We live in a world full of distractions at every step of the way. The push notifications, social media notifications, emails, app updates, and other endless things are constantly fighting for our attention and diminishing our focusing capabilities day by day. In this busy world, reading can be a God-given escape to find calm and focus.
Many people argue that knowledge can be obtained in many ways. If you get the same knowledge from a youtube video, then why waste time reading? The answer to the question of why exactly daily reading is better than watching a video is discussed throughout the article. To summarize the benefits of reading daily in one sentence: Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. Stick around until the end to find a resource that provides unlimited free books to download.
1. Improves Your Focus and Concentration
Complete focus is an absolute requirement when reading. Unless you concentrate, you won’t follow the content of the reading. In today’s world of multitasking – watching Netflix while eating, listening to songs while writing emails, or watching youtube while checking your Twitter feed, reading provides a unique experience of complete focus. Contrary to the popular belief, you hinder productivity by multitasking; neither of the tasks you are multitasking on gets done efficiently. Reading is one task that can not be paired with another attention-seeking task; you have to provide your undivided attention while reading. Speaking from a personal experience, reading has increased my attention span. After I started reading daily, I can focus on my tasks for much longer before I feel like procrastinating. I feel that I have become a much more productive person since I started reading daily.
2. Provides Relaxation
Reading is said to be one of the most effective ways to overcome stress. Reading requires your complete attention preventing your mind from sidetracking any stressful thoughts. The act of reading transports you to new worlds emerging you completely in them and reducing stress.
A captivating book can provide the kind of escapism you need to get away from stress-causing thoughts. Studies have shown that even reading as little as 15-20 minutes a day can reduce stress by ~65%.
3. Stimulates Your Brain
Reading allows you to vicariously experience the sounds, scents, and places described in your reading. According to studies, every time you read about substances with extreme smells such as garlic or Lavender, the olfactory regions of your brain are stimulated. Each time you read about physical activities such as sports, your motor neurons are triggered. Reading allows you to exercise your brain by strengthening and speeding up your neural pathways. You will slowly increase your creativity and critical thinking.
4. Prevents Early Onset of Alzheimer’s and Dementia
The meditative act of reading on a daily basis has been proven to prevent the early onset of Alzheimer’s, dementia, and other mental illnesses. How? you ask. These long-term benefits of reading come from the brain stimulation that happens when you read. As mentioned before, reading activates the neural pathways and keeps the brain active. Just as physical exercise keeps your physique strong, the mental exercise provided by daily reading keeps your brain strong.
A study conducted by Rush medical center showed that people who engage in brain-stimulating activities such as daily reading are likely to maintain healthy and active brains well into their old age.
6. Expands your knowledge
Sure, this is an obvious one, but not any less important. Reading a book that exposes you to new ideas, perspectives, facts, and experiences can keep the brain active and stimulated. Daily reading constantly exposes you to new ideas and expands your knowledge. Reading improves your critical thinking and reasoning skills. The more you expose yourself to reading, the faster you get at connecting new concepts and plot points, thus making you a faster learner. To summarize, more reading = more learning = faster grasping of complex ideas.
7. Increases Empathy (Surprisingly)
Reading exposes you to people from different backgrounds, different circumstances, and people with different perspectives on life. This exposure makes it easier for you to understand the people that come from different backgrounds from you. It makes you more empathetic!
Studies have shown that reading positively improves your personality due to its ability to broaden your perspectives. Books are there to expand your horizons and to transport you to other people’s worlds. Insights and experience reading about thought-provoking arguments and complex stories help you understand the people around you – those who are like-minded to you and those who are different from you. Many books have the ability to completely change your outlook and perspective on life.