Bedtime reading is a hygienic activity that can stimulate good sleep. It can reduce stress and strengthen the mind. Just like physical exercise can boost your body strength, reading before bed can increase your brain function and reduce mental clatter. It can also calm your mind and give you a break from screen time.
While reading is a great hobby for your leisure time, it can offer various other benefits (as per science) that you may not know.
Improves Sleep Quality
If you’ve been struggling to fall asleep lately, pre-bedtime reading can fix that easily. It can improve sleep quality and make you sleep faster. In a trial called Reading Trial, two groups of people were assessed to check the benefits of reading before bedtime.
While one group (intervention group) was asked to read a book in bed before sleep, the other (control group) was told not to do so. After seven days, the result justified that people who completed the trial (about 42% of 50% in the intervention group) witnessed improved sleep quality. The intervention group showed 8 to 22% better sleep than the control group.
Boosts Concentration
Pre-bedtime reading can boost your focus through mental stimulation. While reading a book, you can train your brain to concentrate more on the sentences, words, and stories. This builds up your cognitive strength and habituates the brain to develop more focus over time.
Pre-bedtime reading also activates your anterior dorsal cingulate cortex and dorsolateral. Both of these are associated with better attention, concentration, learning, executive control, and self-control.
Stimulates Creativity
With good concentration comes better creativity. That’s exactly what pre-bedtime reading offers you. Reading can stimulate the right side of the brain, that’s responsible for spontaneous, artistic, and creative tasks. It helps to vanquish the distractions and work as a catalyst for professionals in the creative field.
One of the benefits of reading is that it takes you into an imaginative world to interpret a storyline through mind pictures. It captures your imagination and stimulates creative expression to boost innovation in the long term.
Encourages Empathy
According to a study by psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, reading literary fiction can encourage empathy and help readers understand people’s emotions. It can work as an empathy-building tool for better tuning into people’s feelings, affection, and compassion.
The relation between empathy and reading is how the latter offers first-hand knowledge of any character’s experience. It puts you in someone else’s shoes and makes you neurologically closer to someone’s empathy. You can get the same benefits of listening to audiobooks.
Reduced Stress
As reading is related to reduced mental clutter, it can keep you relaxed and reduce stress in your life. According to an old study by the University of Sussex, reading can decrease stress by up to 68%. In fact, it’s said to work better than activities like music and drinking tea after a long hard day. That’s because when you read a book, you dive into a literary world that’s free from any stressors or tension of life.
These are the five benefits of pre-bedtime reading. Make sure to include this popular activity in your day-to-day life for the incredible benefits and quality of life.
Navkiran Dhaliwal is a seasoned content writer with 10+ years of experience. When she's not writing, she can be found cooking up a storm or spending time with her dog, Rain.