Do you lose yourself for hours every day in fantastic worlds or love stories through reading? Keep going and you will live a very long time.
According to a study carried out by Yale University, readers are predisposed to live longer. While we might think that this is linked to sleep which is much easier to find when we read a book in the evening in bed rather than scrolling on our smartphone, it is not the level of sleep that plays a role in the life expectancy of book lovers, but also the action of reading.
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Reading, a friend for life
To establish this observation, the researchers separated the participants into three distinct categories. Firstly, people who don’t read at all, those who read, but for less than 3.5 hours per day and people who read more than this amount of time every day. People who read daily have a 23% lower risk of dying in the next 12 years. “People who reported reading little, even half an hour a day, had a significant survival advantage over those who did not read at all. And this advantage remains even when adjusting for financial situation, education, cognitive abilities and many other variables,” Becca R. Levy, co-author of the Yale study, told the New York Times .
Far from being an immortal elixir like one can come across in the pages of dystopian novels, reading has a positive impact on the cognitive system of the people who practice it daily. Thus, it protects the brain from degenerative diseases by stimulating memory, for example. We can never repeat it enough, a good book is the cure for all ills.
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