11 Benefits of Reading for Seniors
Reading is so much more than simply scanning words across a page and lugging around thick books in public to seem smart. There is something special about a good book, article, or story. Everyone’s brain works differently, and everyone has different circumstances and interests; some people don’t enjoy reading and would rather opt for movies, which is completely normal and justified. Others have difficulty concentrating or are impaired in some way, and might therefore find audiobooks more helpful. Either way, everyone has different relationships with the act of reading and with stories and storytelling, which makes it a special, unique activity.
Those who do enjoy reading and recognize its power or those who want to get into reading might be pleased to find out that it has scientifically proven benefits. Whether you are reading a newspaper article or a fiction book, the very act of reading is advantageous and valid because it is a mentally stimulating and enriching activity; no one format or genre is ‘better’ than the other. Reading is valuable for people of all ages, but is an activity you’ll want to continue or begin in your senior years for your benefit. Read on to find out about the eleven benefits of reading for seniors.
A soothing combination of a morning coffee and a book
1) Stress and Anxiety Reduction
It’s no secret that everyday life can be stressful. Aging, too, can be particularly stressful for a number of reasons. Unfortunately, stress is a regular fact of life. Sometimes you might even feel stressed for seemingly no reason, although there are usually underlying factors that must be identified. If you are perpetually stressed and it goes unmanaged for long periods of time, it can be extremely detrimental to your long-term physical and mental health. Some issues caused by chronic stress and anxiety include high blood pressure, diabetes, diarrhea, constipation, heart disease, heartburn, a weakened immune system, Alzheimer’s, dementia, anxiety, depression, and more. Luckily, there are many ways to manage stress and general anxiety before it goes too far, one of which is reading.
Reading is an extremely relaxing activity; there is a reason parents read to their children before bed! However, it’s not only soothing for kids. There is something so peaceful about sitting there silently (or not silently – everyone has their preferences, and you may prefer to read with music or other background noise playing simultaneously) and devouring a good book or article. You forget about the silence as your brain absorbs the words on the page and creates captivating mental images to go along with the story. The pure distraction and escapism it provides is enough to relax a person. Even action-packed stories can reduce stress, as they can cause you to forget about your own worries momentarily and get sucked into another world.
Copious studies have been conducted proving reading’s relation to stress reduction. One study from 2009 found that reading can reduce stress levels by 68%, much more than listening to music or going for a walk. Participants who read for merely 6 minutes experienced slowed heart rates and less muscle tension. Similarly, anxiety can be debilitating, but reading can – once again – prove to be a distraction and cause you to think more deeply about your (or book characters’) sources of anxiety. The thoughtfulness, distraction, escapism, and overall sheer fun and enjoyment induced by reading all decrease stress significantly, and are very convincing reasons to start reading.
2) Improves Emotional Intelligence
This might seem like a strange, unlikely product of reading. However, various studies have shown that reading improves people’s emotional intelligence. Part of being emotionally intelligent is having empathy and compassion for others and being open-minded, which reading also happens to increase. When things happen to characters in books, your brain simulates certain actions and you might ‘feel’ what the characters are feeling. For example, reading the word ‘kick’ activates the areas of the brain related to physical kicking.
This advantage doesn’t just apply to fiction, although fiction especially increases empathy and overall emotional intelligence by creating fictional ideas and characters to which you can relate and with which you can empathize, ultimately allowing readers to better comprehend people’s thoughts and feelings. Reading about other people’s experiences in the news, whether good or bad, can allow you to place yourself in their shoes and better understand them and their backgrounds. This can even boost your social skills by helping you read others’ emotions.
By reading, you can even begin to further understand yourself and perhaps learn how to feel out and regulate your own emotions. All in all, reading creates a better world full of more open-minded empaths and caring people with less prejudice and more tolerance, making it much more than a simple leisurely activity. Even as a senior, it is never a bad thing to increase your empathy as the world is always changing, so new situations and circumstances arise which we must attempt to better understand.
