Do Instagram captions, tweets, or WhatsApp status consist of all that you ever read? Do you realize how do reading books help us? Reading social media content doesn’t help us more than reading books, newspapers, or magazines. Not reading books is like missing out on one of the greatest pleasures of human life.
Imagine cleaning up a bookshelf on a Sunday morning. You end up sitting with the pile of books that, with time, are turning yellow. The fragrance of the old pages spreads all around you for the entire day. Or imagine visiting the libraries every time you want to feel more alive or whenever you are exhausted and want to give yourself a little treat.
Active and engaged book readers usually have a mini library of their own, and they love arranging it, cleaning it, appreciating it, and adding on new books to their book collection. These people are well aware of the benefits of reading books. These people love books more than they love human connections; they are very much self-involved and do not depend on other people for their happiness.
Activities like reading books lead to active mental stimulation. Children’s books or rather children’s focus should be more on reading nonfiction. Books are a blessing for the entire humankind.
More than half of the entire population, consists of those people who are missing out on these pleasures!
Some find reading books to be boring, some feel that it’s a total wastage of time, some do not read due to lack of interest or proper guidance, some prefer E-books over traditional reading methods, and some fall asleep whenever they try to read. Whatever, the reason is, the answer to the question that how do reading books help us, is that they do it in a very deep-rooted manner.
Though there are thousands and thousands of reasons in which we are benefited by the books, let’s know a few essential facts about how does reading books help us-
1. How Do Reading Books Help Us? Well, to Enrich Vocabulary!
Studies have shown that how do reading books help us? It helps us to get rich and richer in terms of vocabulary. These studies were conducted way back around the 1960s. The scientific name given to the process is the Matthew effect.
One cannot go around reading the dictionary from elementary school with the motive to increase their vocabulary and learn more words. This is not the process. Everything has a process.
Words cannot stick to our minds unless we do not read them in a sentence, and especially the catchy slogans tend to stick to our minds for a longer duration. Similarly, reading good books, or in that case, any book helps a lot to add to new words in our minds.
Vocabulary plays a very vital role in every language. A person with a vast vocabulary can express his or her feelings or ideas in a better manner than a person with a comparatively limited vocabulary. Now, what can be a better way to enrich one’s vocabulary than reading books?
2. The More You Read Books, the More You Build Capacity to Empathize
How do reading books help us to build empathy? Reading books and especially literary fiction helps a person a lot to step into others’ shoes to be able to feel what the second person is going through. It helps in feeling different emotions and situations. Read more words to get more empathy.
There is a wide variety of literary fiction with varied genres that are beautifully written and have amazing character development, which helps the readers to feel the catharsis. The writer tries to bring out different emotions through different characters, and different people connect to different characters. A successful book never fails to leave a long-lasting impact on its readers.
People who stay connected to literary fiction often come up with broad mined ideas and sayings. They are usually sensitive and have a better sense of understanding and are always more successful in the workplace.
3. Reduces Stress
Stress and anxiety are a ubiquitous part of our day to day lifestyle now. People often do not realize the level of stress one is going through. According to research conducted by a group of scientists back in the year 2009, half an hour of reading a boon to the inability to fall asleep at night or sleep well.
This can be helped in various ways like cutting out caffeine from your diet, maintaining proper food cycle, not getting indulged in any sort of physical exercise two hours before bedtime, setting the appropriate temperature of your sleeping room, and many more.
However, it is scientifically proven that reading books before sleeping is a very effective way to help one maintain their sleep cycle. Besides, it also helps in reducing stress levels, which allows you to sleep well. Therefore, it is not hard to fathom how do reading help us in terms of stress.
4. Concentration Increases
With all the distractions nowadays, it is almost not possible for a lot of people to focus. In a single one-hour span, an average individual would divide the time between doing a task, checking emails, texting someone, drinking coffee, or scrolling through social networking sites. Hardly anyone takes out a reasonable one hour from the entire twenty-four-hour day, to spend some time with themselves.
How do reading books help us in the form of therapy? Reading books helps a person to isolate from the outer world and enter into the entirely different world of the book. Reading a book with complete concentration definitely works as a therapy.
Once a person starts reading a story, the mind of that person would stick around as the story proceeds. The entire concentration revolves around the book, which helps to sharpen the focus and concentration both.
5. Reading Books Makes Us Smart
If our body is our temple, then the mind is the almighty. Staying in touch with the books would lead to becoming smarter. People don’t accept that books help us smartness as the answer to the question of how do reading books help us.
But, people with reading habits and who read fiction are more capable of achieving their goals, and it is no luck or any accident. It’s a fact that it helps to become smarter. It helps to add on various words to your vocabulary, sharpens your brain, increases your ability to think or to feel.
Here’s a list of books to enhance your intelligence, click here.
6. Reading Books Help Us to Fight Anxiety and Depression
With a humdrum routine, anxiety and depression have started to increase day by day in today’s youth. It has become prevalent now, and people do not feel free to talk about how they feel or what they go through when they are undergoing depression or anxiety.
