Want to Live Longer? Read a Book

We all know that a healthy lifestyle, eating well, exercising and avoiding certain trigger activities means that today the average lifespan for a man is 79.1 years and 82.8 years for a woman (UK figures) but did you realise that reading could lengthen it even further? It’s true, if you want to live longer read a book.

Reading fiction has been used as an escape from the drudgery of daily life for aeons and reading as a hobby is known to help people through difficult times, with its therapeutic benefits often cited in clinical studies but now reading has gone one further it can actually prolong your life.

A recent study that was published in the September issue of the journal Social Science & Medicine has shown that reading has a definite effect on a person’s life span. The study which investigated the reading habits of 3,635 over 50s found that the lifespan of a reader was, on average, two years longer than that of a non reader.

The study group was separated into three subgroups, those that read for longer that 3 ½ hours a week, those that read for up to 3 ½ hours per week and those who did not read at all and with taking factors such as race, gender and education etc, twelve years on the results are in.
Taking non readers as being the control group it appears that those who read up to 3 ½ hours a week were found to be 17% less likely to die and those who read for longer than 3 ½ hours were 23% less likely to die during the ensuing twelve year study period.

A Chapter a Day: Association of Book Reading With Longevity a paper written by academics Avni Bavishi, Martin Slade and Becca Levy from the Yale University School of Public Health it was found at the study follow up that 33% of the non-book reading participants had died, compared to 27% of those who were book readers.

The paper states that “When readers were compared to non-readers at 80% mortality (the time it takes 20% of a group to die), non-book readers lived 85 months (7.08 years), whereas book readers lived 108 months (9.00 years) after baseline…. Thus, reading books provided a 23-month survival advantage.” with Bavishi expanding upon this by saying that the more that respondents read, the longer they lived, but that “as little as 30 minutes a day was still beneficial in terms of survival”.

But it’s not simply reading itself that offers the greatest improvement on life expectancy; periodicals for example have little to no effect on longevity with Bavashi explaining
“We found that reading books provided a greater benefit than reading newspapers or magazines. We uncovered that this effect is likely because books engage the reader’s mind more – providing more cognitive benefit, and therefore increasing the lifespan,”

Meaning that there is a direct correlation between the intricacy of what is being read and the positive impact on life expectancy rates.

The paper attests to two cognitive processes that are triggered when reading books and produce what they term a “survival advantage” promoting both the “slow, immersive process” of “deep reading”, which “occurs as the reader draws connections to other parts of the material, finds applications to the outside world, and asks questions about the content presented” adding that “Cognitive engagement may explain why vocabulary, reasoning, concentration, and critical thinking skills are improved by exposure to books,” and also stating that books “can promote empathy, social perception, and emotional intelligence, which are cognitive processes that can lead to greater survival”

Although the study did not ask what genre books were being read it is highly likely that they were predominantly fiction readers, similarly whether the books being read were eBooks, hard copies or audio books was not specified.

In conclusion “the benefits of reading books include a longer life in which to read them … The robustness of our findings suggests that reading books may not only introduce some interesting ideas and characters, it may also give more years of reading.”

So if you want not only a longer life but also a happier more fulfilling one, you know what you have to do. Read more books!