What’s stopping you from trying again? Treat it like working out: schedule 30 minutes per day in which you have to read the book, and you have to try honestly. It doesn’t matter if you get distracted and have to start over all the time, just keep trying. After a while, your habits will change and it will come naturally.

It’s a brain plasticity thing. Like any exercise, you have to keep it trained or you will lose your endurance and muscle memory.

Gotta cultivate the habits you want to keep, or else habits will form on their own that you don’t necessarily want, not unlike weeds in an untended garden.

After a pause in my reading habit, it was similar for me but I just kept at it and now I read a lot quite easily. Although, with the bite sized content, my patience for media taking too long to get to the core message, is significantly reduced. If I don’t get what the image, text or video is about within the first 5 seconds, I move on. Especially with the reels of people talking some random stuff with just their face in the video. Absolutely loathe that.

I do fast forward through shows like you. Especially when they’re putting too much fluff before the conflict/resolution. No patience for that at all. And I watch k-dramas and anime, so it gets difficult sometimes haha.

I’ve developed a constant need for content

Used to, but I’ve managed to keep it under control. For reference, I have ADHD, and due to my carreer and hobbies I spend most of the day in front of a screen. I’ve gotten the algorithms from sites and apps I use to favor media on the longer side and have no issues sticking to it, or reading for long periods of time. Since I started taking medication for ADHD, it’s gotten even better still. Though I won’t lie, when reading I often had to read the same thing twice or thrice because I didn’t really read it.