attention off something, they’re there, and when your attention naturally drifts off them into sleep, that’s fine.
Audiobooks bounce less
One thing that often happens to me is that I bounce off stories. It’s not that I think they’re bad particularly, but they just fail to grab me, and at some point I get distracted from them and go read something else.
This seems to happen much less with audiobooks, and I think it’s because they change the default action. With reading, by default you stop reading. With an audiobook, by default you continue listening.
This also combines well with the different relationship to attention. A worse audiobook just ends up consuming less of my attention rather than causing me to stop reading it. This is both good and bad of course, but it does give me the ability to enjoy things I might otherwise not.
It also seems to be a good mechanism for picking up some of a hard subject by osmosis. e.g. the Very Short Introduction series seems to be really quite good for audiobooks, and I “read” “Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction” on audiobook as part of trying to decide whether I should to make an attempt to read Heidegger.
Audiobooks have more voice
At the same time, there are a number of ways that an audiobook can annoy you in a way that a conventional book will not. The easiest one is the narrator. If they’ve got an annoying voice, the audiobook is an absolute non-starter.
But you also notice more subtle things, like where they place emphasis on words, particular regional pronunciation, and so on. Sometimes this is interesting. For example, I have apparently gone through life into my 40s without realising that Americans pronounce “shone” incorrectly.
But it also makes the language style of the author much more apparent, in a way that can be very irritating, particularly given my tendency to listen to books that are not actually that good.
For example: I’ve recently been listening to the Divine Apostasy series by AF Kay. Can’t particularly recommend, but there’s a lot of it and I’ve previously read most of it before deciding not to continue, and that made it a good choice for sleep reading. Something I had not picked up on in my reading was the incredible density of the words “He said”, “She said” in the author’s writing style. It’s ubiquitous in most of the narrative, in a way that feels really unusual. When reading my eyes would just immediately skip over that and not notice.
I’m currently listening to “The Perfect Run” by Maxime J. Durand, and there’s something really weird about how he uses tenses. One way it shows up is the use of “having” as a connective in run-on sentences, and slightly odd use of tense. e.g. a line that just went by is “Thankfully, Ryan managed to dodge the initial volley, reaching his car.” The connective isn’t exactly wrong, but the construction feels a bit foreign, and appears constantly. I never noticed it while reading rather than listening.
And, at the same time, the fact that you’re listening to the sound of the language more slowly is a significant upside when the writing is really good. I’ve also listened to a lot of Terry Pratchett and Dorothy Sayers, and the quality of the writing genuinely stands out a lot more when it’s well read.
I’ve definitely got to the point where I enjoy the medium in its own right, and I think if I read a book I’ll likely also want to listen to it as an audiobook later, and I will get new and different things out of it by doing so.
I do worry that they might supplant the “reading a book” part though, and I would definitely lose out by only listening to audiobooks.
Audiobooks are a bit too convenient
I think one of the big difficulties we face in modern society is that it’s very easy to substitute a good thing with an easier thing. That easier substitute may not even be strictly worse, but it certainly isn’t uniformly better.
Something I’ve noticed is that since starting listening to audiobooks, my reading has largely dried up. I don’t think that’s wholly causal - it’s not just that audiobooks are substituting for reading (though they are, especially my trashy fiction reading, which I don’t mind them substituting), but that I’ve been having a bad time and that’s both impairing my ability and willingness to read and also increasing my desire to listen to audiobooks.
But I do think that I’d possibly have solved this problem if I didn’t have the much more convenient audiobook format to fall back on.
Audiobooks can fill much needed holes
Another problem I’ve been having with the new audiobook habit is that it makes it a lot easier to drift:
Drifting is like… evil flow. It absorbs the totality of your being in the same way, but you’re left feeling entirely unnourished by it. Flow is what happens when you’re able to absorb yourself entirely in the achievement of some end. Drifting is what happens when absorbing yourself entirely is the end, a way to dissociate from the world. Drifting is eating the lotus.
The thing that makes audiobooks a good sleep aid also makes it very easy to enter into this evil flow, because they basically create a sump that any attention you don’t want to spend on reality to flow into. It’s very easy to listen to an audiobook “while doing other things” and then suddenly realise you don’t really know where the last couple of hours went.
There’s a concept of an “aesthetic slot” I really like from the book “Why it’s OK to love bad movies” (which I’m a huge fan of). The idea is that there are points in your life that you can put an aesthetic experience into, your aesthetic slots. You can e.g. go see a movie in the cinema at a point when you’re full of energy and enthusiasm about the movie, and that’s one type of aesthetic slot, but you’ve also got points in your life where e.g. you’re tired after a long day, or you’re washing the dishes or cooking dinner, etc. and you could still watch something then.
