How to READ Faster and RETAIN More 🧠📚

The challenge is, is if you have a book and it's been sitting in your home or on the shelf for so long that most people don't get past the first chapter, then it becomes shelf help instead of self-help.

It turns out that people have these things called chronotypes. Now, folks out there might not have understood what a chronotype is or might not have heard that word before, but you've probably heard of somebody being called an early bird or a night owl. Those are chronotypes.

If you have to say the words inside your mind in order to understand what you're reading, you can only read as fast as you could speak. Let me say that another way. If you have to say all the words to yourself inside your mind, your reading speed is limited to your talking speed, but not your thinking speed.

Because there's 2 parts to reading, right? There's reading speed and reading comprehension. It doesn't make sense to have the speed if you don't understand what you read.

What if you could read one book a week? One book a week, that's 52 books a year, without speed reading. Would that give you an advantage? A little bit or a lot? One of the reasons why I love the topic of reading— we've all heard the phrase leaders are readers— is because, as many of you know, I grew up with learning challenges from a brain injury, and it actually took me an extra few years to learn how to read. And it was one of my biggest challenges. I remember when they would pass around the book in elementary school and you'd have to read out loud, and I couldn't do it. And I think that's where a lot of fear of public speaking actually comes from. And maybe that's where I got my fear of public speaking. But I know that leaders are readers, and you know it too. That if you're listening to this, you know the power of reading. And that if somebody could read 52 books a year, they have a huge advantage over somebody who only reads 2 books a year. In fact, I've read before that the average person only reads a few books a year, while the other average CEO actually reads 4 or 5 a month. So the reason why reading is so powerful is we live in this information age where the right knowledge is not only power, it's profit. And I don't just mean financial profit, that's obvious. There's a divide between those who know and those who don't know. But the beautiful thing about it is we live in an age of not muscle power, it's mind power. And the quicker you could learn, the quicker that you could earn. And so we live in this knowledge economy, but how do you learn most of this knowledge? It's still done through reading. And so the challenge is, is if you have a book and it's been sitting in your home or on the shelf for so long that most people don't get past the first chapter, then it becomes shelf help instead of self-help, right? And the reason why I love reading is that if somebody has decades of experience in marketing or sales or leadership or health or relationships or whatever it happens to be, productivity, and they put it into a book, That means you could download decades into days. You could download it into the superhero supercomputer, your Kwik brain, if you will, through the software of just reading, right? And so how many books are you reading right now? And if you'd like to improve it, that's what this episode is all about. So here are just a few steps that I would recommend to go through a book a week. Number 1, I would keep a book list, keep an active book list. And so every time that we recommend books, Whether it's from us or you get it from another source, write it down or keep it in your smart device or keep it on Evernote, wherever you happen to have it. Keep an active book list of things that you're excited about reading. Number 2, I would say, is start by testing your reading speed. And one of the simplest ways of doing it is picking up a book, putting on your phone for a 60-second timer, and time yourself reading 60 seconds and have the alarm go off. And then after you're done, you know, reading as you normally would read, count the number of lines that you read in 60 seconds. And that gives you the lines per minute. Now, if you wanted to test your reading speed, it's done in words per minute like they do typing speed. And you could count the number of words in the average line. And you could average it out a little bit. Most books, it's about 10 words per line. So if you wanted to know your reading speed in words per minute, you would just take how many lines you read in a minute and multiply it by 10 using this example of 10 words per line. The third thing you would do is you wanna find out the median number of words per book according to Amazon is approximately 64,000 words. Median meaning the 50% have more than that, 50% have less, but about 64,000 words. That means that if you're reading 200 words per minute, it takes about 320 minutes to finish a book cover to cover. If you break that down, divide it by 7, that's approximately 45 minutes of reading a day. That you could finish a book, an average length, about 64,000 words, in about 45 minutes a day, cover to cover. All right, so that gives you kind of a framework. So it doesn't sound like as much probably as you thought. The 4th thing I would recommend to be able to read one book and finish one book a week is to schedule your reading. Is to schedule it. Because if you don't schedule it, it's not real. If you just talk about it, it's not going to happen. You have to schedule it around a time where you know you could execute on it, because just talking about it is not going to make a difference. And I would treat that time as time that's yours, that you— it's like time with your boss, or it's time with an investor. It's a very important time that you would not cancel, because it's time for yourself. Now, what is subvocalization? Have you ever noticed when you're reading something to yourself, you hear that inner voice inside your mind reading along with you? Now, why is that a challenge when it comes to your reading speed? If you have to say the words inside your mind in order to understand what you're reading, you can only read as fast as you could speak. Let me say that another way. If you have to say all the words to yourself inside your mind, your reading speed is limited to your talking speed, but not your thinking speed. And so when you're reading something, most of the words that you're actually going through and reading, you don't have to pronounce to understand. When you see a date like 2017, most of you don't say 2,017. You see the date and you recognize what it is, much like a stop sign, much like if you're reading something and it says Los Angeles or New York City. Even if it was abbreviated NYC, you would get it. You don't have to pronounce it in order to understand it. So how do you reduce this habit called subvocalization? Well, I'll give you 3 tips. Number 1, the first idea is to be able to stretch yourself. Stretch yourself. That means to read faster than you normally do. Because the goal is when you're reading faster, what'll happen when you stretch yourself is your mind is always looking for shortcuts. And it's gonna spend less time filling in the filler words, like saying the filler words like and, there, because, that is, all these words that are there that don't have any inherent meaning, 'cause you're not reading for the words, you're reading for the ideas.

