Did you know...?
Reading is very, very good for you. Research shows that regular reading:
- improves brain connectivity
- increases your vocabulary and comprehension
- empowers you to empathize with other people
- aids in sleep readiness
- reduces stress
- lowers blood pressure and heart rate
- fights depression symptoms
- prevents cognitive decline as you age
- contributes to a longer life
It’s especially important for children to read as much as possible because the effects of reading are cumulative. However, it’s never too late to begin taking advantage of the many physical and psychological benefits waiting for you in the pages of a good book.
Yale School of Medicine (2020)
“Neal Baer knows how to tell a good story. A Harvard lecturer and pediatrician, Baer has been weaving public health research into compelling narratives as an executive producer for top shows like Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and ER for years.
He told an intimate online gathering of Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) students and faculty members just how he does it.
“Empathy is the gateway to changing hearts and minds,” Baer said during a virtual dean’s lecture last week “You know the data. The challenge is to make it understandable and compelling to the public.”
Psychology Today United Kingdom (2021)
“We all understand this from our own experiences sharing stories, but new research by Brockingham and colleagues shows just how deep these human connections through stories run. They asked whether storytelling could actually modulate physiological responses to stress for children in the ICU as compared to a control group who engaged in riddle games for the same amount of time. Children who listened to someone telling stories for just 30 minutes showed decreased cortisol responses; cortisol is a hormone that is released in response to stress and higher cortisol is related to increased bodily and psychological distress. More striking, these children showed a marked increase in oxytocin, a hormone that is related to human bonding. Higher levels of oxytocin are related to greater feelings of love and empathy. And these increases in oxytocin and decreases in cortisol were also related to lower ratings of pain and higher levels of positive emotion about feeling better and getting better. Stories helped these children heal.”
Good news, bookworms: Reading books might be part of the key to a long life.
A 2016 study published in the journal Social Science & Medicine found reading books can reduce mortality by up to 20%.
According to the researchers, “any level of book reading gave a significantly stronger survival advantage,” particularly for adults 65 and older who “redirect leisure time” from watching TV into reading books.
The study also found that reading alone isn’t enough — it’s reading books that makes the difference. Books contributed to a “survival advantage that was significantly greater than that observed for reading newspapers or magazines,” the authors noted.
According to Debby Bitticks, there are 101 reasons to document your life story. These include: remembering the challenges and triumphs you faced on your life journey; an opportunity to analyze your past while gaining insight about who you are today; understanding how your experiences have influenced the path you chose in life; and becoming aware of ambitions or dreams that you have not yet realized. The list goes on from there, too.
Debby should know. She’s the creator of “Cherished Memories”, a 96-page guide for documenting your life story or that of a loved one. Now, she can add a 102 reason for documenting your life story: It’s good for your health.
A recent article by Matthew Solan, executive editor of Harvard’s Men’s Health Watch, shed light on this. From the article: “The actual writing aspect also can be a therapeutic tool as you explore issues that may still trouble you. A study published in the March 2018 JAMA Psychiatry found that writing about a specific upsetting memory was just as effective as traditional cognitive processing therapy in treating adults with post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Everyone loves a great story. Storytelling really has its roots in the beginning of human existence, a communication system that developed with the first societies. Its purpose has always been critical: to be the oral history of significant events, to transfer knowledge and to ensure the longevity of traditions, values and social norms. We spend hours consuming the tales of other people through all aspects of journalism – magazines, blogs, news broadcasts and conversation. The world has seen an entirely new industry in the genetic and ancestral searches for people to track down their family history – the story of their lives through previous generations. Stories are also for entertainment and society building as a vehicle to understand the complexities of the world as it exists. As an Indian proverb suggests, “tell me a fact and I’ll learn. Tell me a truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.”
With regard to health care, storytelling has been employed in certain areas with some success. One of the major areas of impact is in the realm of patient safety. Having patients and families tell their stories of preventable harm events has shone a spotlight on the process issues that exist that may result in injury. Many hospitals have embraced this phenomenon and overall, there is belief that such stories have improved the preventable harm in many care centers. Why? Most likely, it adds the human aspect to the facts of a case, touching the empathy cord inside most human beings. It adds both accountability and urgency to improvement activities. The result has been a national movement to do better.
Before Goldstein became immersed in the virtual circle’s stories, she found herself “rabidly reading” a different kind of story: the news. But the recent retiree soon realized that constantly keeping up with the news was “a lot”—a feeling so ubiquitous that even the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised taking breaks. Goldstein, a self-described anxious person, realized she needed an escape.
Though Goldstein says she’s always loved folk storytelling, she’d “never gone to anything like this, or known it existed” until Ethical Culture—a group she’d long been a member of—started offering virtual storytelling circles during the pandemic. Now, for the past year and a half, she’s attended regularly. “It wasn’t talking about COVID, it wasn’t talking about politics, it was just comforting,” Goldstein says of the circle. “I found my anxiety definitely lessening.”
Goldstein is far from alone: a study of hospitalized children in Brazil found that those who had stories told to them experienced increased levels of oxytocin and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol than a control group.
Daniel Weinshenker, director of the Denver office of StoryCenter—another group offering online circles and workshops—says there’s a primal reason why storytelling might lower anxiety while creating comfort in times of uncertainty. Much like Ethical Society, StoryCenter’s circles happen through Zoom (with the camera optional), and usually consist of five to 25 people. But instead of a few storytellers sharing a made-up tale at random, Weinshenker invites everyone in the room—sometimes in pairs— to share a true story related to a specific prompt, usually involving a “moment of change.” This, he says, can help people cope with the changes, especially the unexpected ones, happening in their own lives. “Most of us go through life with a lot of assumptions, and an idea that things are going to stay the way they are,” says Weinshenker, who’s trained in social work. But when those assumptions are challenged, it can cause deep distress. “[For instance], growing up in the Bay Area, it was common for us to feel earthquakes,” he says. “But when someone new would move to San Francisco, and the ground would move, it would blow them out of their sense of normalcy and comfort, and their whole relationship with the ground and the world.”