A senior immersed in a good book
3) Improves Sleep
If you have recently found yourself unable to sleep, consider picking up a book before bed. Seniors commonly have more difficulty falling asleep than their younger counterparts for a number of reasons. Reading for half an hour to an hour before bed, or simply incorporating reading into your daily schedule in general and not just before bed, can help you fall asleep faster and sleep more peacefully.
As we now know, the blue light emitted from electronic devices keeps us awake or disrupts our sleeping cycles due to the light’s reduction of the brain’s melatonin production, resulting in poorer sleep quality overall. Using an e-reader or reading on your phone can consequently keep you up rather than help you fall asleep. Reading a physical book, however, does not.
Reading a physical book works your brain and your eyes, and is a generally relaxing activity. Incorporating reading into your nightly routine or reading in your bed or in a slouched position can trick your mind into associating reading with sleep. Additionally, reading doesn’t have to be boring, but it sometimes is. Think of your school readings, for example, and how reading occasionally ‘dry’ material made your eyelids droop. Clearly, there are many reasons why reading can put you to sleep or simply improve your sleep.
If you prefer reading digitally, try to keep your ‘digital reading’ to a minimum at night or opt for e-reading during the day, then switch to traditional reading formats to help you sleep at night.
4) Cognitive Enrichment or ‘Exercise’
Eighteenth century English essayist, poet, playwright, and politician Joseph Addison has famously stated that “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body”. While this is quite an old quote, it has held up today due to its truth.
The mental stimulation produced by reading can keep your mind sharp in old age. The brain must be constantly working to remain healthy, so reading can be seen as cognitive exercise. The brain forms new connections while creating new memories, which is what happens as one reads. That is because you create mental images while reading, and memorize and understand words, names, characters, plots, concepts, and perhaps real-life memories or previously learned concepts. In this way, reading improves memory retention and strengthens the brain, making it function better. As such, reading is a great activity for preventing and slowing cognitive decline; it protects against Alzheimer’s and dementia, and improves overall brain functioning.
Reading is evidently a very powerful activity that should not be underestimated in its effects, and is important for people of all ages.
“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”
A senior reading on her tablet
5) Increases Creativity and Imagination
Reading is an extremely interactive and immersive experience. Many people often read for escapism, which has been a common tactic during the pandemic. While you read, you visualize worlds and characters explained by authors, creating a mental image in your head that has been described on paper but is unique to you. You experience new worlds, perspectives, and ideas, transporting yourself to different times, places, or worlds that diverge from your own, all the while exercising your imagination and boosting your creativity immensely by learning new things.
This does not only apply to fiction. Reading nonfiction is equally stimulating. Thought-provoking think pieces, for example, allow you to encounter new subject matters and consider things you otherwise wouldn’t have. While reading, you might even allow your mind to wander briefly (in a good way, of course) and connect previously learned concepts with ones that your current read is teaching you. Reading stimulates you, and can cause you to explore and remember old memories, and temporarily escape reality by transporting you to other realms. Who knows, maybe you’ll become inspired enough while reading to pick up an old hobby, write your own book, and so forth.
6) Improves and Maintains Concentration
We now live in an information age in which everything is instantaneous. We learn one thing, and it’s quickly replaced by the next new story. Everything is extremely fast-paced, causing people to speed up as opposed to slow down in every sense. Our patience and attention span have decreased, and continue to decrease as everything around us becomes faster and faster to accommodate our shrinking attention spans and patience. In this digital age, many of us have consequently lost the patience for reading.
Reading evidently requires more concentration than scrolling through your phone, for instance. You can’t exactly multitask while reading, either; a good book or article requires your full concentration so that you can fully retain all of the information. Some books require more attention than others. Reading a classic, for example, requires more effort to read than contemporaries, since they might contain concepts or experiences you don’t understand or haven’t lived. That is why you might breeze through contemporary books, whereas reading a classic might take you a few weeks.
