Many know that reading is a fun and rewarding hobby, but what many may not know is just how many hidden benefits for your health and life reading has to offer. Reading for 30 minutes a day is easy enough to fit into anyone’s schedule, but can produce life changing effects.
These benefits can be reaped no matter what it is you’re reading. While picking up some nonfiction can offer more in the way of expanding your knowledge and fiction can offer more assistance for your emotional learning, all reading is great for your mind and body. Whatever genre or style interests you and excites you is great! The most important part is that you are excited to pick up your current book and are motivated to continue the habit each day.
It’s not just adults who reap these incredible benefits, either. Children who read regularly, both with adults and independently, also receive incredible benefits of reading for 30 minutes a day. When you read along with your child, not only do you each benefit yourselves, but you also have a chance to grow together and inspire a love of reading.
9 benefits of reading 30 minutes a day
- Improved sleep
Reading daily for even just six minutes before bedtime has been shown to help you sleep better! Because reading reduces your cortisol, the stress hormone, it helps you relax and send you off to sleep. It’s also a great screen-free activity, which reduces the amount of blue light you’re exposed to before bed and lets your body’s circadian rhythm get ready for sleep.
- Better Empathy
One of the incredible benefits of reading every day is that it can actually make you a more empathetic person. Reading helps see from the perspective of others, access the stories of other people, and puts you in touch with big emotions and issues. Reading each day has been associated with everything from volunteering, donating to charity, and showing more kindness in everyday interactions with others.
- It makes you smarter
Reading each day is a great way to improve your crystallized content knowledge, fluid intelligence, emotional intelligence, and your brain’s neural connectivity. Simply put, reading often and broadly can change the way your brain functions and make you smarter every day!
- It improves your mood
With its connection to empathy, cognition, and mindfulness, it’s no wonder that reading has the ability to greatly improve your mood. If you struggle with mental health or just would like to pick up your general mood, including reading as a part of your daily routine may be the answer for you.
- Better Career Opportunities
Those among us with high career ambitions may not consider reading for leisure to be an especially strategic career move, but the truth is that reading each day is good for your career’s performance. Readers develop skills that are critically important for any career, like communication skills, creativity, and intelligence.
- Better Vocabulary
Those who read regularly are shown to have an improved vocabulary. Being exposed to new words regularly and hearing from varying authors and characters is a great way to expand your personal vocabulary. Read every day and soon you’ll be the most articulate and verbose person you know!
- Improved Focus
In today’s day and age, it’s becoming harder and harder to focus on a single task for an extended period of time. Unlike email and social media, books don’t automatically update or provide new and flashy stimuli every few moments. That’s why readers, especially those of long-form novels, are better at focusing and maintaining their attention span than their non-reader counterparts.
- Better Writing
If you’re a writer, reading may be the single most important way you can improve your craft. Even writing emails and messages can be improved by reading daily. Reading helps improve critical thinking skills, exposes you to a variety of writing skills, expands your vocabulary, allows you to study grammar, and provides insight into new ideas and points of view – all critical for being able to write well in any context!
- Saving Money
Entertainment can be costly. Watching a movie can cost quite a bit of money, and going out for nightlife can cost an arm and a leg. Reading is a fantastic investment, with hours of entertainment available for usually only between 10 and 20 dollars. If you’re extra thrifty, you can even shop used books or visit your local library to get even more bang for your buck. A few dollars in occasional late fees for days on end of entertainment seems like a fantastic deal!
If you’re especially pressed for time in your life, there’s great news. Listeners of audiobooks receive almost all the same benefits of paper books readers, with only a few exceptions that readers benefit from specifically from not having to be in front of a screen. Downloading a few audiobooks and listening to them on the commute to work or while doing your daily house chores can offer you all the same incredible benefits of reading as your paper book loving peers!
Sharing a love of reading with your children can help them to grow up with the habit of reading that will allow them to reap these same rewards throughout their entire adult lives. Inspire a love of reading with Tidy Books, the bookshelf that allows them to see their entire personal library displayed and encourage a sense of autonomy and engagement with their reading experience. You can check out Tidy Books shelving here.