Why You Should Read Books Everyday: 30 Benefits Of Reading
Want to know why you should read books everyday? Then you’re in the right place.
That reading books positively influences our minds has been a quite common belief for a really long time.
Despite this, year after year, books are losing their competition to other media more and more, particularly in the age of the Internet, and an increasing number of us don’t read a single book a year.
Does reading books really give us something that other media don’t give us? Or is the book simply a relic of the past, redundant, replaceable and doomed to abandonment?
It turns out that books give us more than we ever suspected! How?
It turns out that reading is not a passive pastime, but an act of co-creation that stimulates the brain to act in many fields [1].
When we place a reading person in an MRI machine, we can see other parts of his brain light up while reading [2]. Areas from recognizing faces when he imagines characters, areas from spatial orientation and model of reality when he reads about fictional places and builds models with his imagination.
This means that reading the right books affects us much more than you might think and stimulates our development.
But what does this give us concretely?
Why You Should Read Books Everyday:
It is worth reading them for dozens of various benefits.
From developing imagination, vocabulary, knowledge and broadening horizons; by developing empathy, the ability to put yourself in the position of other people; for entertainment, relieving stress and supporting healthy sleep.
The benefits of reading are concentrated in several groups:
Intellectual benefits
1. They increase the general knowledge and broaden the worldview
The most evident item on the list.
It is not without reason that we call someone with extensive knowledge and the ability to look at things in a broad context “well-read”.
Understanding things from many sides is something that can’t be made up for when you need to googling quickly.
This requires associating facts with one another, which is feasible only when these facts are in our head. It won’t be without extensive knowledge, and this comes from reading.
2. Inspire
Fantasy books can break the patterns of how we imagine the world, places, living creatures or physics phenomena.
They provoke us to imagine what extends the limits of our imagination. The heroes of the books, both fictional and genuine, face problems and look for solutions, and we – instinctively do it with them.
Thus, inspiration can come to us even when the heroes’ problems are utterly different from ours.
Thus, books will provide both creative inspiration, if you’re a Creator, artist or work with innovation, and practical inspiration, to be used in the face of the challenges of everyday life.
3. They open the mind and raise IQ
Many people instinctively dismiss what surprises them. Especially when it doesn’t fit into their worldview and views.
Reading books continuously gives us new and interesting thoughts, and in a way gets us used to absorbing what is surprising.
They allow us to create many models of fictional realities in our heads, to speculate and evaluate what we read about within the laws and assumptions of the worlds presented to us.
Thus they make us more open to new thoughts, ideas, concepts and arguments also in real life and allowing us to go beyond our own standpoint – they allow us to reach further; and our mind becomes more agile in general [3].
4. They develop sensitivity and empathy
By following the heroes of fictional books, their fates, decisions and dilemmas, we identify with them and experience them at their side.
This makes it easier for us psychologically to “step into someone else’s shoes” – put ourselves in someone else’s situation, sympathize better, better understand others and their needs in real life. [4] [5].
5. They teach the adoption of other points of view
… which also has a functional dimension – it is simpler to step into the shoes of others also for pragmatic purposes, to forecast someone’s behavior, see someone’s motivation during negotiations or conflicts.
6. They increase analytical skills
When you read detective stories, books with secrets, intrigues, riddles and conspiracies; you try to unravel the mystery with the heroes, you try to guess the course of events, you have your types, who killed, who will reveal who will turn out to be an ally and so on.
But to have them, you need to analyze everything that the book has given you at the moment and when the author gives you another piece of information – you update your speculations.
Thus, by reading – you develop your analytical skills. Abilities whose usefulness in real life can’t be overestimated, and the number of their uses is numerous.
7. Develop your imagination
Because the reading process, as we have already mentioned, is a creative process – the text in the book is just the foundation on which we place the constructs created in our imagination.
The faces, personalities, buildings and places she has created; which complement what we read and build a complete picture of the presented world and its inhabitants … it’s difficult to train it better.
And a developed imagination affects our entire lives, not only being a key tool for artists, scientists, innovators and inventors; but also a tool that helps us understand the people and the world around us, including our relatives and loved ones.
8. They improve focus and concentration
Many of us have trouble getting distracted easily.
Noise from the street, conversations next door, even too loud footsteps can distract us from drowning at work and break the precious flow – a state in which, immersed in a task, we achieve many times greater efficiency than outside it.
Have you ever tried to attract the attention of a person immersed in an interesting reading?
Exactly.
Reading is also a training of concentration, cutting yourself off from the chaos of your environment, to immerse yourself in one engaging activity.
Additionally, when the action of the book includes moments in which their health and life, and even the destiny of the world, depends on the focus and concentration of the characters – we focus together with them.
