Why We Should Read During Challenging Times

A Case for Books as Balm, Healthy Habit, and Resistance

Jul 03, 2025

selective focus photography of woman reading book while sitting at bench — Photo by Gift Habeshaw on Unsplash

The news right now can be a constant source of stress and even despair. Every time you look at what’s happening to institutions and our democracy, it can chip away at your sense of agency. Besides calling your legislators and sending signs of distress, what can you do?

You can read.

This goes beyond escapism (although there’s nothing wrong with that). Reading can be a balm for the heart, mind, and soul. Educator Peter Leyland finds that “people engage with literature, not just to escape the familiar world and travel somewhere else, nor only for academic purposes, but to ease the pain of existence, of being human.”1 We can feel a little less alone in the company of others, even if fictional.

When we stop reading for a period of time, we forget about these benefits. Reading “centers” teacher and educational author Donalyn Miller. “I am happier when I make time to read, and I feel stressed and anxious when I don't read for a few days.”2 Making reading a habit introduces a daily dose of pleasure as an antidote to despair.

In some ways, reading is also an act of resistance. When we say yes to books, we are also saying no to the continuous cycle of urgency perpetuated by social media and those that profit from our constant worry. Artist and academic Jenny Odell notes that when we read, we both “withdraw attention” from the negative source while we also “invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity.”3

This attention toward what we value has benefits beyond the aesthetic side of reading. Steven Johnson finds that engaging with pleasure reading (and the arts in general) makes us smarter. “[T]he cognitive benefits of reading involve these faculties: effort, concentration, attention, the ability to make sense of words, to follow narrative threads, to sculpt imagined worlds out of mere sentences on the page.”4

While the benefits seem clear, the implementation can be a challenge. Here are some ways I’m being a reader during challenging times:

Remove unproductive apps from my smartphone. For example, I don’t have any social media apps downloaded on my iPhone. If I want to engage in that world, I need to open up my laptop.
Make it easy to read. I like Readwise as a tool for reading digitally.5 It's an app that saves articles to read later and exports my highlights for future writing and research. (I used it to find the quotes in this article.) In some ways, I see Readwise and similar tools as a way to reverse hack the addictive nature of smartphones.
Count audiobooks as reading. This is a preferred way for me to spend time with family or myself during long drives. My wife and I are listening to The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune (with parallels to today’s problems of systemic oppression and othering). My son and I are enjoying Misery by Stephen King. When I am driving solo, I am listening to Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.6 All of these books are nuanced and explore the gray areas of life that counter the black-and-white thinking that can dominate our current discourse. (As an alternative to Audible, consider using Libro.fm to support independent bookstores, or check out audiobooks through your public library via Libby.)
Read short. I just finished the novella Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones. Just seeing how thin the book was made the idea of reading a more palatable venture. It fit my current cognitive bandwidth. Regie Routman shares the short texts she has been reading in these challenging times here.
Stop rationalizing reading. It can feel luxurious, even selfish to just sit and read. With all that’s going on, we may feel like we should be doing something. But reading needs no reason other than we want to read.

Reading won't solve the world's problems, but it can restore our capacity to engage with them more thoughtfully rather than reactively.

Read by Example

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