Why we should all read for at least 20 minutes a day.

Joseph Addison, an English playwright, politician, poet and essayist, once said “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body” and I could not agree more.

I have never been massively into reading until this year where I decided to pick up the book I took out of the library in December, but haven't been able to return. I had it for 2 months before I actually decided to read it. I'm not sure what made me decide to read it, but I gave it a go and loved it.

I think reading is so wonderful, and it is something that everyone should be doing. With so many different genres and storylines, you are bound to find one you like. Reading has endless benefits: creativity skills develop, vocabulary increases, better performance in academics, lower brain stress, more empathy and a wider imagination amongst many others. Reading for me acts as a de-stress technique. After a busy day picking up a book acts as an escapism technique, we can enter a new world and leave all of our everyday problems behind us. It also allows us to develop critical thinking. In a world of so many lies in the media and false news, critical thinking is a skill we can use to evaluate and form our own judgement of a given situation. In addition, it allows us to solve problems, as our analytical thinking gets stimulated.

So, why do we need to do it every day?

By reading every day our memory increases. We can exercise our memory by focusing on one thing at a time. Reading is an activity to which we need to give all of our attention, unlike watching Netflix for example. In addition, by staying mentally active and training our minds by doing activities like reading, our memory increases and grows.

As mentioned before, it reduces stress. If we doing something for around 60 days, it becomes a habit, and so by reading daily our stress levels we decrease making us a more optimistic and happy person. We also become more productive. 20 minutes of your day is not a lot of your time and so many of us waste time by aimlessly scrolling through social media and doing things that are unproductive, but by doing a simple task of reading for a small amount of time makes us have a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment as we have used our time to our advantage.

Reading can be hard to get into initially however you don't have to read books, you could read magazines, newspapers, or even textbooks of information. When we have days with nothing planned our minds can wander and not be stimulated. It's important to keep your mind active to develop and grow it, and although there are other ways to stimulate our brains, I find reading to be my favourite as it is relaxing and creative.

---

thomasjlblog

24th March 2021