9. They strengthen the sense of justice and ethics
Popular novels abound in dramatic choices full of consequences, and the line between good and evil can be blurred.
The heroes weigh options and make ethically complex decisions, while we think with them about what’s right and what isn’t, and make our own – stepping into their shoes.
In this way, our ability to distinguish good from bad, and to set boundaries between what is right and what’s wrong, also increases.
In creating your own standards.
Priceless when the situation is not black and white, but as it happens in life – ambiguous, foggy, in shades of gray. And this very skill brings real life.
10. Focus on assessment and judgment
So is the ability to make accurate judgments and judgments based on the information available.
This happens when we get to know the heroes of the novel, not necessarily knowing what role they’ve to play, what they follow and what motivates them; and with each subsequent portion of knowledge, we try to evaluate and guess how they will proceed next.
11. Positive values
It is much easier to admire someone’s values when we see how others live according to them and make sacrifices in their name, than when someone simply tells us about them and praises them.
That is why we are strongly influenced by the stories of individuals who lived in accordance with their values and who paid the price of such a life.
Do you want positive values to become closer to you? Read about people who profess them.
12. They shape the personality
What reading books allows us to improve – the way we evaluate reality, ourselves and others; our empathy, our values, sense of justice and ethics, and a more open mind affect our lives so strongly that they can help us change for the better.
We just become better people.
13. Increase vocabulary
Books are descriptions and the transmission of knowledge through the written word.
Thousands of matters conveyed in hundreds of thousands of other ways make us learn new words useful in describing anything we want to convey.
14. They improve writing skills
… And this, in turn, makes us learn to write better, and more fully convey what we want also with the written word.
15. They consolidate the rules of spelling, grammar and punctuation
… and they also teach you how to write correctly and without mistakes without even thinking about it.
We simply see well-written words so many times that we repeat their true forms without thinking, and our trained instinct tells us how to write words that are less common.
16. They improve long-term memory
A good, multi-threaded novel with many characters, it can “show” us a multitude of places, characters, relationships, nuances, social and cultural phenomena.
Understanding them can be the key to getting maximum pleasure from a book, but it can even challenge our memory. A challenge, and thus also an effective training of memory and memory [6] [7].
17. They improve the working memory of the brain
To unravel the mystery of a crime story, to try to forecast a conspiracy threatening the heroes, to guess who is a saboteur or a traitor, you need to remember many pieces of the puzzle: information, characters and events.
We have already talked about long-term memory, but it should even be mentioned that such activities are a superb training of our short-term memory, called working memory.
What most of us don’t know is that the development of the working memory center in the brain also increases our willpower, and with it our ability to self-control [8] [9]. The ability to control yourself and your impulses; to do what we want to do, not what tempts us.
A person with increased willpower [10]:
- It is more resistant to addictions and addictions
- More difficult to upset and nervous
- It may be easier to follow diet, exercise, regular medicine and following doctors’ recommendations [11]
- Achieves her long-term goals more often
- Copes better with phobias and fears
- Has less problems with maintaining an appropriate weight
- It is more resistant to adversity
- Maintains a higher quality of relationships with loved ones and friends
- It is usually healthier and lives longer
This means that even if there were no other benefits of reading books, it would still be worth reading them just for the sake of working memory training that’s carried out on the occasion.
But the intellectual benefits, both direct and indirect, are just the tip of the iceberg of reading.
The emotional benefits of reading books
18. Entertainment!
Perhaps the most evident of the benefits.
Despite the proven fact that the Internet and tv today abound in diverse sources of entertainment – they still give way to books in terms of the wealth of things that can be described, and much tougher to show in the form of a moving film image.
When astonishing scenes of action, battles and epic events on the scale of events can be shown on the silver screen, books are still the only medium that can so richly present the thoughts and emotions of the characters, their perception, enlightenment and fears.
The list of wonderful book stories that aren’t appropriate for filming is still growing.
It’s worth taking advantage of.
19. Experiences and emotions
If you aren’t trying to find mere entertainment, but for strong new intellectual and emotional experiences, the books reveal yet one more advantage over other media.
As you read, you have the opportunity to pause and digest what you’ve read more deeply. To live it fully and fully experience the emotions that a moment in a novel brings.
You don’t must search for the remote, pause the movie and so on – the reading pace is yours. What you read you can consume as fast or as slowly as you like and can.
20. You won’t be alone in difficult times
“Why do we listen to sad music, watch sad movies and read sad books?” – this question scientists have been asking themselves for a long time.
Today, however, we know that the story of other people’s sad or tragic experiences allows us to feel that we’re not alone.
