How Working Out Can Make You A Better Reader
Reading is perhaps one of the most rewarding activities on Earth. Not only can you lose yourself in a story, but learn via factual and contextual understanding. No matter if you’re reading a memoir, a beautiful fictional book serving as an allegory for bigger and more important topics, or you’re just escaping into a fantastic adventure, it’s easy to see books as just disconnected pieces of work, but they’re about humans and their follies more than anything else – even when depicting other species in certain sci-fi novels.
In some ways, exercise has similar peaks and valleys. Exercise, however, takes you deeper into yourself, provides you with mental strength and clarity, and helps you define the scope of your own life and strength in an 1:1, almost primal manner. For this reason, it’s important to note how working out can make you a better reader. Sometimes, this can even be a literal outcome, such as when taking your insight and choosing to test now for a qualification that could help your career.
In this post, we’ll discuss how these two necessities feed into one another:
You’ll Feel Alert & Focused
We tend to feel alert and focused after working out. That might sound silly, of course, as exercise takes energy – but it also gives you energy, and more than you’d think. Sitting down with a book and a coffee after a morning run is one of life’s most enjoyable pleasures. With all that stagnant energy invested in a habit that helps you, you’ll feel much more actualized and interested regarding the effort in front of you. Over time, this can make a major difference in your wellbeing, as well as improvements to memory and reading retention.
Emotional Processing Is Easier
Those who work out regularly experience better mental health and emotional wellbeing. When you can keep your own mind clear and still, you can more easily respond and relate to the emotions in the stories you’re reading, processing them more deeply. It might sound romantic to feel at your worst when reading a long Russian novel about hardship during wartime, but there’s no proof that you’d get more out of that than feeling actualized in yourself and more ready to engage with the text.
You’ll Learn The Value Of Discomfort
Let’s face it, exercise is uncomfortable for a time. It forces you to look outside your comfort zone and try something new. It may even help you understand the value of challenging yourself on a visceral level. This way, you learn the virtue of trying something new with confidence, even if it takes time to adapt to. Might this give you the confidence to write, or open that booktube channel? Might it inspire you to read more challenging classic literature, or even begin to learn a language so that you no longer have to read translations forever? Knowing you can overcome some of your physical limits is almost always tied to the mental, and with that, you can become an even more actualized reader.
With this advice, we hope you can see how working out can make you a better (and healthier!) reader.
