The Truth About Reading and Stress
Until a few years ago, I used to feel guilty about shutting out the world and curling up with a book or newspaper (I love reading the Sunday papers cover to cover).
It felt wrong to want to spend my free time doing nothing.
It must be a sign of my laziness to choose reading over being productive and downright selfish to spend that time alone with my thoughts rather than interacting with other people.
I don’t know if this mistaken belief (that reading was wasting time) is something that I absorbed from the world around me or from the sense that not everyone had the same urgent need to escape into stories that I did.
What I did know is that when I didn’t make the space in my life to read, I felt overwhelmed and drained.
Even when I spent the same time doing other things to chill out, like watching TV, I didn’t experience the same zen I felt after getting lost in a story or contemplating a new idea.
I’ve been like this since I was a child, hiding at family gatherings with my nose in a book, maxing out my library card on our weekly library visits, spending whole Sundays hidden in my room reading and always staying up way too late with my midnight mantra ‘just one more chapter’.
It’s not that I’m anti-social.
Friends and family are incredibly important to me and I always ensure that I make time in my life to see them. I hold onto friends forever and most of my social group have known me since I was a teenager. But I also know that I need other things to balance out the edges, so that I can stop the burnout and recharge my soul and one of those things is immersing myself in words. (In case you’re wondering, writing, music and lifting weights are my other go to self-care activities.)
Turning to a book has always been second nature to me when life gets too much, and I feel stuck in an endless loop of worry and exhaustion. Now I know that I’m not being lazy or wasting time as a range of scientific studies have proven.
If, like me, you feel you need permission to be selfish with your time and devote it to reading, you can be safe in the knowledge that it’s a proven way to calm your mind, reduce stress, enhance emotional wellbeing and build resilience.
Here’s five ways that reading can improve your mental health:
1. Just six minutes of reading reduces stress levels by up to 68%, which is more effective than other common stress-relief methods you might turn to like listening to music (61%), having a cup of tea or coffee (54%), or taking a walk (42%). A 2009 University of Sussex study, led by Dr David Lewis, concluded that immersing oneself in a book helps to distract us from stress, lowers heart rates, and reduces muscle tension significantly.
2. Reading uplifting or engaging fiction boosts your mood by triggering the release of feel-good hormones like dopamine. This is the same boost gamblers feel when placing a bet, or when you get a like on a social media post or receive an email notification. Berns et al. (Brain Connectivity, 2013) found that reading activates the brain’s reward system, releasing dopamine and improving mood.
3. Reading is a flow state activity because it requires deep focus and engages the imagination, which causes you to lose track of time. While you are reading, the brain activates the same brain network as mindfulness and meditation, silencing the unhelpful thoughts. A 2015 study in Trends in Cognitive Sciences (Smallwood and Schooler) found that deeply absorbing activities like reading reduce the time spent ruminating (which is linked to anxiety and depression) and improve emotional regulation.
4. Bibliotherapy is a real thing. This is when books (particularly self-help books) are used as a therapeutic tool alongside other treatments for mental health challenges, such as CBT. A 2013 meta-analysis (Gregory et al., PLoS ONE) found that self-help books, when used as part of bibliotherapy, significantly reduced symptoms of mild to moderate depression.
5. Choosing to read a physical book before bed, rather than watch TV or doom scroll, improves sleep quality which in turn supports positive mental health (Exelmans and Van den Bulck,2019, Sleep Health). Calming, cosy stories or poetry will help you to wind-down.
If you want to amplify the positive impact of reading, I’d recommend joining a bookclub too. If you can’t get to one in person, there are plenty online. I have a one with friends and we meet when we can, and another online I found on Instagram that reads similar books to me.
If you are feeling nervous, remember that they’re full of other readers who want to connect with likeminded souls.
So, don’t feel guilty about prioritising reading, sometimes the best remedies are found in pages and people.
Want to read more? Here’s one from the archives. Mental Health Champion: An Interview with Tanya Marwaha
What do you think? Have you experienced the healing power of words too? Let me know in the comments.
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