Reading
Benefits of reading
The main benefit of reading is that you get better with words. People who read more have a bigger vocabulary and understand more of what they read. You may also have heard that reading makes you kinder, calmer or longer-lived. The proof for those claims is much weaker.
Last updated
Reviewed by Mohammed Raqeeb
The short version
What are the benefits of reading?
The benefits of reading are real, but some are much better proven than others. The cards below show five things people say about reading, and what studies found.
The dots show how sure we can be. Three dots means the claim is well tested. No dots means no real study is behind it.
Well tested
You get better with words
People who read more in their free time are better with language. They also read and spell better. A review of 99 studies found this in small children, in school children and in college students (Mol and Bus, 2011).
Likely true
Children do better at school
Children who read for fun learned more words between ages ten and sixteen, and made more progress in math too (Sullivan and Brown, 2015). Nobody told one group to read and another group not to, so the study cannot prove the cause.
Mixed results
You understand other people better
One famous study said a short story helps you read other people’s feelings. A larger repeat did not find this (Panero and colleagues, 2016). When many tests were put together, fiction showed a small gain (Dodell-Feder and Tamir, 2018).
Not proven
You live longer
In one American study, people who read books lived longer than people who did not (Bavishi, Slade and Levy, 2016). The study only watched people as they were, so it cannot show that the books were the reason.
No real study
Less stress in six minutes
People say that six minutes of reading cuts stress by 68 percent. The number comes from a newspaper article from 2009 about a chocolate brand’s campaign to give away books. No published study is behind it.
The main benefit
Why is reading important?
Reading is important because books use many words that people rarely say when they talk. If you do not read, you meet fewer of those words, so you learn fewer.
This starts early. Researchers compared 100 picture books for small children with the way parents talk to their children. The books had more different words than the talk (Montag, Jones and Smith, 2015). So even a simple picture book brings a child words that talk at home does not.
A common question
Does reading make you smarter?
Reading teaches you more words, and intelligence tests check how many words you know. Whether reading also makes you better at thinking in general is less clear. Two studies tell us a little more.
Children who read better scored higher later.
One study followed pairs of identical twins from age seven to sixteen. The twin who read better at one age tended to score higher on intelligence tests later (Ritchie, Bates and Plomin, 2015). But the study measured how well each child could read. It did not measure how much they read.
Children who read for fun early had slightly larger brain areas.
Another study looked at more than 10,000 young teenagers in the United States. Those who had started reading for fun early in childhood scored higher on thinking tests. Brain scans showed that the outer layer of their brains was a little larger (Sun and colleagues, 2024). A study like this shows a link. It cannot prove that the reading was the cause.
How much
How much do you have to read to get the benefits?
No study we read sets a minimum amount of reading. The studies only find that people who read more gain more. So pick an amount you can keep up, like half an hour a day, and count it each week.
To see how minutes a day turn into finished books, see how to read more. To get more out of each book, see how to read a book.
The test
How do you know you are reading enough?
The test
You read on four or more days of the week, and your reading hours for the week stay the same or go up
for four weeks in a row.
The benefits of reading come from the hours you read, and it is hard to remember how many hours you really spent with a book.
A good way to check is to count your reading from what you write or say about your day, like “a chapter on the train”. Then there is no timer to start, and no timer to forget. Most journaling apps only ask how your day felt. They do not show you how many hours you spent with a book this week.
One app built for this is Think in Numbers, a smart journaling app with time tracking built in.
You write or say your day in your own words, as it happens or all at once. The app reads what you wrote and counts the hours that went to each part of it: your reading, your work, your phone, and the time you never mentioned (shown as unaccounted). Then it shows those hours over days and weeks. So you can see if you really read each day, and watch the hours add up. Make reading a habit for four days a week, with a reminder if you want one. When what you write about your day shows you read, the app ticks it off.
