By: Camden Baucke MS LLP
Reading habits are a litmus test for mental health.
In the age of technology, a book with paper and ink can feel old fashioned. However, almost everything important requires us to read including job offers, exams, eulogies, vows, religious texts, etc.
The combination of technology and a mental health crisis has made reading more difficult. If it be distraction or distress, it might be hard to keep your mind, as well as your eyes, on the page.
In this article, I will share the importance of reading, why mental health gets in the way, and methods to start reading again.
Why is Reading Important?
Reading is important from a very young age. In school, it opens up your world and serves you life on a silver platter. You can read about ancient history, the beauty of the natural world, or worlds that only exist in your head.
While reading is meant for growth, it often leads to work. Most modern jobs require you to read. Once many adults hit this point in their life, they slow down the type of reading from their childhood. They read less for the wonder and more for the application. We start getting selective about the books we read, but that’s often when we stop reading entirely.
Reading for work isn’t where reading matters most. Reading for pleasure is healthy for the mind.
A collaborative study found that reading for pleasure during childhood, particularly around 12 hours per week was linked to improved brain structure, better cognitive performance, and enhanced mental wellbeing.
Another community-based study found that those who regularly engaged in reading activities performed cognitively better than those who didn’t. This included attention, memory, language, and executive functioning.
In another intriguing experiment, participants read parts of the novel Pompeii for nine consecutive evenings. Resting fMRI scans taken each morning revealed enhanced connectivity in brain regions tied to story comprehension and perspective-taking, such as the angular gyrus and temporal gyri. What was even more surprising was that these improvements persisted for several days after the reading stopped.
As you can see, reading is incredibly important not just for work, but for the brain. It allows you to earn an income, but it also shapes your mind. If reading is so good for you, then why is it so hard to sit down and do it?
Why is It Hard to Read?
The reason why reading is so hard is the same reason it’s helpful: It’s the direct result of emotional regulation and cognitive attention. Essentially, if your thoughts and emotions are all over the place, it’s hard to read. If this is the case, your mental health might be worth addressing.
This is why reading a book for pleasure is a modern measure for mental health.
First, you have the challenge of emotional regulation. If you feel depressed, you might experience a common symptom of anhedonia, meaning “without pleasure”. If you struggle to find pleasure in reading, then you might feel depressed.
If you feel anxious, your body won’t want to sit still. Anxiety is an action based-emotion, and it can’t protect you by lying still and reading a book. Even worse, reading for pleasure is unproductive in the traditional sense. If you try to read, but your body won’t let you sit down or think about something unproductive, then you might have anxiety.
If your thoughts are racing, it’s also hard to embrace the silence of reading. Reading requires a quiet space. However, ruminative thoughts might fill that space, making it harder for anything else to enter. If the silence is too loud, you might have some underlying anxiety or depression.
If you treat reading like checking off a box, then it’s a checklist. If it’s a part of a perfectionistic goal to read a certain amount of books per year, then it’s not reading for the sake of reading. Leisurely reading must be for purpose of pleasure, not productivity. If you are desperate to finish a book, you might be driven more by closing the book than reading what’s inside.
Most of all, reading takes controlled attention. If you are easily distracted, then it can make reading incredibly difficult. If you can’t seem to read a page before looking at your phone, then distractions are problematic. Often, distractions come as a necessity to ease negative feelings, which is why attention issues are linked to anxiety, depression, PTSD, ADHD, and so on. If you are distressed or easily distracted, then reading will highlight that.
6 Steps to Start Reading Again
1. Notice What You Feel
As you can see, most barriers to reading are mental health issues. If you are constantly feeling anxious, depressed, or distracted, try working through those first. Try journaling prompts, meditation exercises, and maybe start therapy. Reading is a litmus test, a measure to see how your mental health is doing. Reading is important, but your mental health comes first.
2. Stop Treating Reading Like a Task
If you are going to read for pleasure, it needs to be for pleasure and not anything else. The point isn’t to finish the book, making it an outcome-driven task to check of a perfectionist box. The point of reading is to read, to immerse yourself in the pages and allow yourself to be there. You can plan out your reading, but don’t let it funnel into a self-sabotaging game of productivity.
3. Research What You Want to Read
If reading doesn’t need to be productive, it can be anything. If it can be anything, don’t just read anything, find what you’re interested in. I encourage making a list of books you seem curious to read, but not on a time table. Explore what you’d like to read and open yourself up to new genres and authors. Your picks don’t have to be perfect either. The list of books to read can be dynamic and ever-changing, because the goal isn’t perfection, it’s pleasure.
4. Set the Scene for Reading
Don’t treat reading like a cheap chore. Spend some time and prepare your environment before you read. Grab a blanket and drink of your choice. Put away your phone and make sure you are sitting in a comfy place. Reading should be an experience, not a chore. Reading for pleasure means setting yourself up for feeling calm and comfortable while you do it.
5. Get Comfortable with Silence
If you’re going to focus on reading, you need it to be quiet. However, intrusive thoughts and worries can easily break the silence. I encourage meditating and deep breathing before you read. When you do so, take inventory of the silence. Take time to recognize every loud sound that isn’t there. This comes with time, practice, and patience, but once you can feel comfortable with silence, you can focus on what’s fun.
6. Quit the Book if You Don’t Like it
Because a book is not a task, you don’t have to finish it for the sake of getting it done. I encourage working through at least the first three chapters of a book. The introduction can often be the hardest part before you’re immersed in it. However, if you are in the body of the book, and it’s not very appealing, then feel free to quit reading it. It might be difficult, but reading for pleasure depends on it feeling pleasurable. It’s not a crime or bad character to quit a book you no longer want to read. It gives you more time to start something else you’d like to read more.
Final Thoughts
Reading is crucial for work, but even more so for health. Reading opens avenues to explore beautiful and insightful themes. However, reading can easily get stuck in the game of toxic productivity.
Reading should not become another checked box. Reading is a measure of your mental health, which can alert you to certain conditions like depression, anxiety, ADHD, or PTSD. If the steps above don’t help you get closer to reading, I would highly suggest therapy to heal from whatever is distracting you.
Find comfort in silence, set the scene, get comfortable, and try reading what you like. Don’t treat it like work, don’t wait until the end of the book to feel good. Enjoy the process of reading, allowing information to flow through your brain.
Literacy is a gift. I would encourage using it, not just for the benefit of your employer, but for the quality of your life.
Reflections 
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