If you stop and think for a moment about when was the last time that you read anything, it’s likely that you can’t come up with anything. Sure, you read your emails every single day and you read company material but you haven’t really learnt anything new in quite some time. We live in a very digital world and so reading books is usually done on a tablet or smartphone but putting aside time to read something is more difficult than many would imagine. Trying to hold down a full-time job and take care of the family takes up a great deal of time and so we don’t really read any more.

Nobody is saying that you have to buy a novel that is 600 pages long in order to be able to appreciate reading and signing up for a magazine subscription for a magazine that you really like is a strong start. You need to start incorporating more reading into your lifestyle and if you need a few reasons why reading is good for you then maybe the following can help.

-          It’s great for your brain - Reading is especially important for young and old people because it gives the brain a good workout which is incredibly good for your memory. It exercises the brain in many ways because you have to remember the plotline, the characters that are contained within the story and so much more.

-          It’s free entertainment - We rely much too heavily on technology nowadays but the one upside of it is that we can download books and magazines to our smartphones and tablets. This means that you have an opportunity to read something no matter where you are at any given time. All of the TV shows and movies that you like are all based on books anyway.

-          It helps with sleep - Many of us are tossing and turning at night because we have been looking at televisions or smartphones until the moment that we want to close our eyes for the night. All of this blue light is not conducive to a good night’s sleep and so it makes more sense to pick up a book or magazine about an hour before bedtime and read that.

-          We increase our knowledge - It’s important to learn something new every single day and books and magazines are full of many interesting things. It doesn’t matter if you like to read fiction or non-fiction because you will still learn things that you didn’t know before you picked the book up initially. Reading is a great way to motivate yourself to stay positive in this otherwise difficult existence.

If you are carrying around far too much stress in your life due to the job that you have and the life that you lead, picking up something to read has the ability to take you somewhere else even for just an hour. You should always be trying to set an example for your kids, so read.