The Underrated Literary Intervention We Need to Take More Seriously

One of the most consistently evidenced tools for a longer, calmer, sharper life is something most of us already own a version of, gathering dust on a shelf. There’s no supplement to take or wearable to attach and it has pretty much zero side effects. I’m talking about reading.

Since 2013, GPs, therapists and other health professionals across England and Wales have had access to something called Reading Well, a scheme, that allows them to formally recommend specific books for specific conditions: anxiety, depression, chronic pain, dementia care, and more. Patients collect the books for free from their local library. The overwhelming majority of people who borrow a book through it say it helped. Most health professionals who use it say it gives them something to offer patients when a ten-minute appointment simply isn’t enough time to do the job properly.

I run a bibliotherapy practice (Book Therapy) and train many doctors as well as mental health professionals in bibliotherapy, so none of this surprises me. What surprises me is that the wellness industry spent the last decade selling us cold plunges and continuous glucose monitors, overlooking something simple, something we have been doing for years, something that is on the decline and at risk of disappearing, and something that I am urging more and more folks to return to.

Here’s what’s changed recently, and why I think this deserves more attention than it’s getting.

Earlier this year, researchers at Rush University Medical Center published a study tracking nearly two thousand older adults, looking at their lifelong exposure to intellectually enriching activities - reading among them, alongside writing and learning languages. People in the top tenth of lifetime cognitive enrichment had a substantially lower risk of Alzheimer’s than those in the bottom tenth, and developed the disease, on average, around five years later. A separate long-running study following older adults for fourteen years found that reading at least once a week meaningfully reduced the risk of cognitive decline, and that this protection held regardless of how much formal education someone had.

Then there’s the ageing research by UCL Professor Daisy Fancourt that first pulled me into writing about this properly. A recent study using epigenetic clocks, biological markers that estimate how quickly the body is ageing beneath the surface, found that engagement with arts and culture, including reading, was associated with slower biological ageing. The effect size was comparable to physical activity.

Layer on an older but still under-cited Yale study, which followed over three and a half thousand adults for twelve years and found that people who read book (specifically books, not newspapers or magazines) had a meaningfully lower risk of dying during the study period than non-readers. And a well-known University of Sussex study, which found that six minutes of reading lowered measured stress levels more effectively than listening to music, going for a walk, or having a cup of tea.

None of these studies, on their own, proves that reading is medicine. They’re mostly observational, and cautious researchers are right to say so. But taken together, across completely different fields (psychiatry, epigenetics, neurology, stress physiology) they start to describe the same shape: a habit that is protective, in ways that compound the longer you keep it up.

What seems to matter most is something researchers call narrative transportation: the experience of becoming so absorbed in a story that the boundary between you and it briefly disappears. That state of sustained, single-threaded attention is exactly what most of our daily technology is built to interrupt. Reading for more than a few minutes at a time may be one of the last common habits that still asks this of us.

I think the honest answer is that reading doesn’t have a marketing budget. Nobody profits from you finishing a library book the way they profit from you buying a supplement or a smart ring. Reading tends to be a private, and largely invisible activity which makes it a terrible fit for an attention economy, and possibly exactly why it works.

If any of this has made you think about your own relationship with reading whether you used to be someone who always had a book on the go, and somehow drifted away from it, I’d love for you to join me on a retreat I’m running this autumn in the Cotswolds with Performance Pilates expert Sabrina Ovadya. It pairs reading and journaling with pilates: slow mornings, real books, time to stretch and copious time to read, rest and reset, that’s genuinely hard to find elsewhere. A space where we can connect with our minds and bodies again through movement and also with a story, character and/or narrative that leaves us feeling re-energised and refreshed.

You can find all the details here: Pilates, Reading & Journaling Retreat, Autumn 2026

If you’d like your own set of curated book recommendations and literary prescriptions, you might find our library of A-Z Book Prescriptions helpful. And if you’d like to prescribe your own literature and offer bibliotherapy sessions or provide social book prescriptions, you can train with us, or register on our Book Therapy Method Directory.

My goal is to continue to pioneer this space, and raise more awareness of bibliotherapy with my book, Bibliotherapy: The Healing Power of Reading and my work at Book Therapy. If you’d like to join this movement DM here, or on my Instagram – I always write back.

Warmly,

Bijal x

Bijal Shah is a bibliotherapist and the founder of Book Therapy. Her book, Bibliotherapy: The Healing Power of Reading, is available now. If you would like a personalised book prescription or to explore bibliotherapy sessions, visit booktherapy.io.

And if you’d like to explore a curated library of books prescribed for every season of life, you can subscribe here: bookprescriptions.booktherapy.io