Right?

So you're not spending the time doing that. So you want to be able to stretch yourself doing some of these drills. The second thing I would recommend is to listen to music. And I would listen to music— you would have to find music that really agrees with you. I would avoid ones that have lyrics to it. Classical music has always worked well for myself and a lot of our students. I am partial to Baroque music. It has about 60 beats per minute. And so having that, listening to the sound of the music sometimes will help drown out the sound of our internal voice potentially. And the third tip I will give you right now that you could use right away is a pattern interrupt. A pattern interrupt. So you need to distract yourself. Basically what it's doing is when people are reading, you'll see them moving their lips or they're talking to themselves under their breath. And what you have to do is you have to give your mouth something else to do while you read. And so it could disengage from that speak mechanism in the brain. So what can you do? Number one, in no particular order, some people could hum. You could hum while you're reading because that resonance, that sound there, will prevent— you can't be humming and also be talking to yourself at the same time. Other things that we would recommend is chewing gum. Some people say that chewing gum is actually good for your brain. I would say that would be dependent on the quality of the gum that you're using. But chewing gum could help break the pattern that we've learned back again, back in school, where we're talking out loud and saying the words to ourselves. And the other one I would recommend would be to count— counting. And what I mean by that is if you're saying internally, you're counting numbers, let's say 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, then you can't be also simultaneously subvocalizing and saying the words to yourself. Now, in the beginning, a lot of these practices will be distracting because you don't normally do that while you read. But what your brain is also going to be doing is it's also very efficient. And after it starts to do this for a while, it'll start paying more attention to what's in front of you in terms of reading and boosting your reading comprehension. But counting as you're reading, you can't possibly be saying all the words to yourself while you're reading when you're counting 1, 2, 3, 4.

Do you have too much to read but too little time?

Are your shelves full of books that you haven't read yet and become shelf help, not self-help?

That's why I created the Kwik Reading Course.

15 minutes a day, 21 days, will absolutely transform your life. Just go to kwikbrain.com/reading, use the code PODCAST15, and you'll get instant access.

Dr. Michael Breus.

Great to be here.

So I wanted to have a quick conversation with you.

We're talking about reading.

Right.

And so what I thought we'd do is talk about ways that they could increase their mental acuity, their energy, and their focus, and combat that fatigue. So where would we start?

Reading fatigue is a real thing. So that's first of all, is it definitely something that people experience quite a bit of, and especially if you want to read and get that information in your head and you're so gung-ho to do it, you need to be careful. So one of the things I'm always talking about with my patients is taking breaks, right?

Mm-hmm.

So you don't want to be going and going and going because it will cause a decent amount of eye strain. And now people might be wondering, wait a second, didn't he introduce you as a sleep doctor? Why on earth are you talking about eye strain? So it turns out that when light comes in, can only really pretty much go one place and that's through our eyes and that actually affects our circadian rhythm, that internal biological clock. Now the reason I bring this up is because there are certain times of day where you're gonna be more alert and certain times of day where you're not gonna be able to ingest all that great information. And so some people can actually time their breaks when they're not gonna be so alert. It turns out that people have these things called chronotypes. Now folks out there might not have understood what a chronotype is or might not have heard that word before, But you've probably heard of somebody being called an early bird or a night owl. Those are chronotypes. And it turns out that different chronotypes have different alertness times. Now, one general blanket rule for everybody out there is between 1:00 and 3:00 PM in the afternoon is really never a good time for most people.

Mm-hmm.

And I'll tell you why. There's actually a small core body temperature drop which releases melatonin in our brains. For folks out there, remember, melatonin is that key that starts the engine for sleep. So we don't want that in the middle of the day. Great time to take a nap, by the way, and feel even more alert, but not necessarily the best time to read, right? So there's tremendous differences. So once you kind of get a feel for what your chronotype is, you can really figure out exactly when is your perfect time to read.

So it's not even just what people do or how they're doing it, it's actually—

When.

When they do it.

Exactly.

So that's really key. So when we're talking about fatigue and frustration, I know one of the biggest frustrations people have is they're their eye fatigue. And really what it comes down to is this word called fixations. These fixations where people are reading and they're stopping at every single word. And every single time they make a stop, it takes more time, it takes more energy.

Yeah, I mean, it would make sense to me because if your eyes are continually moving and not stopping nearly as much, every time you stop, you have to pause, which causes muscles in your eye to stop. And that means that's where you're gonna get the fatigue. So it makes perfect sense.

