The Amazing Power of Reading Fiction: Does it Make Us More Creative and Happier?

Most successful debut novels

Miquel Reina books

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been even just a bit guilty for putting aside precious time out of your busy, hectic life to dive into most successful debut novels, and enjoy a made-up story. If your hand is in the air, it's there with a crowd of your likes.

Essentially, a guilty pleasure is a fix in the system of a story, a narrative cocktail that allows us to momentarily forget the narratives of our own monotonous lives. And, for quite a few readers, there’s the exceptional kick of feeling that they’re getting away with an amazing story. Rather than milking the cows or reading the Meno, they’re lingering somewhere with 'Fifty Shades of Grey.'

What’s interesting—and slightly counterintuitive—is that reading amazing fiction work like Miquel Reina books can offer many of those same self-improvement advantages, even while exploring other worlds through stories that exist only in mind.

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The next time you feel guilty for choosing a work of fiction over a self-help book, remember these tremendous benefits of fiction.

Empathy: Imagination fosters understanding

To put yourself in the shoes of others and advance your capacity for empathy, you can barely do better than reading fiction. Various studies have revealed that imagining stories help activate the regions of your brain in control of better understanding others and seeing the world from a fresher, brighter perspective.

Disengagement: Reading alleviates stress

Your brain can’t operate at its supreme capacity 24/7—far from it. We all search for periods of disengagement to rest our cognitive capabilities and claim our ultimate functionality.

Tony Schwartz demonstrates this as one of the most disregarded foundations of our lives: Even the fastest racing car can’t finish the race with at least one or two great pit stops. The same should be considered true for humans. Without the necessary “pit-stops” built into our routine, there is no chance we can race at our best.

Reading has been revealed to put our brains into a trance-like, pleasurable state, similar to meditation, and it fosters the same health benefits of inner calm and deep relaxation. Regular readers have decreased stress levels, sleep better, higher self-esteem, and relatively lower rates of depression than non-readers.

Enhanced relationships: Books are a ‘reality simulator.’

Life is complicated. A lot of times, interpersonal relationships and trials don’t have the simple resolutions we might like. How helps us accept this reality? By using fiction to explore concepts of change, multifaceted emotions, and the unknown.

What science fiction does, particularly in those areas that deal with the future, is to help individuals understand that life changes and that you can live through it. We are surrounded by change. Perhaps things change faster now than they did five or six hundred years ago, chiefly in some parts of the world.

Sleep: Fiction promotes better sleep better

In fact, the kind of relaxed disengagement that reading enables can set the perfect environment for your deep hypnosis.

Creating a sleep ritual is a great way to build up a reliable sleep pattern. One of the crucial things is to have the last activity entirely disengage you from your daily routine.

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Miquel Reina