My year of slow-reading War and Peace

Photo of a person reading Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” with a red decorative cover while sitting near a window.

Photo by Ally McNaughton

I usually start the year with the goal of reading more books. But, this year, my goal is to read just one: War and Peace (1869).

Leo Tolstoy’s novel has been on my shelf for years, but lighter and shorter fare has always come between us. ‘I’ll read this one quick, easy novel,’ I think, ‘then I’ll give Tolstoy my full attention.’ Years passed. Until I encountered the idea of the ‘slow read’, via Simon Haisell’s newsletter Footnotes and Tangents. It’s Haisell’s third and final year running an online club for this particular novel, producing podcasts to accompany each week’s reading, and in 2025 his subscriber list has swelled like the ranks of the Napoleonic and Russian armies advancing towards each other, with me among their number.

War and Peace has 361 chapters, most shorter than 10 pages. Having started on 1 January and reading a chapter a day, I can expect to reach the epilogue not long after Christmas. This makes my experience similar to how the earliest version of the story, published in weekly newspaper instalments, was read. Now more than halfway through the year, my sense of time has shifted in response to this routine. The book as an object has become a talisman, a tangible manifestation of how a daily habit can build into a much bigger accomplishment: the growing section of pages in my left hand marking out the year so far; the dwindling section in my right hand showing the year yet to unfold. On the left is what is done and cannot be changed; on the right are possibilities still open, choices yet to be made, days to be filled with activities of my choosing. If this is what I can achieve through an extra 15 minutes of reading a day, what else could I add to my life in a similarly manageable, daily microdose? My guitar calls to me from across the room, and the Duolingo owl hoots softly, menacingly, from my phone.

by Freya Howarth

FIND OUT MORE

Join the ‘slow read’ book club at Simon Haisell’s online newsletter Footnotes and Tangents; the upcoming novels are Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (Sep-Nov 2025) and The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald (Nov-Dec 2025).

Build your reading habit, at any speed, with the help of the Psyche Guide ‘How to Read More Books’ (2025) by Christian Jarrett.

Grow your book collection so your next read is at the ready, with tips from my Psyche Guide ‘How to Nurture a Personal Library’ (2022).

NOTE TO SELFPERSONALITY

Try everything twice

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Ross Sneddon/Unsplash

Starting in college, I adopted a new life motto: ‘Try everything twice, because the first time could be a fluke.’ I knew I needed a change. My teenage self had been stubborn and overly certain about the world. That version of me liked what they liked, and that was that. But as I entered adulthood, I started to see how my rigidity was hurting me. By dismissing people, opportunities and experiences out of hand, I was missing out.

So I started giving everything chances – at least two. I applied this to different foods, workout classes, styles of dress, and even dates. I revisited a study group that I’d avoided after our first session together (because they seemed awkward and too quiet), and soon got to know them as a witty and thoughtful group of friends. Saying ‘yes’ at least twice to different social events and party scenes helped me figure out what I truly enjoy.

Over time, this practice, I suspect, even changed my personality, strengthening my tolerance for things I would’ve previously written off and giving me a newfound curiosity. As someone who writes about psychology, I came to understand this change in terms of openness to experience: a dimension of personality that includes inquisitiveness, willingness to entertain new ideas, imagination, and adventurousness. There is no doubt in my mind that changing this personality trait – which, research shows, is indeed possible to do – has made me a happier person.

But I’m also a better person now, I think. Since my first impressions now carry less weight, I’m more generous in my assessments of people, and way more likely to chat with someone I don’t know well. Teenage me would be baffled by how many more sources of joy and delight you can find if you just give things a chance to grow on you. Sometimes all it takes is a second try.

by Hannah Seo

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Openness to experience isn’t the only personality trait that can shift over time. If you’d like to become more outgoing – and learn more about the science of personality change – check out the Psyche Guide ‘How to Come Out of Your Shell’ (2021) by Christian Jarrett.

Olga Khazan of The Atlantic conducted her own personal experiment into altering her traits, which she recounts in the story ‘I Gave Myself Three Months to Change My Personality’ (2022).

My motto encouraged me to persist in getting to know unfamiliar people. If you could use some additional encouragement to put yourself out there, try the Psyche Guide ‘How to Chat With Almost Anyone’ (2025) by Michael Yeomans.

NOTE TO SELFMIND-BODY INTERACTIONS

So what if Nike’s neuro shoes are a placebo?

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Nike has just released its first ever range of ‘mind-altering’ shoes. Its glitzy marketing campaign features a chief science officer, brain scan results and dramatic music. The shoes, which have an array of bobbles (sorry, ‘nodes’) on their soles, promise to help connect your body with your brain and tune you in to the present moment. I’m sceptical about the scientific claims, but I’m impressed by the storytelling.

In medicine, it’s well known that positive expectations about an intervention, even an inert one, can produce real physiological benefits – this is the placebo effect. As the neuroscientist and placebo expert Fabrizio Benedetti explained in his paper ‘Placebos and Movies: What Do They Have in Common?’ (2021) , it is the therapeutic rituals around a placebo treatment that magnify its effects. White coats, needles, pill colours, authoritative reassurance – all these factors can trigger associations that contribute to a patient’s belief that a treatment will work.

I’m reminded of Nathan Hill’s satirical novel Wellness (2023), in which the psychologist Elizabeth starts out investigating products that make dubious claims, but comes to realise the effects are real even if they’re purely a placebo. The key to their success is the ‘story surrounding the thing’, she observes; later, she becomes a consultant for multinational corporations, helping them to craft convincing fictions.

