In our busy lives, it is often very difficult to take a moment to do something for ourselves. When some hear reading, they think of long, dragging books or articles, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Reading can be incredibly fun, stimulating, and beneficial. We often assume that building good habits, such as reading, would require us to spend hours every day in order to receive any sort of benefit. However, contrary to popular belief, reading just ten minutes a day can completely transform your life.
For starters, reading 10 minutes a day will expose you to over 600,000 words a year, many of them being new vocabulary. Broadening the words you know will help you write, speak, and think more maturely, as well as knowing more about the world in general. You will become more empathetic after becoming more culturally aware due to the diverse backgrounds of authors, and be able to understand people much better. Not only that, but eventually, it will be extremely difficult to stop reading after only ten minutes. As many readers, including myself, know that reading isn’t just understanding words on a paper. It can take you to a whole different world, giving you the experience of living a hundred lives at once. Sometimes, having a physical copy of a wonderful book is extremely powerful; you have an entire universe of characters, settings, and stories in your palms.
Also, being able to put everything down and read for ten minutes will greatly improve your attention span. In a world of short-form content and horrible attention spans, slowly reading and understanding words on a paper helps one’s focus, comprehension, and learning. Reading is also a fantastic stress reliever, and is a great unwinder at the end of a long day. Plus, it is a lot better for your nervous system to look at pages instead of sensory-stimulating short form content. It is universal; enjoying books has been the number one human activity for thousands of years. So, why have we stopped. If reading has been fun for a long time, it certainly should be now.
So, putting aside ten minutes a day to read a book is a worthy sacrifice. But how can you start getting into reading? Well, the first step is to understand what you are interested in. When you watch movies or TV shows, what genres are your favorite? How about short-form content? Do you mostly enjoy fictional stories, or nonfiction narratives? All of these factors will affect the types of books you enjoy. That is another beautiful thing about reading for ten minutes a day; you don’t necessarily have to love the book, because it’s only ten minutes. Even if the book has a very repetitive or boring beginning, reading ten minutes a day will force you to get through it to the more exciting parts, which I can assure you will turn ten minutes into multiple hours. And the best part? You can feel proud of yourself for doing something productive.
