“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
This quote by George R.R. Martin is definitely one the best and truest lines about reading ever written, and if you are a passionate reader, you sure know what he meant by that.
But wait, it gets better!
A recent study in the journal Social Science and Medicine reveals that, not only do bookworms live a thousand lives more than non-readers, they actually live longer.
A 12-Year-Long Research
Yale researchers gathered 3,635 participants over 50 years-old and split them into 3 groups:
- non-readers,
- people who read less than 3.5 hours per week,
- people who read more than 3.5 hours per week.
The researchers followed up with each group for 12 years and came up with rather interesting results. It appears that people who read the most were college-educated women in the higher-income group. They also found that both groups of readers lived longer than the non-readers.
To put the findings into numbers – “the readers who read over 3.5 hours a week lived a full 23 months longer than the people who didn’t read at all, while this extended lifespan applied to all reading participants, regardless of gender, wealth, education or health factors,” the study explains.
Book, Rather Than Articles
Although any kind of reading is healthy and necessary, the results suggest that book readers take the biggest slice of the cake.
“Compared to non-book readers,” the study authors report, “book readers had a 4-month survival advantage. Book readers also experienced a 20% reduction in risk of mortality over the 12 years of follow up compared to non-book readers.”
“Further, our analyses demonstrated that any level of book reading gave a significantly stronger survival advantage than reading periodicals. This is a novel finding, as previous studies did not compare types of reading material; it indicates that book reading rather than reading in general is driving a survival advantage.”
There you go folks – you want to live longer? Read books!