The point of the concept in the original context is that not all movies fit into all slots. You might want to watch some classy art house movie when you’ve got attention available for it and are prepared to make a big event of it, but when you’re washing the dishes and only paying half attention to it the latest MCU nonsense is probably a better fit for that slot.
As a devoted bad book reader I’ve found this concept very helpful for a while, and not just to justify my terrible taste. It’s genuinely helpful when e.g. I’m “struggling to read” to think about what would be the right book for me right now rather than just reading the book I feel like.
But something the current audiobook experiment is definitely making me notice is that actually maybe it’s not good to fill every aesthetic slot. Maybe rather than listening to an audiobook while I wash the dishes or go for a walk, I should use the time to think or just generally be alone with myself in whatever way I choose.
Audiobooks as a comfort blanket
I think one of the problems is that having this sort of attention sump makes it very easy to smother anxiety, and that’s bad.
Something I notice right now when I take off my headphones and attempt to just be in the world without any sort of external stimulus right now is that my anxiety levels are way up. Not about anything specific, the underlying cause is probably something mostly physical, but a general heightened sentence of agitation.
It’s not much fun, and it naturally makes me reach for an audiobook as a sort of soothe for it. This can, of course, be a completely reasonable thing to do. It’s part of why they work well for going to sleep.
But at the same time… during the day it’s not actually that helpful. It’s not like listening to the audiobook actually addresses the underlying problem, it just gives me somewhere else to direct my attention so I don’t notice it.
It feels like it’s the psychological equivalent of snuggling up in a nice warm blanky. It’s not that you shouldn’t do this, but you can’t wander around in one all the time - it gets in the way of things you want to get done practically.
Because the thing that replacing anxiety with audiobooks does isn’t that it removes the impairment caused by the anxiety, it just leaves me impaired and makes it less unpleasant. Yes I can, in theory, work while listening to an audiobook. Sometimes I even do - it’s better than not doing any work at all - but it’s a hell of an impairment.
Another habit I’ve got into recently which isn’t always bad but is maybe diagnostic is cryptic Sudokus. I think some amount of this is good, and it’s e.g. better to wake up to playing a Sudoku than to scrolling Twitter.
And, sometimes, I do both at once, listening to an audiobook while playing Sudoku. And it’s interesting to notice that sometimes when doing this I have to turn the audiobook off (not just ignore it) in order to be able to think through some tricky problem. It’s particularly interesting because of how invisible this is to me until I really hit the limits of my cognition, but I think clearly that tax on thinking is being paid even when I’m not noticing it.
This is particularly interesting with Sudoku because although I do use verbal reasoning for it it’s not a particularly verbal activity. Obviously listening to an audiobook gets in the way of writing. Less obviously it gets in the way of coding, and certainly I can multitask coding and listening to an audiobook, but I’m clearly paying this sort of sudoku-equivalent intelligence tax when doing it.
Audiobooks as a place to hide
As the line goes, everything in moderation, but this is a class of things that is very hard to get a good handle on. Audiobooks are clearly helping me solve problems, and it’s good that I’m solving those problems, but I think perhaps they’re helping me cover up problems that I should be solving.
I’m increasingly interested in discomfort tolerance as a general skill, and I think the problem with having access to a very easy way to increase your comfort levels makes it harder to practice discomfort tolerance. If I’m sitting there being anxious and I could do something hard and unpleasant like engaging with the anxiety (or even something only moderately unpleasant but higher effort like going for a walk, doing some breathing practice, etc) or I could immediately turn it off by putting on an audiobook and listen to someone make numbers go up, it requires a level of self-discipline that in the moment I’m not necessarily going to manage to exhibit.
This is particularly true because a lot of the time actually this is a completely reasonable thing to do. If I’m genuinely wiped out, or if I need to sleep, or there’s nothing really done to be done about the anxiety, it’s perfectly reasonable to do something to mask it, in much the same way that you can take a painkiller for a headache without addressing the underlying cause of the headache. It’s also perfectly reasonable to listen to an audiobook just because I want to enjoy listening to an audiobook.
But I do think it’s worth noticing when these habits end up becoming hiding places, and trying to find a happy medium where we can use them, we can enjoy them, but we don’t over rely on them in ways that end up making the problem worse.