Yahoo Style: The Mental Health Benefits of Rereading Your Favourite Books
After this wild year we’ve all had, is it really a surprise that we’re all going a little bit nuts? The uncertainty and stress of it all is enough to send anyone into a tizzy. Especially for us social butterflies who have now morphed unwittingly into housebound moths. But I have good news: Rereading your favourite books can seriously help your mental health.
Recently, I wrote an article for Yahoo Style exploring the different ways rereading your favourite books can have a major influence on your mood, attitude, and—get ready for this—lifespan. If that’s not a good reason to pick up your fave prose, I don’t know what is.
The Mental Health Benefits of Rereading Your Favourite Books
Rereading your favourite book years apart, at different stages in your life, can also be a sort of self-discovery. For example, I first read Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella when I was 11-years-old, then again as a teenager, and then yet again as an adult. Each time, I discovered new layers to the story.
At first, I thought it was glamorous how the main character, Becky Bloomwood, could afford all of her designer clothes. Then, I realized that she couldn’t actually afford them and was going into massive debt. Finally, being a self-confessed serial saver and thrift shopper, her actions made me cringe and I wished I could help her curb her pathological spending. Think about your credit, Bex!
"Even though people are already familiar with the stories or the places, re-consuming brings new or renewed appreciation of both the object of consumption and themselves," one study says. "By doing it again, people get more out of it."
Voracious readers and book lovers across the world have been privy to this mental health elixir for years. And now you are, too. Currently I’m rereading The Tennis Party by Sophie Kinsella (her début novel) and Last Night at Chateau Marmont by Lauren Weisberger. What are you rereading?
Read my article for Yahoo Style here.
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