Is Reading As Good As Meditation For Stilling Your Mind?

Reading is something I really enjoy. It calms me, helps me to focus, and takes my mind away from everything else and into the moment.

Mindfulness meditation is a practice to train your mind to notice small feelings and sensations in everything you do. It helps us to focus inwards, noticing how we feel and what our senses can take in. This can help to slow down our mental activity, reducing much of the noise in our heads and helping us to notice negative thought patterns arising so we can let go of these.

This form of meditation is just one type of many. Mediation can be in many other forms including movement meditation (yoga), mantra meditation (repetitive phrases to improve focus), and spiritual meditation (surrendering to a higher power).

So many of our daily activities can be an opportunity to practice mindfulness. For example:

When we shower, we can feel the flow of the water on our bodies and how it feels against our skin. We can notice the temperature of the water and how it affects the texture of our arms. Sometimes we can feel goosebumps or the water can make our skin feel slippery and smooth. Taking a moment in the shower each morning to empty our minds and focus inwards on our senses can be a form of daily meditation.

Eating food can be an opportunity to still our minds and focus on the different tastes of what we’re eating. Slowing down our bites to feel the texture against our tongue and teeth can allow us to notice richer tastes and to eat slower, which can make us feel full faster.

A morning walk can do great things for our minds. Noticing how the sun feels against our skin. Noticing the wind and how it feels brushing our arms and cheeks. Noticing the temperature. Paying attention to each step we take, what is underfoot, and how the crunch of leaves sounds or how the softness of grass feels beneath our feet.

Personally, reading can be one of the most effective ways of focussing on one thing and blocking out daily thoughts that are usually racing through my mind. Getting absorbed in a fiction book can be more effective than other forms of meditation at stilling my mind. The act of reading is focusing inwards on the story and creating images in your brain of the words on the page.

Some of the things you can notice when you’re reading are:

How the pages feel between your fingers when you turn them over

How your body feels in your seated position

How the words look on the page in front of you

How the images are forming in your head when the words on the page enter your vision

The speed of your breath as you are taking in the story

How do you feel when you’re reading the words

Whether your heart rate changes reading different parts of the story

How your eyes move across the page

The benefits of mindfulness meditation are endless. Practicing being mindful helps to improve attention, mental focus, compassion, and self-control.

One of the main effects of mindfulness is that it can help to decrease anxiety and depression. Anxiety involves worrying about the future and sometimes catastrophizing about possible scenarios that haven’t happened yet. Depression is a feeling of sadness and loss, often through focusing on past events that happened some time ago. Both of these thought patterns can be damaging, often stopping us from reaching our potential as we are focussing on things we can’t control. While mindfulness meditation doesn’t get to the root cause of these mental health disorders, the focus on the present moment helps to reduce these negative thought patterns focusing on both the past and future, bringing attention to how we are feeling now and what we can control today.

Other benefits of mindfulness meditation include reduced stress levels, improved sleep, lower blood pressure, and mood regulation.

While reading is a great form of mindfulness meditation, practicing mindfulness while reading can help you to better enjoy the book as you read slower and notice more sensations.

Final thoughts

Although reading is just one type of mindfulness meditation that can be practiced, I personally find it to be a simple way of focusing on something that takes my thoughts away from the past and future. Whilst other forms of meditation can be great practice and can have many benefits, I find that it takes more effort to still the mind and thoughts are more likely to wander compared to if I am engrossed in a fiction book.