ADHD Tip - Audiobook Reading
One of the ADD / ADHD symptoms comes down to difficulties in reading, mostly because we have hard time to focus for a long time. This causes many ADHDers to read siginificantly slower than other people, and in some cases avoid any reading whatsoever.
Several years ago I bought my first MP3 player. The last thing I thought when I made the purchase, is that it will transform my reading habits.
Yes, I said reading habit not listening habits.
It was a Sansa Clip, a cute and simple, little MP3 player with 4Gb of memory. Enough to store all my favorite music. When I opened the box I found inside the expected Sansa Clip, earphones, USB cable and a user manual. But there was one more thing inside the box.
Usually, I automatically throw all the extra promotional material that comes with new gadgets, but this time something caught my eye. It said: Download a Free Audiobook.
I love books. I love reading. I am kind of an information freak, but never in my life I have listened to an audio book, so I thought, what the heck, it’s free, why not try one.
So I did, I typed in the web address, which happened to be Audible.com and downloaded my first audio book. It was love at first sight, or maybe should say, love at first sound.
I downloaded ”The 4-Hour Workweek”, and since then I have heard 168 books, in less than four years. That’s about 4 books per month on average. Something I could never achieve by reading the same books in print. I love reading, but I am a slow reader, probably due to my ADHD, and the audiobooks give me the opportunity to consume more books, possibly 3 or 4 times more than I could ever read in the same period of time.
Other than not being limited by my slow reading, audio books allow me to hear them while doing physical work that does not need concentration, such as, while washing the dishes, walking around, working in the back yard, and so on. I am not limited by my slow reading anymore, and I don’t have to sit down to read.
Certainly, there are downside to listening over reading, as well, mainly when I wish to highlight certain parts of the book for later reference. The audible app for the newer devices, such as tablets and smart phones, now allows me to bookmark as many parts of the audio book as I wish, but these devices are somewhat less intimate comparing to Sansa Clip.
I encourage anyone with or without ADHD to try audio books. Here are some references, some are free and some are for fee, some are excellent quality some are less.