I suspect this is exactly what Nike has done with its new range of shoes. They’ve created an elaborate, compelling narrative tailored for an athletic audience looking to gain an edge: a ‘Mind Science Department’ staffed with neuroscientists who have developed shoes that ‘disengage the default mode network’ and engage the ‘sensorimotor network of the brain’. Is any of it real? The remarkable thing about the placebo effect – and Nike’s canny marketing exploits this fully – is that it doesn’t really matter.

by Christian Jarrett

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Even knowing that these new shoes might be relying on a placebo effect probably won’t dull any benefits. Research suggests that so-called open-label placebos – in which patients are told they are receiving a placebo – are still effective, as explained in this Psyche Idea by Darwin A Guevarra and Kari A Leibowitz. (And regardless, the Nike Mind 001 ‘pregame mules’ do look awfully comfy!)

There is a long tradition of marketing teams exploiting the allure of neuroscience to sell products. Why not wear your Nike Mind mules while sipping on a glass of NeuroSonic?

NOTE TO SELFOCD

Forever compelled

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Woman in historical dress washing her hands with water poured by a child from a jug, with onlookers in an ornate interior setting.

Detail from Interior with a Woman Washing her Hands (1675) by Eglon van der Neer. Courtesy the Mauritshuis, the Hague, the Netherlands

Having a history with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), I’ve long found it fascinating and, in a way, reassuring to read about the disorder’s many guises. The anxious thoughts and compulsive responses to them follow a common script, but the specifics vary. What seems horrible to one person with OCD, such as using a restroom without extensively washing their hands, might seem innocuous to the next person, who’s preoccupied by something completely different (such as worrying and repeatedly testing whether doors are locked, or having ‘bad thoughts’ and scrutinising what they mean). Reflecting on this merry-go-round of fears tells you something about the true nature of your specific, seemingly terrible fear.

A book I recently read showed me another dimension of this multiplicity – stretching it backward in time. In portions of Can’t Just Stop: An Investigation of Compulsions (2017), the late science journalist Sharon Begley surveys compulsions of the past. Based on rare historical accounts, she writes, it seems that ‘until the late seventeenth century, [compulsions] were seen as evidence of Satan’s hand and addressed by clergymen.’ Some of them featured the scrupulosity that still appears in many OCD cases today – for example, compulsively praying, fearing you’ve not done it right.

But other variants emerged in the record. A Renaissance-era physician described a patient who felt compelled to wash her clothes after touching things. Later, Begley writes, changes such as the spread of household stoves encouraged compulsive checking (eg, checking and rechecking whether you left the stovetop or oven on, a well-recognised pattern today). In what sounds a lot like an OCD compulsion, the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson would reportedly touch each lamppost as he walked down the street, ensuring he didn’t miss any. The disorder took on new faces, and the explanations for it evolved. But its insidious power appears to be age-old.

by Matt Huston

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For an excellent, concise description of OCD and ‘scrupulosity’ in particular, read Jesse Summers’s Psyche Idea ‘Why Won’t the Sin Wash Away? When Thinking Ethically Goes Awry’ (2020).

Nick Wignall’s Psyche Guide on ‘How to Deal With Troubling Thoughts’ (2020) offers advice for handling the intrusive, unwanted thoughts that are a common feature of OCD.

The International OCD Foundation lists many of the common types of obsessions and compulsions and has a series of articles on subtypes of OCD.

NOTE TO SELFLOVE

It’s a gift to share reality with someone

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A couple sitting in a beach chair on a sandy shore during a cloudy evening surrounded by empty striped chairs.

Photo by Alessandro Gandolfi/Panos

My partner and I say, unjokingly, that if it weren’t for dating apps we never would have met. We’re different in many ways, with divergent backgrounds, interests, musical tastes and social-media diets. While our differences meant we needed help getting together, staying together has been easy – perhaps because we have something that researchers have deemed valuable in relationships: a ‘shared reality’.

Psychology researchers define a shared reality as the perception that you share with another person many of the same feelings, attitudes and beliefs about the world. If, for example, you and a partner discuss a horror movie you’ve watched together, and it turns out that you both found particular parts scary and other bits a little silly, you’d feel a sense of shared reality about this movie. It’s the impression that the other person is seeing what you’re seeing and that you’re processing it in a similar way. This can apply to all sorts of shared experiences.

Previous research has shown that having a shared reality is related to greater relationship satisfaction and commitment. Most recently, researchers found that romantic partners who experienced a higher sense of a shared reality tended to report a greater sense of meaning in life. They also reported feeling less uncertainty when faced with stressful life and world events.

For me, it’s reassuring to have someone whose experience of the world overlaps with mine – especially in moments when I doubt my own reading of a situation. When someone’s humour at a party doesn’t sit right with me but rouses rounds of laughter, that incongruence and self-doubt can feel uncomfortable. When my partner, unprompted, later admits he didn’t enjoy it either, we both sigh in relief and talk about why. It’s a grounding process, one that confirms, time after time, that neither of us is alone in seeing things the way we do.

by Hannah Seo

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Want to get better at showing that you have a sense of what someone is feeling? It’s a skill you can practise. To learn more, check out Psyche’s Guide on ‘How to Make Someone Feel Seen and Heard’ (2025), by Caroline Fleck.

Going beyond surface-level conversations with a friend or partner provides new opportunities to feel understood, as Lucy Foulkes explains in her Guide on ‘How to Have More Meaningful Conversations’ (2021).

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