The accident took place without warning during a holiday. The culprit: an Airbnb bedside table with no power outlet. A minor inconvenience forcing a mobile phone on its last gasp of ions into another room for the night.

While lying on the bed desperately trying to stem the terrifying rise of my own thoughts, it happened: I reached over and picked up a book.

The creeping anxiety of missing global breaking news, or not making it through all the reels my wife had sent me, started to slowly release its grip on my synapses, as sentences on pages swelled to paragraphs that soon arched chapters. My goldfish-trained brain so used to the mindless flick of short-form calorie-void videos as an official wind-down technique, suddenly felt soothed as it held a single connected idea together on paper. Peace descended.

I slept through that night, something I hadn’t done in a long time. Now, months later I’ve never once had the phone back near the bed.

The downside of this new leaf though was turning into the absolute worst type of book reader – a born-again book........

© The Guardian