We find solace in the proven fact that other people, like us, can undergo hard times, be subjected to destiny, resent and anger at injustice and powerlessness.
Sharing the destiny with them, even when it is finished while reading a book, watching a movie or listening to the lyrics of a song – simply gives us relief in what we undergo [13].
Health benefits
21. Relieves stress
A 2008 study [14] was to check to what extent diverse activities and entertainment reduce the stress level.
It turned out that when playing computer games reduced the level of stress by 21%, a walk by 42% and drinking a cup of tea by 54%, reading books decreased the most – by as much as 68%!
So, after a stressful day or events – just reach for the book!
Especially that, as shown by other studies – long-term elevated levels of stress harm us in many ways [15] [16] [17] and how we deal with it’s of great importance.
22. It slows down unfavorable changes in the brain
Stimulating the brain on so many levels while reading has its own wide-ranging positive side effects.
Studies have shown the beneficial effects of reading in slowing down and preventing the effects of senile dementia [18] and Alzheimer’s disease [19].
23. Extends life
However, the positive side effects don’t end there. A 2016 study [20] showed that people who read regularly live on average two years longer than those who avoid reading.
Social benefits
24. You build better relationships with others
We have already talked about the increase in empathy, a sense of justice and ethics, and the increased ease of entering someone else’s standpoint.
These same abilities not only improve your quality of life, they help you build healthy, good relationships with those around you, and benefit society as a whole.
25. Family entertainment
By reading to kids, we not only deepen our bond with them, but also significantly accelerate the development of their vocabulary [21] and facilitate their later learning to read [22].
A 2019 study using magnetic resonance imaging shows us that some of the general-stimulating benefits of reading also occur when the child listens to a story read by an adult [23].
We don’t yet understand how many of the benefits mentioned in this article are given to kids by reading books to them. Scientists themselves write that this requires further research.
However, we have good reason to believe that the benefits are considerable.
26. Social entertainment
Among our friends, friends or school peers – conversations about favourite heroes of books can be a fantastic excuse to break the ice and to have thrilling, positive conversations; which regularly result in a rise in mutual sympathy.
It is worth checking if you’re reading the same book series with someone you know.
And since each of us uses our imaginations to build a large part of the story, world and heroes – comparing your imagination with the works of others’ imaginations will let you see the content of your favourite novel from a different, thrilling angle.
Additional benefits
27. Learning foreign languages
Even although the first contact with literature in a foreign language and comparing its complexity with what we know from linguistic textbooks is occasionally a shock; it’s reading foreign languages that greatly accelerates the acquisition of linguistic proficiency.
It is worth starting if you need language skills seriously. And it’s worth starting sooner rather than later.
28. Good image
We associate books with knowledge, wisdom, honesty, ambition and intelligence.
We associate them so positively that politicians were caught filming themselves on fake bookcases from film studios or wall murals pretending to be bookcases.
Interestingly, most of us are well aware of this fact.
According to a survey conducted by the Yougov group, as many as of the Londoners polled turned out to have at least one book, not to read it, but only to appear smarter [24].
The conclusion?
Read and speak about it openly, and take pride in your bookcase. Even if she is still modest and about to grow.
29. Increases the attractiveness of the opposite sex
A survey by eHarmony [25] has shown that being a regular reader makes us more attractive to the opposite sex! And this on several levels.
An acceptable book, present amongst our interests, can increase the chance of interest in us, the first time you contact our profile in the dating application.
Women much more often interacted with the profiles of men, which included books about business, or literature considered ambitious and popular at the same time, such as Scandinavian crime fiction, in addition to books on history and politics.
Male profiles admitting to fantasy books, particularly to fiction considered light or youthful, had a reduced number of interactions.
It worked the other way around in a utterly different way, because men more often spoke to women who were interested in… fantasy.
The same for which the gentlemen lost points.
Ladies were also profiting from the presence of ambitious fiction books, but they were losing nonetheless, having in their interests well-known romance books.
However, the impact of reading was not limited to first contact.
People who have been read turned out to have more interesting, longer conversations and stay in touch longer in the form of a text conversation.
30. Reading books helps you sleep better and fall asleep easier
Thanks to the record-high efficiency in removing stress from us, reading lets you relax and fall asleep, leaving behind the concerns of the past day.
The relaxation of the body that generally accompanies reading also supports this process.
Important!
Make sure your bedtime reading is from a book or e-book reader (not from a computer, phone or tablet!), And that the light that enables you to read is warm-colored light.
Otherwise, the negative influence of the blue component of white light can disrupt your sleep and the benefits of reading!
I want to thank you for taking the time to read my article about why you should read books everyday. I sincerely hope its contents have been a good help to you.
