Reading - The Super Activity

Looking for a fun and easy activity that you can do all year round anywhere, proven to make you smarter and happier, help you beat stress and live longer, and even prevent the onset of cognitive degenerative illnesses? Look no further than the pages of a good old-fashioned book. The benefits of reading are many, and they’re all easily accessible to all. What to know more? Read on!

The general benefits of constant reading have been well-known for centuries, including the deepening of our general understanding, the fostering of ideas, the improvement of our vocabulary and training in the correct use of grammar and syntaxes of our language. But recently the benefits of this simple mental exercise have been studied more thoroughly, and the results are nothing short of astounding.

Here are some of the latest scientifically-proven benefits about reading:

Reading Can Help You Live Longer

In 2016, researchers at the Yale School of Public Health dug into Health and Retirement records documenting the reading habits and health of over 3,600 people over the age of 50, over a period of 24 years. The study found that those seniors who read books - whether fiction, nonfiction, poetry or prose - for at least 30 minutes a day for several years, lived an average of two years longer than non-readers.

In an interesting twist, the study found that readers of magazines and newspapers did not reap the same benefit than book readers. Something which may be explained, at least in part, by the next benefit on our list.

Reading Can Help You Relax

According to a research conducted in 2009 at the University of Sussex, reading helps to control and overcome stress better than listening to music, drinking a cup of tea or taking a walk. Participants in the study had their heart rate and muscle tension measured before and after brisk exercise. Compared to other methods of relaxation, it took the participants only 6 minutes of reading to reach the normal level of their heart rates and muscle tension.


A possible explanation for this result is that the attention required to read - specially something that we enjoy and captures our attention - takes the mind away from all other concerns in a faster and more effective way than other methods of relaxation that don{t require such mental investment.

"This is more than merely a distraction," stated Dr. David Lewis, who conducted the study. "but an active engaging of the imagination as the words on the printed page stimulate your creativity and cause you to enter what is essentially an altered state of consciousness."

Reading May Help You Sleep

Love reading in bed? Good for you! Reading lowers the heart rate and propitiates muscle relaxation, while the attention required to follow the text propitiates a gentle eye strain and mental exhaustion, all of which helps us conciliate sleep.


However, it’s not the same reading a chapter book than the newspaper or work documents. The best type of reading for bedtime is something enjoyable that may not require much mental work, or the effect may be the reverse.

Also, the traditional paper book is recommended over laptops and tablet readers, since the brightness of the screen signals the brain that it’s time to wake up, interfering with the rest and sleep cycle.

Reading Can Make You Smarter

Recent findings suggest that toddlers who are read books by their parents show stronger literacy skills and score higher on intelligence tests when in school, and later in life land better jobs than children who were not read to and did not develop the habit of reading.

According to findings made through the Progress in International Reading and Literacy Study (PIRLS) on a global scale, children whose parents read them from early infancy, engaged them in word games and/or pre-school reading activities outperformed their peers by the time they reached school.

And the benefits didn’t end there - these early readers continued to develop their cognitive skills at a higher rate than children who weren’t encouraged early into reading, and demonstrated better reading comprehension, higher verbal expression and better connection of ideas. To see the complete 2016 PIRLS report, you can go to: http://pirls2016.org/pirls/summary/

Reading Can Protect You From Cognitive Decay

 Have you ever had the feeling of being ‘submerged’ in a book you’re reading? Then you’re in luck. Scientists explain that chapter books encourage ‘deep reading’ - they force your brain into critical thinking and make connections from one chapter to another in order to follow the plot. These form actual neural connections, which form new pathways between regions, lobes and hemispheres in the brain. When carried out over a lifetime, these connections may promote a healthier, quicker brain and even stave off the dangers of Alzheimer and cognitive decay.

In addition, according to researchers from the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, a lifetime of reading helps build a large vocabulary, which in turn can significantly delay the manifestation of mental decline, even when damage may be already present in the brain.

Reading May Improve Empathy

In 2013, social psychologists Emanuel Castano and David Comer Kidd developed several studies aimed to find what emotional benefits, if any, reported reading. In these studies, participants were randomly assigned to read short texts and were later tested on several emotional recognition skills.

Readers of non-fiction (news, articles on science, economy, etc.) and non-readers reported no variation before and after the reading. Readers of popular fiction (romantic novels, pulp fiction, etc) rendered small variations in their results. But readers of literary fiction (such as ‘Jane Eyre’ or ‘Moby Dick’ ) yielded the strongest variations in empathy before and after the reading.

The difference seems to be the very nature of both fictions. In popular fiction the characters and settings are markedly fantastical and detached from real life, its plots are action-based, and the emotional background is merely sketched, if at all mentioned. On the other hand, literary fiction focusses on the psychology of the characters and their relationships, the character’s reactions and the plots are more realistic, and the writer sometimes may omit information, forcing the readers to come up with their own conclusions, making it thus a more participative and internalized reading.

The result seems to prove that we transfer the experience of what we read into real life situations because, as David Kipp explained, "the same psychological processes are used to navigate fiction and real relationships." In turn this may enhance our relationships and help us develop a happier, more satisfactory life.

However, further studies have suggested that reading a single chapter in a book is not enough to improve empathy levels, and the reader must be truly interested in the story for it to report any emotional intelligence benefits.

Most of these studies and their associated benefits point to two interesting facts: it does matter what you read, and some of the benefits of reading can be earned only after a lifetime of exercising it.

If we compared books with food, we could say that both are sustenance : one for the body, one for the mind. But just as there are many types of food, there are also many kinds of books of vastly different levels of quality, content and value.

Although we can subsist by eating cheese sandwiches every day (or its literary counterpart, glossy magazines, pulp fiction, etc.), we will feel much stronger and healthier with well-rounded meals (classics, contemporary literature, poetry, etc.). Of course, we can’t have fillet mignon at every meal - we all need our desserts and junk food from time to time! The idea, however, is to keep a good balance in our ‘reading diet’, in order to feed our minds well and reap the most benefits from our reading.

But, how to foster reading habits in children? Keep tuned for our next article where we’ll explore several proven techniques to start children reading, and keeping them at it!

Sources: PIRLS, The University of Sussex, University of Santiago de Compostela, Reader’s Digest, The Guardian, The Huffington Post.

　

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