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How Reading Books Can Help You Reduce Stress

How Reading Books Can Help You Reduce Stress


You can learn how to be a better person, sleep better, and have better memory retention simply by powering down your electronics 30-60 minutes before bedtime and reading a book. Sounds like a conspiracy made up by the book stores? There is actually plenty of science to back it up.

The best place to start is by finding a really good fiction book. A fiction story allows you to be pulled into the story and identify with the character. You feel the emotions of the story causing you to sympathize with the characters. This causes you, as the reader, to practice empathy while reading the fictional story. Empathy is defined as the cognitive and intellectual ability to recognize the emotions and to emotionally respond to other persons. This is important because highly emphatic people are more pro-social, which is associated with higher performance, productivity, and creativity in the workplace. Thus, making you a better person towards others.

Reading a book also helps you de-stress better than any other activity, such as walking, listening to music or drinking warm tea. This is because the human mind has to concentrate on reading and the distraction of being taken into a fictional world eases the tensions in muscles and the heart.

In a study, reading worked best — reducing stress levels by 68 percent. Subjects only needed to read silently for six minutes to slow down the heart rate and ease tension in the muscles. Listening to music reduced levels by 61 percent, having a cup of tea lowered them by 54 percent and taking a walk by 42 percent.

Studies show that more frequent cognitive activity throughout life has an association with slower late-life cognitive decline that is independent of common neuropathologic conditions. Reading more frequently helps exercise your brain and improves cognitive skills, more than someone who does not read on a regular basis.