How Stories Heal, Help Us Survive, And Connect
Books are powerful. Reading is a calming activity and can be used to learn but is also an escape for a bit and provides some fun. Books can often have representations of some aspect or challenge in your life, allowing you to learn from them. In other words, books help build resilience. Reading a book that you can see yourself in is an opportunity to learn how to take on those same challenges in your life, or perhaps learn what not to do too. And for children or adults who have experienced trauma, this can help you on your journey toward healing.
Books as Medicine: Benefits of Bibliotherapy
Reading can have a positive effect on both our mental and physical health. This form of medicine has been referred to as bibliotherapy. Reading can reduce stress and depression, lower blood pressure, and improve sleep (as long as you aren’t reading late into the night)! Reading has even been shown to help chronic pain sufferers.
There is a lot of evidence showing that bibliotherapy, which is reading books on specific themes or topics, can help children who have experienced trauma. The American Academy of Pediatrics advocates shared reading as an effective and positive early intervention to promote health, well-being, and development while reducing or preventing childhood toxic stress.
To explore further into these findings, books are useful in easing pain and taking the pain away. Stories offer the ability to move out of the surroundings and offer some sort of an escape. It is not even a mere escape, since books are proved to reduce cortisol which is referred to as a fight or flight hormone. The presence of high cortisol may cause pain and stress. With only thirty minutes of reading, it has been found that there is a visible reduction in cortisol!
It has also been shown that stories can raise our level of a hormone called oxytocin which is a social hormone of great significance that is highly associated with bonding, empathy, trust, and the reduction of stress, and also administration of emotional information. Reading books can also aid us in regulating our emotions and helping us feel more connected, in particular, when done with others.
In a book, we are able to see ourselves on character and get the chances to learn and develop. It is a means to make a child realize that he or she is not alone in what they are going through and can serve as guidance to the child as they struggle along life and against the odds.
The books will provide us with the possibility to digest feelings and open discussions.
A book would also be able to move the perspective. Books enable us to teach us how to be more positive in our outlook, give us coping skills and they can give us self-confidence when we feel hopeless. Even when it comes to maintaining morale in difficult times, books can assist in this area books were used as bibliotherapy toward the end of World War I to help children, Hospital patients and even returning soldier.
Key Takeaways
The use of bibliotherapy is not new and the happiness and calm that comes when reading a book is something that adults are more often than not intrinsically familiar with. Reading books beyond pleasure reading could also act as guides and beginners of conversations and makes us listen to our own emotions. This is useful not only in the upbringing of a child, but also to all individuals, no matter what age, to recover a trauma.