Harvard Business Review (2021)
“Even as we inoculate our bodies and seemingly move out of the pandemic, psychologically we are still moving through it. We owe it to ourselves — and our coworkers — to make space for processing this individual and collective trauma. A recent op-ed in the New York Times Sunday Review affirms what I, as a writer and professor of writing, have witnessed repeatedly, up close: expressive writing can heal us.”
Harvard Health (2021)
“As a doctor working on the front lines in a designated respiratory illness clinic, I have been submerged in all things COVID-19 for the past 15 months. It has been exhausting and heavy, tinged with constant uncertainty, fear, and loss, and I am so ready for it to end.
One thing is certain: all of us have been changed by the pandemic, individually and collectively. Our life stories have shifted and will continue to shift in response to what we have experienced. In April of 2020, early in the pandemic, I wrote about how telling our stories can help us navigate and ultimately make sense of the trauma and loss associated with COVID-19.
Building on research from the field of narrative psychology that supports the mental health benefits of narrative, I have dedicated much of the past decade to helping people heal through storytelling. Studies have shown that digging into our personal stories, reflecting on them, and editing them as our lives evolve, is good for us. Sharing them with others, though it makes us vulnerable, is an important part of this healing.
Today, as we emerge from over a year of social isolation, I am focused on the benefits of sharing stories in community. When we witness someone else’s vulnerability in a safe and supportive environment, we feel less alone, and often just plain better. Stories connect us as human beings and build bonds between us. We need them now more than ever.”
“When you listen to a story, whatever your age, you’re transported mentally to another time and place — and who couldn’t use that right now?
‘We all know this delicious feeling of being swept into a story world,’ says Liz Neeley, who directs The Story Collider, a nonprofit production company that, in nonpandemic times, stages live events filled with personal stories about science. ‘You forget about your surroundings,’ she says, ‘and you’re entirely immersed.'”
Depending on the story you’re reading, watching or listening to, your palms may start to sweat, scientists find. You’ll blink faster, and your heart might flutter or skip. Your facial expressions shift, and the muscles above your eyebrows will react to the words — another sign that you’re engaged.
A growing body of brain science offers even more insight into what’s behind these experiences.”
Most of the writing about the literacy benefits of storytelling in the professional literature has been based on observations from practice rather than on research findings. Authors of these pieces typically suggest that storytelling helps children to become better listeners and better readers while building vocabulary.
A small body of research has tested these assumptions. Three of these studies are highlighted here.
First, Brian Sturm studied the trance-like state that listeners enter when they are deeply involved in listening to oral storytelling. He interviewed children and adults at a storytelling festival and identified six characteristics of the storytelling trance:
“Six categories emerged from the listeners’ descriptions of the storylistening trance phenomenon:
- Realism: the sense that the story environment or characters are real or alive
- Lack of awareness: of surroundings or other mental processes
- Engaged receptive channel
- visual (both physical watching and mental visualization)
- auditory (both physical hearing and mental “chatter”)
- kinesthetic
- emotional
- Control: of the experience by the listener, or someone or something else
- “Placeness:” the sense that the listener “goes somewhere” (often “into”) another space
- Time distortion: the sense that subjective time moves at a different speed than objective, clock time.”
“The Subjective, Objective, Assessment and Plan (SOAP) note is an acronym representing a widely used method of documentation for healthcare providers. The SOAP note is a way for healthcare workers to document in a structured and organized way.[1][2][3]
This widely adopted structural SOAP note was theorized by Larry Weed almost 50 years ago. It reminds clinicians of specific tasks while providing a framework for evaluating information. It also provides a cognitive framework for clinical reasoning. The SOAP note helps guide healthcare workers use their clinical reasoning to assess, diagnose, and treat a patient based on the information provided by them. SOAP notes are an essential piece of information about the health status of the patient as well as a communication document between health professionals. The structure of documentation is a checklist that serves as a cognitive aid and a potential index to retrieve information for learning from the record.”
University of Minnesota Medical School
“Numerous musical theatre productions, television programs and movies vividly portray characters experiencing mental illness, including issues of depression, social anxiety and suicide. While some media offers content warnings, viewers may be surprised and triggered by intense portrayals of emotionally laden topics. Since about one in five Americans experience mental illness annually, and even more people care about someone living with mental illness, the potential impact on audiences is considerable. For actors, authentically portraying characters with serious mental health issues can also take a toll.”
“When you really get into character, your blood pressure goes up, your heart rate increases and your mind and body can’t differentiate between reality and acting,” said Michelle Sherman, PhD, professor in the University of Minnesota Medical School’s Department of Family Medicine and Community Health. “Your body goes through this emotional experience in intense ways, and that’s hard to just turn off.”
“Dr. Sherman, a clinical psychologist, and colleagues Robert Levy, MD, assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, and Jessica Larsen, PhD, recently published the paper, “Shining a spotlight on issues of mental health in musical theatre and ways psychologists can help: Perspectives of theatre professionals,” in the journal Professional Psychology: Research and Practice. Their research explores the portrayal of mental illness in theatre from the perspective of professional actors, directors and choreographers, along with how a behavioral health consultant (BHC) might help both performers and the audience deal with psychological themes.”
“As a psychologist, choreographer and long-time fan of musical theater, the opportunity to merge my passions and engage in robust discussions with theater professionals has been meaningful and enjoyable,” Dr. Sherman said.”
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