Benefits of Reading for Pleasure

Reading for pleasure is widely regarded as a good thing but is that enough? It’s enough for those of us who happen to love reading and who have time for it. But what if we had evidence that it was such a good thing that omitting it from a school curriculum or time-table was a bad thing? What if senior management teams needed evidence? What if school library funding were being cut? What if too many people were too busy to prioritize reading for pleasure? What if teenagers were avoiding it because no one was telling them how it would affect their lives, well-being and perhaps even exam results?

It turns out that all those things are true.

It turns out that reading for pleasure has a wide range of extremely important benefits, benefits which we absolutely owe our young people. I’d argue that not to promote reading for pleasure and not to create a reading culture in school is a dereliction of duty towards our students. It will make their lives poorer.

Until 2015, I felt this in my heart but actual evidence was flimsy. There were many studies but some were very small or not replicated and it was hard to be able to say with any certainty what the results really showed. All that changed in 2015 when the UK’s Reading Agency published its Literature Review, a meta-study of hundreds of other studies over many years. “Reading for pleasure has a dramatic impact on life outcomes,” was the headline conclusion.

The research also showed that it wasn’t just the daily act of reading but the enjoyment of it that made the difference. Hence the phrase “reading for pleasure”. So, now we know: daily reading for pleasure positively affects mental health, self-esteem, vocabulary, general knowledge, socio-economic status, relationships, mood control, empathy, self-understanding and stress levels.

It was that last one – stress levels – that led me to invent the concept of “readaxation”. I define this as “Reading for pleasure deliberately to lower stress levels, thus increasing well-being and performance.”

Why might reading for pleasure reduce stress?

Because readers believe it does. Ask any reader, “Do you think reading for pleasure would reduce stress?” and most say yes. Confirmation bias means we tend to see what we expect to see: if we expect to see stress reduction, we do.
If we’re engaged in a book we can’t simultaneously be worrying – it gives negative thoughts a break.
Reading for pleasure allows a state of “engagement”, offered by Martin Seligman and others as an importantly positive and transformative psychological state.
It leads to increased self-worth, itself likely to reduce the stress of negative feelings.
We can choose books to create a desired emotion. If our emotional state is one we don’t like, we can change that by reading a book that will make us feel another emotion.
Reading gives us space away from the demands of other people. It gives us a break. This is especially important for introverts.

https://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2018/09/27/readaxation-reading-pleasure/