These phases usually are followed by wrong and harmful decisions. Unprescribed meds or drugs are opted to fight off these issues. Due to a lack of proper guidance, many come out as alcoholics or drug addicts.
Well, there is a solution for such circumstances. According to research conducted in the year 2009, it is shown that reading is the ‘most’ effective way to overcome stress, anxiety, or depression, beating the classics like traveling and music.
The most effective answer to how do reading books help us is to fight anxiety and depression!
The study was measured by evaluating heart rate and muscle tension. It took the participants exactly SIX minutes to relax once they start turning pages. When we close ourselves in the book, we isolate ourselves from all our worries and stress, given that the book is of our choice and no documentary, that could be low-key boring!
7. Reading Books Help Us to Fall Asleep
Generally, people have trouble falling asleep during the night. This could either be due to insufficient exposure to sunlight, the pain usually physical, depression, stress, work pressure, or extra work hours. Insomnia is the scientific term given to the inability to fall asleep or sleeping well.
Reading a book for at least half an hour before sleeping helps to reduce heart rate, blood pressure, and stress level as efficiently as yoga does. It is recommended to read a book and not an E-book before you sleep as it may affect your sleeping pattern. It is shown by research that reading every night helps your mind and body to remove all the stress and pressure, which allows a person to get better sleep.
So, how do reading books help us? The long-lost sleep could be found by reading.
8. Reading Books Help Us to Overcome Loneliness
In today’s world, with a population of 7.8 billion people and enormously increasing connections on social media, there is a drastic decrease in real-life connections. A person might have thousands of friends on Facebook or Instagram with tons of likes on their feeds and still could be fighting the feeling of Loneliness.
People tend to depend on other people for their happiness, while the truth is if you cannot be happy with your own company, then there is nothing in this world that could make you feel better and complete. One should learn to live by themselves, and as Justin Biber says Love Yourself.
Book readers often do not need many people to make them feel complete or less lonely. According to research ‘A Society of Readers’ conducted by national charity, it is proven that reading books helps to overcome Loneliness and depression. Bad and desperate decisions are taken by people when they are lonely. It should be thought if risking life or reading is a better option.
Check out this article to know how do reading books help us in escaping reality:
9. Reading Books Help Us to Increase Lifespan
Reading regularly has proven to increase life span. According to recent research conducted by a professor at Yale University of 3,635, it is shown that book readers tend to extend their lifespan by two years, which is not less.
Book readers fight stress and have more emotional intelligence, which is not very common among non-book readers. Also, reading books sharpens the mind as it helps in cognitive training of the brain and avoids the cognitive decline. These factors help in increasing the life span of an individual.
10. Reading Books Help Us in Giving Way to New Ideas
Books are a human’s best company, advisor, and friend. A person who depends upon books is more successful and has a comparatively happier life than non-book readers. It makes life a better phase and gives the best possible shapes to our minds
Reading books gives way to more and more ideas making a person more creative. Reading with honest concentration makes one concentrate on every word, exclamation marks, grammatical formation, sentence phrasing, and also helping in stimulating activities.
It is proven by research that reading books help in boosting up our creativity and sharpens our mental capacity giving way to new ideas and thoughts. Reading books affects the right side of our brain, which is responsible for the creative persona of an individual. How do reading books help us with creativity? I hope you know the answer, now.
11. Reduces the Screen Time
Those slim, rectangular boxes have sucked up the lives of our youth. This is the constant saying of most of the elders and mentors. Not just for entertainment purposes, but people today are turning towards technology for the reading and learning process. New advancements in the world of technology are producing varied devices and applications that foster on academics.
While students prefer screens over traditional reading methods and are not aware of how does reading books help us, they lack many things. Information lacks most of the time. It’s almost not possible for a child to continuously read the entire text with full concentration and not get distracted with the constant notifications or other fancy applications.
These things act as a barrier between the mind of the reader and the text. With all the breaks in the process of reading, students cannot inculcate all that is needed. Hence, it is proven that reading books is the best way to inculcate knowledge and not screens.
Here is a video that might help beginners to achieve their goals:
For those people who find it difficult to read books, here’s a brownie point for you. One should always start with a book that he/she finds interesting (never judge a book by its cover). The next thing you have to do is assign a certain number of pages for each day.
Do not pressurize yourself by reading too many pages at once. Take it slow initially and slowly keep increasing the number of pages.
Also, never sit near the things that might cause distractions like television, your siblings, or any other crowded place. Do not keep checking your phone every now and then or read notification because this acts as one of the most significant barriers in the process of reading a book with full dedication.
It should be tried that no book is left incomplete. Even if it is annoying, it should be completed by reading in pieces. Procrastinating should be stopped. This will never let you achieve your target.
And then, slowly all your confusion about how do reading books help us would fade away.
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Last Updated on by Laveleena Sharma
