Hey stress bunny, reading a book can save your life
Do you wake up in the morning, stiff with stress before the alarm goes off, and your first thought is: I NEED SOMETHING, without immediately knowing what? High heart rate, rapid breathing, and do you need at least three glasses of wine to calm down? There's a good chance you're a bit stressed, just like most of the Western world. And that's not strange, because we all have quite a lot to do. Now we all know we should take it easier, but instead of actually relaxing, we go on Instagram and Netflix and we still lie on the couch with palpitations. Meditation has been proven to be the best medicine against stress, but if you find that a bit boring like I do (although I believe that's the point), then I have a great alternative for you: reading.
Yes, you read that right: go old-fashioned and sit down with a book and see how you can calm down from it. You can't think about your own troubles because you're happily immersed in someone else's story. I thought I had come up with this all by myself, but there's a Canadian scientist who has researched this: Keith Oatley. He says that reading fiction completely calms your brain. You temporarily retreat to a quiet place and set aside your own thoughts. You hear nothing more, you see nothing more, you enter a sort of trance. You give your brain a well-deserved break from its own worries, so that after reading you feel completely refreshed and focused. While you're reading, according to the University of Sussex your stress decreases within six minutes.
But reading has more benefits. It makes you more empathetic and creative because you have to put yourself in the characters of your book, but also because you're constantly searching for images to go with the words. It also seems to improve your sleep, especially if you read a bit in bed. Reading brings you into the here and now. Definitely don't read self-help books and non-fiction, because those will just take you into the future.
Still not convinced? How about this: you get a larger vocabulary and you're 321% less susceptible to mental decline. A study from Yale University showed that people who read half an hour of fiction every day (newspapers and your beloved Amayzine.com unfortunately don't count) maintain a sharper and healthier brain and thereby increase their chances of survival by 201% within ten years.
Are you still not running to a bookstore, then I'll give you my personal reason why I'm completely crazy about reading. By reading, I live many lives in my own life. I've stayed in a slum in India, I was part of high society in New York, I walked through Australia with a group of Aboriginals, and I spent a lot of time in a Vinex neighborhood. Reading enriches your life, you learn so much from it, and as I said: it makes you calmer. Sit back, take a deep breath, and open your book to page one...