The good thing is that, since reading requires so much more effort, you can ‘train’ your mind by reading regularly and maintain or improve your overall patience, attention span, and concentration. This way, you regain control of your attention by allowing it to focus on a singular task for long periods of time and tune out surrounding distractions. Your strengthened concentration skills can also transfer to other aspects of your life, such as improving work productivity and your connections with others. It’s a win-win situation!
7) Vocabulary Expansion
Reading habitually can expand your vocabulary, which is quite the advantage. It can be very empowering to have an expansive vocabulary, one which makes you feel like you can articulate your feelings in the exact way you wish to do. When you read, you are exposed to new words, and often times, you are given context clues as to what those words mean. Consistent exposure to new or big words will eventually cause you to understand their meanings and incorporate them into your own daily vernacular. You’ll soon notice that you’ll have the ability to better express yourself, ultimately making you a better communicator and writer. If you’re trying to learn a new language or simply expand your vocabulary in your native language, reading is the best way to go.
An elderly man reading peacefully by the lake
8) Eases Boredom
Everyone gets bored. Boredom is, unfortunately, a fact of life for many reasons, and many seniors begin to have more free time after retirement. Many people felt increasingly bored during the many rounds of lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Boredom can still strike even when there might be things to do, people to see (not during the pandemic, of course), and tasks to complete. Reading, however, is a great substitute for boredom.
As previously mentioned, reading allows you to explore exciting new worlds. It is also a wonderful distraction from real life (and boredom!), which is why many people took to reading during the first lockdown. Reading gives you and your brain something to do and to focus on. Besides alleviating boredom, it can also make you feel good when you’re doing it and once you’re done, because its mental stimulation can count as being productive. You can even read multiple books at a time, and have a book set out for each mood you’re in. Hop from one world to the next and assuage your boredom!
9) Critical Thinking Skills
Another huge benefit to reading is the improvement, development, or refinement of critical thinking skills over time. As you now know, reading is quite mentally stimulating. The exposure to different perspectives, ideas, stories, and worlds can cause you to reflect on and ponder them deeply, while comparing them with your own ideals, beliefs, and viewpoints. Eventually, you will create ties between these ideas or be able to recognize and assess why they are dissimilar. Reading differs from electronic media in that it gives you more space to think, understand what you learn, and be critical and analytical. In the long run, critical thinking skills gained from reading can transfer over to problem solving.
10) Increases Intelligence
As you age, you might feel as though you have difficulty retaining new ideas, or that you have learned all there is to learn and cannot increase your intelligence. Thankfully, that is not the case. Extensive vocabulary has been linked with intelligence, and reading induces vocabulary expansion. There have also been numerous studies that have showcased that children with better reading skills at a young age scored higher on IQ tests than children with weaker reading skills. Like this article has described, you also learn more in general when you read, expanding your horizons and your knowledge of the world. As the saying goes, “Knowledge is power”.
11) Boosts Happiness
Last but not least, reading makes you happier for all the reasons mentioned above, and more. Not only is it an incredibly relaxing activity, but it is a fun one as well. Browsing for books, talking about books with friends, and simply reading them and immersing yourself in other worlds is very enjoyable. It alleviates boredom, is mentally stimulating, makes you feel productive, and is proven to be good for your mental health.
When you read, your brain enters a state that is similar to meditation, bringing you inner peace. What could be more freeing and relaxing than unwinding after a long, stressful day voluntarily with a book? Plus, a UK study demonstrated that readers are 21% less likely to experience depression. All of the aforementioned benefits above such as improved sleep, increased creativity, stress reduction, and more can combine to ultimately make you a much happier person.
An open book placed on a table next to some tea and a stack of books
If you are not a reader or if you would like to get into reading but are hesitant to begin for any reason, it is never too late to start. Reading is a unique experience for everyone, and differs depending on your personal tastes and habits. Pick up a book that you put down, start reading for the first time, purchase a new book, and so on. Discover and experience new worlds, learn about things you haven’t been taught in school or things you have never previously heard about, and exercise your brain to keep it healthy. Visit our Instagram page for more tips on keeping healthy as a senior or aging adult.