Reading a book one hour every day can save your mental health
By: Gianluca De Dominici
Tags: Sepulveda, Book, Mental Health, Writing, Reading

Reading a book one hour every day can save your mental health

Reading a book is the best way to improve your quality of life.

Photo by Lilly Rum from Unsplash.

I hardly read anything in the past. In my adolescence, I liked to spend my time on other things: videogames, sports, and comics. Books represented for me a boring instrument, useful but not necessary, using only for scholastic ends and nothing more.

After I graduated from High School, I started to understand the importance of reading. Living in a new sociality context made of men with their work and people interested in politics, art, and culture, it would have been very hard without knowledge about some themes and arguments.

I tested this strange sensation during my first year at the Academy of Fine Arts. I felt like a fish out of water: I was searching to juggle into the conversations, exiting by these a lot of times destructed, completely beaten by the misunderstandings.

So I started to read initially for survival. Now became my first hobby.

I still couldn’t resist like this. I had to do something. So I chose the first book, that seemed most interesting, from my family’s library, and I started to read. I’ve never stopped since that day.

I discovered a wonderful world, where every person can find herself. Now I perceive the importance of classical literature, European and American. In a few months, I read a lot of books and essays about photography and art. I fell in love with Sepulveda, Steinbeck, and Borges books.

My library filling up day by day. And this is making me very happy — to my parents not, they are conscious that sooner or later have to buy a new library.

Now I know a part of our human existence that I have never considered before. And that is saving my mental health during these quarantine days.

One of the last Sepulveda’s books on my desk.

Reading one hour at least every day has changed my life. It allows me to concentrate my attention on different contexts and themes, opening my mind finally to a world that deserves to be knowing. But, firstly, it distracts me, releasing me from social and political troubles.

Since I read constantly, I acquired more sensibility and consciousness about some themes. It helps me to have a different approach to people and reality. It helps me to write and think better.

They represent for me a rescue anchor, the unique thing that permits me to spend my day totally quiet.

No anxiety or stress during my daily reading. It’s a secure place visitable every moment of my day.

So, when I feel stressed or depressed I take a book and start to read. This feels me happy and momentarily more light. The quarantine passes on a second plane: for a few minutes, I navigate in another dimension. Strange characters and hypnotical stories accompany me into the narration. All of this with a practice that everyone can do: to read.

I don’t know how long this enthusiasm for reading will last. But that I know is that a book will always present in my life, ready to comfort me in every moment and every event, happy or bad that is. Just for this, I will thank them forever.