Reading is not just the excellent way to spend your leisure time, but a perfect instrument to support your physical and mental health. Let’s talk about useful effects of reading.
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1. Reading Makes You More Tolerant
Literature belletristic, which means fictional literature in both poems and prose, helps humans to get more of humanity. It increases the level of your empathy, makes you more perceptive according to the others.
Fictional literature is able to model the situations which could ever happen to people in their real lives. That is why it finds such a good popularity and feedback among the readers. Once you read any fictional writing work, you try putting yourself on a hero’s place, don’t you? You can even unwillingly and inadvertently imagine what should be your behavior in a situation similar to what is described in the book.
Belletristic helps to enlarge the amount of your social knowledge and to understand people with different experience better.
Psychologist Keith Oatley thinks any fictional work of art, whether it is a book, a film, a play or TV series, to be a fragment of someone’s mind, which is in some ways being passed from one mind to another. Fictional works enrich our social experience and help us understand others better. You can live a hundred lives while reading a book or watching a melodramatic film, don’t you think? That’s amazing!
Additionally, fictional literature causes a positive effect on your brain activity and really develops your imagination, as writers often leave some things untold, to give their readers an opportunity to finish the story as they want.
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2. Thinking Flexibility
Poetry helps you to think deeper. It increases the flexibility of your thinking due to challenging the reader in some ways. Poetic texts contain numerous metaphors and allegories. This makes readers to be bore attentive to details and meanings which authors put into their words.
Another psychologist, Philip Davis, thinks, that a long-term experience which humans get from reading poems affects the readers’ personalities. Common behavior models change leaving a place for something new and more flexible to appear. Plus, poetry texts can help you overcome your depression.
People who read poems get used to rethink the meaning of words, to pay attention to details and halftones. You can teach yourself to express your thoughts better, to analyze humans’ behavior, to adapt ourselves to certain circumstances and to seek for solutions of your problems more consciously.
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3. Increasing Your Creativity Level
The process of reading is often connected to increasing the level of your creativity. They say, people who regularly read fictional literature are less conservative, and don’t feel themselves uncomfortable due to any ambiguities appearing. These people are much more creative and free.
A controversial nature of belletristic encourages people to make non-typical decisions and to look at any situation from different angles. This is the key to you being creative. When you think on different possible ways for the situation to develop, it becomes easier to notice new possibilities and paths to solve existing troubles.
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4. Brain Function Improvement
Scientists proved: after someone reads a book, their intelligence level becomes slightly higher. And there is no difference in what literature you prefer to read.
Different stories leave their marks in both psychological and neurological meanings. While you read something, brain zones responsive for perception, touch and memory improvement become active. Reading not only stimulates your intelligence to rise up, but trains your brain as well. You learn how to percept information, you widen your outlook and enrich your lexicon.
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5. Fight Against Prejudice
Quality literature can help you to overcome your prejudices. While reading, you can learn how to understand the representatives of other races, cultures and religions; you can find out more facts about people living in other countries and other ages. You teach yourself to empathize people without paying attention to their skin color or sexual orientation.
For example, there was a research which helped to find out the interesting fact: children who grew up on the stories about young magician named Harry Potter are a lot more loyal to immigrants, refugees, homosexuals or Afro-Americans. During the whole story, Harry Potter and his friends teach readers how to be tolerant. So, maybe this book for children is not as simple and useless as someone might think.
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6. Senile Dementia Prevention
Reading stimulates brain functioning, and helps it to be in a good shape even at old age. If to read regularly during the whole life, there is a possibility to reduce risks of memory loss and to partly prevent the decrease of concentration and attention.
According to research data, people who found some time to read at their old age, were 32% less risky to get senile dementia for themselves. People who lived regularly, had no hobbies and no any mind activities, couldn’t be proud of such success. This means: the more you read, the longer you can maintain your sanity.
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7. Life Expectancy Increase
Reading books prolongs your life. According to the latest researches, readers live 2 to 3 years longer than those who read nothing. To live longer, one should devote nearly 30 minutes a day to read some literature.
So, you don’t need to do anything complicated in order to improve your life expectancy and quality. As you can see, it’s enough just to find some time for reading.
