Reading can bring a lot of personally rewarding experiences and wonderful moments into one’s life. However, there are also many proven scientific benefits of reading that enrich your life, health, and mind. Whether you’re hoping to relieve stress, further your career, or improve your mental abilities, there are many reasons to make reading a part of your daily life.
- It reduces stress
One of the incredible scientific benefits of reading is that it actually makes you considerably less stressed. Reading decreases your cortisol levels, the stress hormone, and increases your serotonin, which promotes contentment and relaxation. Reading has been shown to be a more effective relaxation strategy than listening to music and drinking hot tea.
2. Can help you live longer
Scientific studies have shown that people who read for at least thirty minutes per day live longer than their less literary peers. In fact, reading can extend your life expectancy by an average of two years. Scientists hypothesize that this is because of the increased cognitive engagement readers experience regularly, which strengthens their mind and health.
3. Improves your knowledge
Reading increases your knowledge quite considerably. This benefit to reading doesn’t just extend to nonfiction or educational texts, either – any kind of reading increases your knowledge about the world to one extent or another. You’d be amazed by just how much information your brain can absorb, even from works of fiction!
4. It boosts creativity
Reading is a great way to stimulate your creative mind and help you be most creative in your everyday life. Scientists recommend daily reading for those in creative professions to help boost your productivity and even help your career!
5. Mental stimulation
We often are concerned about working out our physical bodies, but mental stimulation and exercise is just as important as hitting the gym. Reading is a great way to stimulate many different areas of the mind, and is a way to keep that most complex organ in the body working at peak performance.
6. Brain connectivity increase
Part of learning is being able to have strong neural pathways between the neurons in the brain. These pathways can only be strengthened by repeated use, or will otherwise be trimmed in a phenomenon neurologists refer to as “use it or lose it.” Reading regularly helps strengthen these neural pathways and ensure that the regions of the brain are well connected by strong neural pathways.
7. Stronger analytical skills
Readers have strong analytical skills, including a broad spectrum of analytical capabilities. These include critical thinking, questioning, prediction, and close observation. Getting practice analyzing your book while reading is great practice for the professional world or simply analyzing things more closely in your everyday life!
Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay
Getting to a point where reading becomes a daily habit can seem overwhelming or like a major life change, but it isn’t as difficult as it might seem. Just follow these 3 simple steps to make reading a part of your day, every day!
- Pick a book you will enjoy.
A trap that many fall into as they try to build good reading habits is to feel they have to pick the “right” book. Maybe you’d like to be the kind of person who reads historical nonfiction, but if that doesn’t truly hold your interest, you’re never going to stick to reading it every night. Find a book that excites you, even if it seems like a less “intellectual” read. The scientific benefits of reading extend to readers of all genres and types of reading – just pick up a book that gets you turning the pages!
2. Commit to reading one page every day.
While reading for an hour or more every day is nice, it can also be hard to fit in. Realistically, you might not have time every day to sit down and read for hours. However, if you can commit to reading just a single page each night, you’ll start building up the repetition needed to truly make it a habit. If you have time to sit down and read even more, that’s great! But don’t feel like you need to have a large chunk of time to devote in order to be allowed to sit down and read something.
3. Set a reading time and place.
As part of building any habit, finding a specific time and place is going to help your mind remember to participate in your new hobby. Finding a comfortable, well-lit spot away from any screens is going to be paramount for maintaining your concentration, and having a set time of day to read, such as while winding down for bed, will help you keep it as a part of your regular daily schedule.
Help your child grow to have a love for reading and reap the scientific benefits of reading by providing them with a beautiful bookshelf that allows them to see their entire collection of books in a beautiful, engaging way that encourages their autonomy and choice in their own reading experience with Tidy Books. Create a special reading nook with our shelving options that will inspire a love of reading here.
