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March is National Reading Month! The first week of March is Read Across America Week — a week dedicated to emphasizing the importance of reading for people of all ages, but especially for children and teens. The National Education Association started Read Across America Week in 1998, with the goal of making reading a part of people’s lives. We want to share five ways reading positively impacts your overall health and wellbeing, and encourage you to read more.
Studies show that there is a correlation between reading and increased health. “Book readers also experienced a 20% reduction in risk of mortality over the 12 years of follow up compared to non-book readers,” according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
At Remote Area Medical (RAM®) we are always looking for ways to improve overall health and wellness. We want to share these tips with you!
Five Ways Reading Positively Impacts Your Overall Health:
- Reading reduces stress
- Reading even for just six minutes, can dramatically reduce overall stress and lower your heart rate. Reducing stress can have many benefits on your health. Including helping with better sleep, having more energy, boosting the immune system, and overall being in a better mood. [Piedmont Health]
- Reading helps you sleep better
- Reading before bed can help improve quality of sleep. It can help you wake up less frequently, and help you sleep for longer periods of time. Reading before bed, instead of scrolling on your phone or watching TV, reduces exposure to blue light. Blue light suppresses the sleep hormone melatonin. Even listening to audiobooks before bed can improve quality of sleep, while not as effective as reading a physical book, it helps promote relaxation before bed. [The Sleep Foundation]
- Getting a good night’s sleep is an important part of living a healthy lifestyle. Sleeping allows your blood pressure and heart rate to decrease, giving the heart a chance to rest. Without enough sleep, or if you wake up too frequently during the night, health problems such as coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, and stroke are more likely to occur [NIH].
- Reading keeps your mind sharp
- The stimulation the brain receives from reading has been shown to slow down cognitive decline in old age. It’s also been linked to a reduced risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
- Reading can improve your relationships
- Reading can help build feelings of empathy towards others, allowing for improvement in social, romantic, and platonic relationships. “Reading about people who are different from us can help us understand another person’s life experience and give us gratitude for our own life experience,” according to Piedmont Health.
- Reading also helps build curiosity and may spike interest in learning about other people’s experiences, or topics that you may not know about. Reading is a great way to learn about new places to travel, learn about history, keep up with updated health recommendations, and much more [National University].
- Reading can help improve your vocabulary
- For adults and children, reading introduces new words and puts them in the correct context. Exposure to new words is a way to increase our vocabulary and increases reading comprehension skills, helping to increase how much we understand as we read.
- Children’s vocabulary learning skills are heavily influenced by reading, “A study published in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research links fourth-grade reading skill to the rate of change in vocabulary growth between the fourth and 10th grades,” according to National University.
Making reading part of your daily routine can improve your health overall and help you lead a healthier lifestyle. Whether you’re reading an entertaining fiction novel, a non-fiction health and wellness book to keep up with the latest recommendations for healthier living, or anything in between, see the benefits of reading for yourself during Read Across America Week.
Read More About RAM
Thank you for reading this blog post! Share this with your friends and family and teach them about the five ways reading positively impacts your overall health.
Be sure to check out our other blog posts. See what RAM has been up to and learn about different health awareness months. You’ll also learn more about RAM’s wonderful patients, volunteers, and more.
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