1. You write your day
2. It counts the hours
- Reading0m
- Work0m
- Sleep0m
- Unaccounted24h
3. It shows your week
Reading this week: 0m
On 6 of 7 days. The gap is the day without it.
An example day and week.
For iPhone and Android. Try it on your own day before you pay.
Sources
Where the findings come from.
Every finding on this page links to one of the sources below. We read each one for this page, the whole text or its summary. This page reports research on reading. It is not medical advice.
- Mol, S. E. and Bus, A. G. (2011). To read or not to read: a meta-analysis of print exposure from infancy to early adulthood. Psychological Bulletin, 137(2), 267-296.
- Sullivan, A. and Brown, M. (2015). Reading for pleasure and progress in vocabulary and mathematics. British Educational Research Journal, 41(6), 971-991.
- Kidd, D. C. and Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science, 342(6156), 377-380.
- Panero, M. E., Weisberg, D. S., Black, J., Goldstein, T. R., Barnes, J. L., Brownell, H. and Winner, E. (2016). Does reading a single passage of literary fiction really improve theory of mind? An attempt at replication. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111(5), e46-e54.
- Dodell-Feder, D. and Tamir, D. I. (2018). Fiction reading has a small positive impact on social cognition: a meta-analysis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(11), 1713-1727.
- Bavishi, A., Slade, M. D. and Levy, B. R. (2016). A chapter a day: association of book reading with longevity. Social Science & Medicine, 164, 44-48.
- The Telegraph (30 March 2009), as kept by the Internet Archive (read ). Reading ‘can help reduce stress’.
- Montag, J. L., Jones, M. N. and Smith, L. B. (2015). The words children hear: picture books and the statistics for language learning. Psychological Science, 26(9), 1489-1496.
- Ritchie, S. J., Bates, T. C. and Plomin, R. (2015). Does learning to read improve intelligence? A longitudinal multivariate analysis in identical twins from age 7 to 16. Child Development, 86(1), 23-36.
- Sun, Y.-J., Sahakian, B. J., Langley, C., Yang, A., Jiang, Y., Kang, J., Zhao, X., Li, C., Cheng, W. and Feng, J. (2024). Early-initiated childhood reading for pleasure: associations with better cognitive performance, mental well-being and brain structure in young adolescence. Psychological Medicine, 54(2), 359-373.
Keep reading.
- LearnAnswers about sleep, habits, study, people and work, in hours.
- How to read moreFive simple ways to read more, and how many books your minutes a day add up to in a year.
- How to read a bookThree plain steps for any book, and what to do when a hard one has you stuck.
- Reading speed testYour words per minute, and books a year at your pace.
- Where did my week go? calculatorEnter a typical day and see your week accounted and unaccounted.
- Time journalingThe method: write or say your day in your own words, then see it as hours.
Questions
Questions people ask.
What are the main benefits of reading books?
The benefit of reading with strong proof is that you get better with words. People who read more know more words and understand more of what they read. Claims that reading makes you kinder, calmer or longer-lived have weaker proof.
Does reading make you smarter?
Reading teaches you more words, and intelligence tests check how many words you know. In one large study, children who started reading for fun early scored higher on thinking tests as young teenagers. That shows a link. It does not prove that reading was the cause.
Does reading fiction make you more empathetic?
Not after one short story, as far as the studies show. One famous study said so, and larger repeats did not find it. When many tests were put together, people who read fiction did a little better at reading other people’s feelings.
Is it true that reading for six minutes cuts stress by 68 percent?
No published study says so. The number comes from a 2009 newspaper article about a test that a chocolate brand paid for, to launch a book giveaway. Reading may well be calming, but that number is not a research finding.
Do people who read books live longer?
In one American study they did, but the study cannot say the books were the reason. The book readers also had more schooling and more money. The authors only say that the two go together.
Try it on my day.
Write today down in your own words, and see where the hours went.
For iPhone and Android. Try it on your own day before you pay.