Early in the morning, a certain silence descends upon a coffee shop: the espresso machine hissing, a few laptops open, and, almost invariably, a book-wielding person in the corner. not browsing. not using earbuds to listen to anything. simply reading. Although it’s not much to notice, it seems important these days. In a society that has spent the past ten years creating ever-more-easy ways to consume content without sitting still, those who choose to read books are subtly expressing their preferences for how they want to spend their time.
Although it doesn’t always make headlines the way it should, the evidence supporting them has been building for years. Even after controlling for age, education, gender, and pre-existing medical conditions, a 2016 Yale University study that tracked over 3,600 adults over 50 for twelve years discovered that those who read books for at least thirty minutes a day lived an average of twenty-three months longer than non-readers. The longevity benefit was weaker for those who only read newspapers or magazines, which is especially intriguing. Skimming headlines doesn’t seem to do the same, deeper work on the brain as reading a book, for some reason.
Reading is a low-cost but genuinely effective health intervention, according to Dr. Kathleen Jordan, Chief Medical Officer at Midi Health, a longevity program for women. According to her, the process isn’t mysterious: mentally taxing activities build what neurologists refer to as cognitive reserve, a sort of mental buffer that enables the brain to compensate for aging or injury and continue to function at a higher level for longer. According to a 2021 study, older adults who continued to be mentally active by reading, writing letters, and playing games had Alzheimer’s disease about five years later than their peers who were less cognitively active. Five years. That number is not insignificant.
However, longevity isn’t the only argument for reading, and it probably shouldn’t be. On a typical Tuesday afternoon, the effects become more noticeable. Researchers have found that reading for as little as six minutes can reduce stress levels by up to sixty percent, lowering heart rate and relieving tense muscles more effectively than walking or listening to music. The nervous system actually calms down when you’re engrossed in a book, distracted from the low-grade hum of unread messages and incomplete tasks. This is a physical aspect of it that is often disregarded. According to behavioral neurologist Dr. Jonathan Graff-Radford, the brain must be active while the body is at rest. In contrast to doomscrolling, despite its other attributes, reading accomplishes both at the same time.
The empathy argument for reading might be the one that is hardest to accept but ultimately proves to be the strongest. Participants in a 2013 study that measured empathy scores after just one week of assigned fiction reading self-reported significant improvements in empathic skill—not after months of continuous reading, but after just one week. According to research from Emory University that same year, reading fiction activates the same parts of the brain that are involved in experiencing events and emotions. Your brain is mimicking the emotions of characters whose lives may be completely different from your own when you are engrossed in a book. Regular repetition of that simulation seems to leave traces. In practice, it’s difficult to ignore how reading a book about a completely different kind of life can make you a little more understanding of a stranger or more interested in a coworker whose decisions seemed unclear at first.
Additionally, the social aspect of reading is often overlooked. Reading and other mentally stimulating activities were linked to significantly lower rates of depression and loneliness, according to a 2023 study that analyzed data from nearly twenty thousand middle-aged and older adults across fifteen countries. This is due in part to the fact that reading itself appears to provide a sort of proxy social experience, such as immersing oneself in characters’ inner lives and tracking relationships through their complexities and resolutions, as well as the fact that books provide a topic for conversation.
These are not insignificant social structures, such as book clubs, library events, and online reading communities on sites like Goodreads. For many, they are where the most truly fascinating discussions take place.
As all of this research builds up, there’s a sense that something clear is being validated, something readers have always known but needed peer-reviewed confirmation to be taken seriously in a society that values quantitative results. Life seems more expansive when you read. In contrast to the phone, it prolongs time. It exposes you to ways of thinking that you would not have otherwise encountered, and those ways of thinking then subtly manifest in the way you go about your daily life—noticing more, making fewer assumptions, and sitting a little more comfortably with complexity. A blood test reveals none of that. However, it appears everywhere else.
