Reading has been taught to us as a successful way to improve cognition and improve writing abilites. However, reading is much more than that. It shows ways to improve mental abilities but more importantly, mental health.
Improving cognition
Reading stimulates your brain by recognizing words, interpreting them, and applying them to prior knowledge. Moreover, it improves your vocabulary. When you’re reading, you build context clues to interpret words, or then again you can look up words, but looking at the context and drawing it vocabulary, this builds intelligence.
According to an article, “How Does Reading Impact Your Mental Health?” by the Pacific Health Group, reading boosts concentration, memory, and cognition. Becoming enthralled by words on a piece of paper that tells a story greatly improves someone’s ability to focus. Scrolling through the internet, however, often worsens people’s attention spans and makes it much harder for them to focus on accomplishing work. Continuing, being deeply connected to characters and the storyline facilitates one’s memory. Connecting the characters and the storylines together helps one remember because they’re recalling details about the story. Many people stick to stories that go through the same motions—a problem occurs, characters follow a journey, and problem is solved—because it’s comforting for those whose lives may be changing or unpredictable, so they need stability.
helping your mental health
The Pacific Health Group continues specifically on how reading improves mental health. They talk about the hormone called cortisol. This is a hormone that is released when someone experiences stress or anxiety. However, reading helps lower cortisol levels because when your body relaxes and your heart slows this lowers it—which is essentially what reading does for your mind. They talk about a concept called narrative transportation. This is when you become so enthralled with a story that you feel like you’re in it. If you focus on the characters and the different emotions and experiences they go through, the reader becomes sucked into the story and forgets about their reality. This is helpful for people who need to get their mind off different aspects of their life and allows them to focus on something else that works their brain simultaneously relaxing it.
This is a way reading can become an escape for people because they’re only concentrated on one thing–reading. Especially in America, we live in a fast-paced culture. People are always rushing or working lots of hours or studying immensely, it’s embedded in our culture to always keep moving. This leaves little time to relax, but reading is a way to unwind and slow our brains.
depression and reading
In relation to depression, reading can be a beacon of hope for those who are struggling. Reading happy stories and emanating hope or laughter boosts dopamine and endorphins. These are positive hormones that are released when someone is happy or laughing. Depression creates a chemical imbalance with neurotransmitters, so reading does not heal depression; it allows people to see hope and think positive thoughts in fiction or nonfiction writing. Healthy professionals may also give people books so that they can understand their feelings and manage negative emotions—this is known as bibliotherapy. Reading can help your brain in many ways, but most of all it’s a healthy mental exercise that everyone should practice.