While curling up on the couch with a hot cup of tea and a warm blanket sounds delightful, there are apparently other benefits that come with reading too.
Fun fact number one: studies reveal that reading can reduce stress by 68 percent. Pretty cool, right?
But wait, there’s more.
Flow
In his wonderful book Stolen Focus, Johann Hari refers to a few book-related benefits. In an age where focus is rare and distraction is rampant, he talks about something called flow.
Perhaps you’ve heard of this term. As an editor, I use this term frequently to describe writing.
Hari refers to the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his concept of flow called a flow state. Hari notes, “This is when you are so absorbed in what you are doing that you lose all sense of yourself, and time seems to fall away, and you are flowing into the experience itself. It is the deepest form of focus and attention that we know of.”
This sounds amazing, doesn’t it? When time falls away, and you are “flowing into the experience itself”. How many of us experience this regularly? It could be a long shot here, but I’d say it’s a rarity.
Hari shares some startling stats with us from a study by Gloria Mark, Professor of Informatics at the University of California. She observed “how long on average an adult working in an office stays on one task.”
Hari shares, “It was three minutes.”
Referring again to Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow, Hari says that Csikszentmihalyi had discovered that “one of the simplest and most common forms of flow that people experience in their lives is reading a book.” He notes further that “like other forms of flow, it is being choked off in our culture of constant distraction.”
Reading requires us to pause from what we are doing and redirect our focus to what is in front of us. But as most of us know, this is a challenge. Not only in reading but in life. Many of us struggle to slow down because of the things vying for our attention: phones, TVs, the internet, social media, text messaging, etc.
Because of this, we don’t often enter into a state of flow. We’re too busy or distracted doing other things. Yet when we flow, our attention and focus can grow (rhyme is totally unintentional, but I’m vibing it!). We get things done, we become immersed in the project, we enjoy it, and our creativity flows. Most importantly, we experience high levels of focus—something that feels uncommon in our everyday lives of multitasking and distraction—and something we ought to fight to preserve.
Slow
There’s a flow that comes with the slow.
For many people, reading isn’t enjoyable because it requires just that: slowing down. For some, even that word, slow, makes you cringe.
For some reason, we’ve come to view slow as bad. We want everything fast—fast responses to our texts, fast replies to our emails, instant phone answering, fast food and express shipping. And while fast isn’t necessarily a bad thing, we often lose appreciation for the benefit of living life unhurried.
Hari poses the question, what is the message buried in a book? His answer reveals something that mirrors the journey of life.
“Firstly,” he says, “life is complex, and if you want to understand it, you have to set aside a fair bit of time to think deeply about it. You need to slow down. Secondly, there is a value in leaving behind your other concerns and narrowing down your attention to one thing, sentence after sentence, page after page.”
Sounds about right to me. Life is complex, and books show us that. You can’t skim a book. Well, you can—but do you really take it in?
Books take time. Sure, you can stay up for hours and finish a novel in an entire evening, but I think the best book experience is one where it’s spread over many nights and takes you on a journey.
I like the excitement of knowing that at the end of the day, I can curl up in bed and open a novel to a world of character experiences, conversations and journeys that might just be the remedy I need for comfort, encouragement or inspiration.
It’s a journey I don’t need to rush, one that is best enjoyed slow.
Empathy
Hari talks about fiction and its effect on our empathy. He says that the more novels we read, the better we are at reading other people’s emotions.
“When you read fiction . . . you imagine what it is like to be another person.”
After reading this sentence, I went to the bookstore and borrowed a fiction book. I put this to the test and can concur that it’s true. When we immerse ourselves in the life and mind of a book character, we desire to know them, we imagine what they are feeling, and we seek to understand their emotions. We feel sorry for them, we hear their brokenness and pain in their words, and sometimes we are privy to their internal thoughts to which we can relate.
If we never took time to get to know anyone, whether in a book or real life, we would only know our own circumstances—and what good does that do us for relating to others and showing compassion?
If you want to grow in empathy, why not grab a fiction book and immerse yourself in the journey of another?
Connection
As we read, we connect. We find ourselves in the stories of others. It brings us together with others because we soon learn that we aren’t alone. Our struggles are common. Our experiences are shared.
When we connect with characters who often represent a piece of us or someone we know, we grow in understanding, we relate, and a piece of our hearts connects with them.
Whether you’re reading for focused flow or living slow, or to see your empathy and connection grow, reading is something that can benefit you in more ways than one.
All in all, reading sounds like a good idea to me.
The Editing Eagle 