Cultivate a Passion for Reading

This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Affiliate, I can earn a commission off of products at no additional cost to you. You can read my full disclosure here.

I am passionate for reading. It was easy in jr high and high school to read. I didn’t get my first phone until 10^th grade, my first social media account until 16, and my first iPhone until college. I didn’t have a lot of distractions to keep me from constantly having my nose in a book. At a point in time, it was easy to cultivate a passion for reading in my life.

Being homeschooled until 6^th grade further encouraged that passion. I had a mom who loved to read. When I went to public jr. high, I had a different perspective about friends. On the bus rides, during recess, or before school when most girls were talking about boyfriends who broke up with them two weeks later, I was a million miles away with the characters in my book. Didn’t do much for my social life, but it 100% helped me in reading, writing, creativity and empathy. In fact, I attribute how easy English classes always were to me in jr. high, high school, and college to reading.

What Reading Does

If you need further encouragement to cultivate this passion, consider this: reading actually makes an impact on your brain. Your brain develops mental ideas or pictures of what it is that you’re reading. You can have a picture in your head of what the character you’re reading about looks like. You picture objects, food, and places whether you are reading them, or they are being read to you, like an audiobook.

Reading is almost like being there in real life. This is why we become connected to characters—our brain tells us that we actually experienced it ourselves. You sympathize with characters and are better able to understand differing points of view. You feel what characters in the story feel. In real life, you are more able to have empathy with others and become more alert and aware of the lives of others. You also are more likely to understand cause and effect.

Scientists have even found that reading for fun can increase blood flow to the brain. Imagine how reading different styles of literature would stretch your brain further, sort of like a mental exercise. In fact, there are studies done that suggest you can actually increase white matter in your brain when you read, and that you can prolong dementia.

Yes, I know that, but…

So why don’t we read more? I’m sure not all of the facts that I just spewed off were surprising to you; maybe some, but not all. Is it truly that we are simply too busy? In my own life, after high school, reading took a very far back burner. Once college hit, classes consumed so much time and studying took up the rest. Add on a 20 hour a week part time job and I barely had time to eat.

Finishing college didn’t help much. I spent a whole year working 60 plus hour weeks paying off college and paying for a wedding. Our first year of marriage brought some time for me to read, but was replaced with TV shows and games on my phone. Fast forward three babies later, it’s 2022 and I remember how fun it was to read and how much I miss it. Maybe you’ve felt the same way. How do you get back to that?

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Atwood h. townsend

Have a Desire

For any of our normal lives to change, we have to want to change. We have to be able to look back on our life for a certain length of time (usually I do this in December, looking back on the year) and be able to see areas that need improvement. A major realization I had in December of last year was that I didn’t spend very much time doing things I actually like to do.

My year was full of teaching part time, cleaning house, cooking, doing laundry, playing with my boys, and a ton of mindless activities. I spent hours wastefully scrolling on social media, playing useless games, and watching tv shows that just filled my mind with garbage. I would be spending time gossiping people I dislike or focusing on politics I can’t possibly do anything about. These “mindless” activities consume completely too much time and inevitably give you bitterness, anger and resentment.

You can, with some work, break bad habits like these. You should replace them with something good. But, you have to have a desire to change them. You have to want to start reading again, want to improve your brain, and want to learn more in this world.

Reading forces you to be quiet in a world that no longer makes a place for that.

john green

Carve Out the Time

There are several ways to give yourself more encouragement to read. I’ll briefly touch on some of my favorites. First, I like to make sure I carry a book with me everywhere. I keep a book in my car, I keep a book in my purse, there’s a book on my night stand and there’s a book by my couch. My husband has even capitalized on this idea—he keeps a book in the medicine cabinet above our toilet.

I try to focus on reading before I touch my phone or turn on the TV. There’s nothing wrong with watching a good show; there’s even nothing wrong with playing a mindless game on your phone. I enjoy having friends over and watching an old movie, or showing one of my favorite cartoons to my boys. I just try to do it in moderation now. It’s not my first go-to at the end of the day.

Other Ways…

I read at the end of the day. I struggle with insomnia and trying to sleep at night. This is something I’ve tried to do in the past year, because I want to improve my sleep and take care of my health and wellness. Any sleep expert will tell you the best thing to do to get yourself ready to sleep is to stay off of your phone for anywhere up to 2 hours before you go to bed. Other sleep experts might even suggest that reading calms you at the end of a day, exercises your brain to cause you to be tired and want to go to sleep.

When I don’t think I have enough time to read before bed, or I really don’t feel like reading for the day, I remember something given to me by Hal Elrod in “The Miracle Morning”. Hal raised the point that if you were to read only 10 pages every day, by the end of the year, you would have read 3,650 pages. Imagine how many books you would have read.

Lastly…

I get up early. I am not a morning person. I can’t take credit for this suggestion. My husband (God Bless Bert) suggested this to me last fall and I was almost angry with him for even bringing it up. I haaate mornings. Not. A. Fan. There’s more on that in a future blog post to come, but suffice it to say, I do get up early now.

After much pushing and prodding and encouragement from dear Bert, I am up between 5 and 5:30 anywhere from 3-5 days a week. It really does make a difference. I have my morning coffee, read my Bible more consistently, sometimes workout, and sometimes get in a few chapters of a book before my 3 bouncing boys hit the ground running.

Successful people have libraries. The rest have big screen TVs.

Jim Rohn