And it's interesting when it comes to focus, people think all the time that if they read faster, their comprehension would go down. But in actuality, you know, we have students in over When people actually read faster, they actually have better comprehension because they have better focus. It's similar going back to that metaphor of driving a car. If you're driving really slow in that traffic, you could be doing many different things, right? You could be drinking your Bulletproof Coffee. You could be trying to text. You could be putting on your makeup. You could be having a conversation with someone in the car with you. You could be thinking about your dry cleaning, 5 different things because you're going so slow, right? But if you're racing cars and you're going really— Breakneck speeds at, let's say, 200 miles per hour. Where's your focus, right?

On the road.

Exactly, on the act of driving and on the road. You're not thinking about the dry cleaning, you're not trying to text, you're not trying to do anything else. And that's why the better readers— the faster you read, the better your comprehension, because the better your focus. Because if you don't give your brain the stimulus it needs, it'll seek entertainment in the form of distraction.

How do you boost your ability to understand what you read? Better. Because there's 2 parts to reading, right? There's reading speed and reading comprehension. It doesn't make sense to have the speed if you don't understand what you read. You see, traditional speed reading has long been associated with skimming words, skipping words, getting the gist of what you read. Now, maybe because I started as a memory trainer, I think it's very important not just to read something, but to retain it and understand it. Because have you ever read a page in a book, got to the end, and just forgot what you just read? Have you ever been asked to talk about something you just read? I'm going to give you 3 techniques to boost your reading comprehension, and I call them the 3 Rs. So let's do this right now. The first R to boosting your reading comprehension, number 1, is you have to read. Now that's obvious, right? Because you can only understand something if you actually read it. So you start by reading it. So remember to go back to past previous episodes because this is not just a podcast. This is your online brain training academy. Remember subvocalization? That inner voice you hear inside your head. You hear that voice inside your head while you read. But that's a big obstacle because if you have to say all the words to yourself, you can only read as fast as you could speak. Now, the second thing I want you to do is I want you to relate. That's the second R, is to relate. What do I mean by that? I mean, read something and then talk and relate about what you're reading to somebody else. And now, why is that important? Because you're going to be training yourself to learn what it really means to understand something, maybe even for the first time. And this is a very sensitive topic for me because, as many of you know, I had a brain injury at the age of 5 and I had learning difficulties and challenges. I had bad focus. I had a really challenged memory. Teachers would have to repeat themselves 4 or 5 times in order for me to understand what they were saying. And it took me an extra 3 years just to learn how to read. And when teachers asked me to talk about what I read, I couldn't do that because I didn't understand it. So relating and talking about what you read is a very powerful tool to teach yourself what it means to understand something brand new. Because as you've learned in the first episode, I talked about the FAST method, and the T stands for what? Stands for teach. Because when you teach something, you get to learn it twice. So what I'm going to ask you to do after you read something to train your comprehension, the second thing I want you to do is relate it to somebody else. So what I'd like you to do is to dedicate 3 minutes just to talk about what you just read. So maybe you're reading 20, 30 minutes a day, and then afterwards call up a friend or tell them that you're going through this online reading course and you want to talk about this book and talk about the book. Talk about who the characters are. Talk about the plot, what's going on. Talk about when it's happening. Talk about where it's happening. We all know the 5 W's and the H, of course. And here's the magic. When you're reading something, this information is going through your eyes, it's being processed for your brain in order for you to be able to talk about it out of your mouth. You have to do something really special with that information. You have to make it your own, because no longer does it belong to just the author. It's your information. When you're talking about it, you're not even using the author's words. Whose words are you using? You're using your own words, and that's the power of it. In order for you to do it, you have to own it, you have to personalize it, you have to organize it, and be able to articulate it to another human being. And finally, the 3rd R I'm going to ask you to focus on is writing. So first you read, Then you relate, and then you write, spelled R-I-T-E. And what is writing? I'm going to ask you to take notes. So again, information is being processed through your eyes into your brain. In order for people to put it out there, you either verbalize it through relating or use your hands and you write it in handwriting. And I would recommend you handwrite this if possible. We did a prior episode on note-taking, and that's a must-listen-to episode. Many of you in our podcast community on Facebook have said that this is the most powerful episode that you've listened to, and this is all about how to take effective notes. So I'm going to ask you to take notes about what you read, to organize it. In our program, we actually have a grid system to do that. We, we take a piece of paper and we break it into 4 parts, and we ask specific questions if you're part of our Kwik Reading program. Now, if you're not part of that, then I would recommend you listen to the note-taking episode and do it that model. Where on the left side you take notes and on the right side you make notes, meaning on the left side you're capturing the information about your— what you're reading, about who the characters are and what's going on with the plot and when and where and all those questions that you're answering. And on the right side, you're creating notes about, wow, I wonder what's going to happen, what's coming up, how does this relate to what I've already understood and understand?