The rush hour traffic analogy may seem silly. But let me explain. When you’re stuck on the interstate, the worse thing you could possibly do is to try to get unstuck. And if you’re like me, you creep and pause, creep and pause, and that only exacerbates your feeling of helplessness. Similarly, in the panic for sentence-by-sentence microscopic answers, we only become more fused with the challenge of the material. We FEEL worse off because the pausing draws implicit attention to our struggle. This unproductive fusion expends energy and pulls us away from the process of learning. Don’t get me wrong: often times stopping and starting frequently can be helpful, especially when your assignment is short and thick. But if you find yourself in a vicious cycle of self-frustration and bitterness towards your reading material, chances are you need to step on the gas and move steadily – albeit slowly – for the good of your coherent picture.    

There's another reason why keeping moving is the way to go. A TON of learning potential lies in not knowing completely, and that's true even if you've got the test tomorrow. Trust me - you're going to fare a lot better knowing more grey at the expense of a little stark black and white. Yes, by chugging along, you sit with the uncertainty that what you missed is crucial to the next sentence. But you also gain the strength not to be so reliant on it. Fluency implies flexibility. Think of it this way: you can always go back after the first run-through (a run-through is measurable and finite, and you can do it again), but a sentence by sentence "time-suck" could go on forever.   

Finally, frequent pauses are harmful in their own right as they can be a potential precursor to full-blown doubting disease. In its nastiest case, reassuring ourselves of understanding at every turn is an obsessive compulsion, and its purpose can shift dangerously away from wanting to figure out the content to needing to feel like we can do it. A natural part of the learning process is genuinely feeling stuck -- like we don't know and shouldn't waste our time - but the way out is not to wallow in it. Frequent stopping and starting actually pulls us away from getting the most out of just about anything we’re reading about. Cross-header connections actually become HARDER to make because you're in your head more than you’re on the page. True embrace of an academic challenge is not how eager you are to absorb everything, but rather how willing you are to take the risk that you might miss something crucial.   

So how do you change your reading habits if you, like me, suffer from obsessive-compulsive reading disorder?