4 reasons that reading for pleasure can make you a better person

Summer is here. At some point, you may find yourself on vacation, sitting by a pool on a weekend afternoon, in a chair on the porch, or lying on a towel on a sandy beach. In those moments, put down your phone and pick up a book (or perhaps an ebook, but preferably on a device that isn’t your phone).



Read something you’re going to enjoy. Don’t select your reading based on what you believe you should be reading. Fiction , nonfiction, memoir—anything you choose is fine. Just pick something you’re going to want to keep returning to. And don’t feel bad about reading something just because it will bring you happiness. Not every action you take has to be one that has clear value.



That said, if you do a lot of reading for pleasure you might just find yourself becoming a better person in your personal and working life. There are several reasons why reading can have an impact that goes beyond what you get from many other media.



The time matters



First, a thought about why reading has a different impact than watching a movie, documentary, or TV series: There are many wonderful things about movies and television. But the stories in these genres are compressed into fairly short time ranges and bite-size doses. Books provide a more leisurely experience. Even a short book might take you five hours to read. Longer books might engage you for 20 hours or more.



This deeper immersion provides time to think and live with the impact of the book. A work of nonfiction may transport you to a time in history, into the life of a famous figure, or may introduce you to a new branch of knowledge. A work of fiction may bring you into the life of someone very different from you living in vastly different circumstances and experiencing emotions that aren’t common for you. Having the time to reflect on these elements of a book over days or weeks deepens the impact that reading can have on the way you think.



You may like doing things efficiently, but changing the way you think about anything is an inherently slow process that requires living with information that differs from what you currently believe. Reading sets the stage for taking this time.



Getting perspective



In your daily life, you get caught up in the events of the day. The depth of your perspective is reflected in the strength of your emotional response. As a result, you may have powerful reactions to something happening in the moment. It can be difficult to disconnect from those events to determine whether the emotional response you’re having fits the true magnitude of what’s happening.



Reading has three benefits that can help you calibrate that emotional reaction. First, it introduces you to a range of events that go beyond what you experience on your own. That enables you to calibrate the importance of what you’re dealing with in the moment.



In addition, literature, history, and biography often give you insight into the way that other people handle situations. That can provide you with additional strategies for engaging with the events that you’re facing. Finally, if you find it difficult to disengage from a work event that’s causing you stress, reading may give you a refuge to enable you to take a step away from the daily grind.



Stepping outside yourself



Most of us want to be the heroes of our own life story. One reflection of this tendency is what social psychologists have called the fundamental attribution error . When explaining the behavior of other people, you tend to focus on their traits. So if someone at work yells at a colleague, you may think of them as an angry person or a “loose cannon.” When explaining your own behavior, however, you tend to focus on the situation. If you yell at a colleague, you’re likely to find an aspect of what was going on at the time to explain why you did it.



The reason this is called an attribution error is that every behavior is caused by some combination of personal traits and the situation the person is in. Emphasizing traits for others and situations for the self means that people are using different criteria for judging behavior for different kinds of people.



One thing that reading does is it enables you to see other people differently. Literature often gives you a chance to view the world from the inside of someone with different traits who has experienced different situations than you have. Often, biography and history provide some of the same experiences. Each of these opportunities helps you to see both how traits and situations affect your behavior and that of others, which narrows the gap between how you view yourself and how you view other people.



Ultimately, the experiences you get from reading can give you more empathy for others and also help you recognize how their situations may affect what they do.



Seeing the context



An event is affected by more than just the situation the person is in. In the workplace, a particular action might be the right one or the wrong one to take based in part on the situation. Great leaders can often sniff out key contextual factors and tailor plans to fit them.



Unfortunately, the world does not come labeled with obvious references to those elements of a situation you ought to use to decide what to do next. You learn about how to adapt to circumstances through several channels, including experience, mentors who guide you, and classes you may take. Reading is another fantastic source of contextual learning.



Literature may show you that well-intentioned actions have negative consequences because of a certain situation. Stories of businesses that succeed may point out critical elements of context. Political biographies often discuss how key leaders identified elements of a situation that affected important outcomes.



Immersing yourself in reading for pleasure provides you the chance to live in other contexts for a while, and that may help you recognize factors that could change the appropriateness of actions you choose to take in your own life.