How reading a novel for 15-30 mins a day can improve your health
Discover the benefits of reading a novel for 15-30 mins a day and how it can improve your health. Escape into new worlds, countries, and seasons to reduce stress and increase overall well-being.
What are the benefits of reading a novel?
If you are going to do one thing today to improve your health – read a novel
The opening sentence of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka has become one of the most famous in Western literature:
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself
transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
Now that is a good line. These are ways reading a novel for 15-30 mins a day can improve your health.
Back to .. reading a novel
- You can ‘enter’ another universe, world, country or season. So it can take you ‘out of yourself’ and your current worries and concerns.
- Improves your social and conversation skills – your current book can become part of your normal chat. Reading novels especially improves empathy, so you listen more to the perspective of friends, colleagues and family. These are examples of questions you might use:
“Hi, what book are you reading?’
“What are your three favourite books?” - Improves your ‘mental fitness’ – by improving mental health, memory and perhaps preventing dementia. Reading increases brain blood flow and leads to new neural pathways
- Increases your vocabulary – in a way that social media does not. That tends to echo your own words
- Helps you sleep .. and (may) extend your life by 23 months – as shown by this study of 3635 people, which used a Cox proportional hazards model to allow for other variables. The effect was not seen for reading newspapers.
MyHSN’s favourite five novels of all time
- Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
- To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
- The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
- Animal Farm (George Orwell)
- Ubik (Philip K Dick). Favourite line from Ubik .. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
What are your top 3-5 favourite novels? Go on .. tell us.
And why not try reading a novel for 15-30 mins every day for a week. And see what happens.
This page is based on a this programme by the late Michael Moseley on BBC Radio 4
It is part of a very good series
