From Instagram, to Snapchat, to Twitter, there are countless hours to invest into social media. There is no denying that these apps use various methods to draw their users in and keep them there for hours every day. However, there is one major hobby that is worth everyone to try and take up: Reading.
We spend multiple hours of screen time reading tweets on twitter, or liking pictures on Instagram, or even sending messages to friends and family. By repeating these actions constantly throughout the day, we teach our brains how to quickly switch focus from one thing to another. This leads to us not fully taking things in, because we don’t need to. It doesn’t take a lot of focus to read a message or to scroll through Instagram. So in the end, we are all strong in this skill in being able to quickly switch our focus from one thing to another, which is a good thing. By utilising this ability, we can maintain a balance in our lives, whether it be between school, extra-curricular, work, or even social life.
This is where reading comes in handy. Where social media and digital activity trains our brain to quickly switch between things, reading on the other hand, helps develop our brain to focus more intensely. By reading, we are forcing our minds to concentrate on the literature in front of us. It is quite difficult to read a book without investing ourselves in it. Instead we find our minds wandering off, being stuck on the same page of the book for ages. Therefore, we should help develop our mind in the other side of thinking. By doing this, we can concentrate more on tasks that require a higher level of concentration, unlike what our usual digital activity would be. This would be beneficial for tasks such as studying or working.
Therefore this would mean that, if we are able to balance our consistent use of digital media with reading novels at the same time, we would be able to easily switch in between tasks as well as concentrate and pay full attention to them.
