How to Focus on Audiobooks When Your Mind Keeps Wandering

You press play, the narrator starts, and ten minutes later you realize you've been planning dinner. You have no idea who just walked into the room or why everyone is upset.

That's normal. Listening is one of the easiest ways to read and one of the easiest to drift away from. Here's why it happens, and what helps.

Why is it so hard to focus on audiobooks?

Because listening asks less of your body than reading does.

In a 2013 study in Frontiers in Psychology, Varao Sousa, Carriere and Smilek had 211 university students read a passage aloud, read one silently and listen to one. The researchers checked in during each task to ask whether the students' minds had wandered. Reading aloud produced the least mind wandering. Listening produced the most, and it also came with the worst memory for the text and the lowest interest ratings.

Their explanation: when you read, your eyes are moving and your hands turn pages. When you listen, nothing about the task keeps your body involved, so your attention has more room to slip.

There's a second problem. With print, you notice you've drifted because your eyes stop moving. With audio, the narrator keeps going. By the time you notice, you've missed a page or two and you're not sure where you lost the thread.

None of this means audiobooks are worse for understanding. A 2022 meta-analysis of 46 studies found no reliable overall difference between reading and listening comprehension (we cover it in does listening to an audiobook count as reading?). It means listening takes a slightly different kind of attention.

Seven things that help

1. Give your hands something simple to do

Walking, washing up, folding laundry, a jigsaw puzzle. Physical tasks that don't need much thought give your restless attention somewhere to go, so it doesn't wander off into your own head.

The word that matters is simple. Answering email while listening doesn't work. Anything that uses words, like reading, texting or writing, competes with the narrator for the same mental space.

2. Rewind the moment you notice

Don't keep going and hope the plot fills itself in. Go back to the last thing you clearly remember. Thirty seconds is often enough. Most players have a button for it, and HushBook's rewind button jumps back 30 seconds.

3. Start with a book that's easy to follow

A dense history with forty named characters is a hard first audiobook. Memoirs, comedy, thrillers and books you've already read in print are easier, because the story carries you and you don't have to hold as much in your head.

4. Slow down, or speed up

If you keep losing track, try a slower speed. If you're bored and your mind wanders because the narrator feels sluggish, try 1.25x or 1.5x. There's no single right number. We wrote a separate guide to audiobook listening speed.

5. Restart after the first half hour

The first chapter of any book is the hardest to follow. You're meeting characters and learning a narrator's voice at the same time. Some listeners go back to the beginning once they've settled in, and find the opening makes far more sense the second time.

6. Don't listen when you're exhausted or worried

If you're half asleep or anxious about something, your mind is going to wander no matter what you do. Save the book for a better moment, or pick something light. If you like to fall asleep to audiobooks, use a sleep timer so you don't wake up four chapters later with no idea what happened.

7. Read along with the text

This is the one we built an app around, so take that into account. But the idea is simple and it fixes both problems above.

When the words are on screen, your eyes have a job, so you're less likely to drift. And when you do drift, the highlighted word shows exactly where the narrator is now. You don't have to guess how much you missed.

How to read along with an audiobook in HushBook

HushBook turns an audiobook file into a word-by-word read-along.

1. Add a book. Import your own MP3, M4A or M4B file, or download a free public domain audiobook from the built-in LibriVox and Internet Archive store.
2. Let it transcribe. HushBook transcribes the recording on your phone and matches every word to the audio. Nothing is uploaded.
3. Listen and read. Each word highlights as the narrator says it, and the text scrolls along. If you lose your place, tap any word to jump the audio straight back to it.

There's a reading profile for dyslexia and ADHD with dyslexia-friendly fonts and a focus view, and another for low vision with large, high-contrast text. If attention is the main thing you struggle with, audiobooks for dyslexia and ADHD goes into more detail.

Two honest limits. The transcript comes from speech recognition, so unusual names can come out wrong. And HushBook can't import protected files, such as Audible downloads. It works with audio files you can legally import.

What if nothing works?

Some people really do follow a story better on paper, and that's fine. Mind wandering happens in print too. You just notice it sooner.

But before giving up on audio, try one easy book, at a speed that feels right, while walking, with the text in front of you. If that still doesn't work, you've learned something useful about how you read.

Sources

• Varao Sousa, Carriere and Smilek (2013), "The way we encounter reading material influences how frequently we mind wander", Frontiers in Psychology