Tidying my living room hungover one New Year’s Day morning – an anxious, erratic mess – my eyes settled on the yellowing books in the dresser, partially buried behind a stack of unopened bank statements. The sight prompted a sudden longing: I wanted my brain back.
Reading had been a passion as a child, but by my 20s I was prioritising alcohol. Paperbacks were pushed out amid the growing pressures of adulthood, when work was full on and weekends a drunken whirlwind spent ricocheting around nightclubs.
After becoming a mother of two in my 30s, scrolling social media while sipping wine became my default leisure activity – so much simpler than navigating a novel’s plot. I didn’t drink more than many other midlifers – three or four times a week, perhaps – but with every drink my brain seemed to shrink, and the longer I drank, the less I read.
Until that morning in January 2022, when, in something of a lightbulb moment, I asked myself: if drinking had stopped me reading, could reading stop me drinking? Could committing to finishing one book a week, while abstaining from alcohol, improve my cognitive function? I decided to try.
Fast forward a year, and I was not only still sober with 52 completed books by authors from Emily Brontë to Sally Rooney to show for it, but I also felt happier and more focused. My sleep had improved, my conversation was better and my stress levels were reduced.
In our distracted digital age, we spend on average over five hours online a day, only half of UK adults read regularly, and just 34.6 per cent of eight to 18-year-olds surveyed by the National Literacy Trust recently said that they enjoy reading in their spare time – the lowest level recorded by the charity in 19 years. This is all why I believe books are more important than ever.
Although I’m no longer getting through one book a week, reading remains a powerful, transformative hobby, while some of the world’s highest-profile entrepreneurs, from Oprah Winfrey to Mark Zuckerberg, credit their success to regular reading. Microsoft founder Bill Gates describes it as “one of the chief ways that I learn” while Barack Obama said it helped him “slow down and get perspective” in the White House.
At the start of my challenge I decided to read paper books, rather than a Kindle – studies show we are more likely to become immersed and focused on a book on paper than on screen – as well as a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, often bought from charity shops to keep costs down. My first – Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, ironically – had been languishing in the dresser for years.
Alcohol is both a sedative and a stimulant, both of which reduce focus, and I quickly realised without it, I could concentrate better on reading. The more I read, the more relaxed I felt, and the less I missed wine.
Clinical hypnotherapist and psychotherapist Clare Cogan suggests alcohol-dependent patients rediscover their love of books, because like alcohol, reading releases dopamine, the neurotransmitter that motivates us to do something pleasurable. “Addictions are controlled by dopamine, and if you’re low in it, you are more likely to desire a drink.”
The unnaturally high dopamine spike that alcohol provides only lasts 20 minutes, however – at which stage, we crave another drink. “Reading releases dopamine more slowly, over a longer period of time, so it is a good replacement activity,” says Cogan.
Meanwhile, a University of Sussex study found reading the most effective way to reduce stress, with just six minutes slowing participants’ heart rates and easing tension in their muscles by up to 68 per cent. And as I ploughed through Katherine May’s Wintering (week six), Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands (week 11) and John Grisham’s The Firm (week 15), I realised engrossing myself in other narratives made the pressures of work deadlines and parenting two children ease.
While alcohol had often reduced me to a rambling wreck, reading helped refine my conversational skills, an observation backed by science. MRI scans measuring the effects of reading a novel on the brain have found that throughout the reading period and for days afterwards, connectivity between various circuits in the brain gets stronger, especially in the somatosensory cortex, the part of the brain that responds to physical sensations like movement and pain, improving our social cognition.
Experts advise we read to our children from when they are babies to foster enthusiasm for the habit – one psychotherapist I interviewed for work told me even teenagers enjoy being read to. They also say watching parents read encourages children to read themselves.
Certainly, my children, admittedly already keen readers, were intrigued by my challenge. After listening to me rave about Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy (weeks five, 25 and 43), my daughter Rosie, 14, decided she was going to get through it herself (she’s still going).
As the year progressed, my personality changed. I had always been prone to narcissistic self-loathing, convinced everyone thought I was a failure, but reading abated this self-obsession, opening my eyes to others’ experiences and reassuring me that, actually, nobody was thinking about me at all.
“When reading we realise there is a world beyond ourselves, which stops our self-involvement,” says Cogan, who explains that, by engaging the pre-frontal cortex – the decision-making part of our brain – reading helps quieten the primitive emotional part of the brain.
What genre we read doesn’t matter, she adds, as long as it absorbs us. “People think of meditation as sitting still with your legs crossed and eyes closed, but in fact reading can be very meditative.”
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Read MoreIt can even benefit our physical health. A study in JAMA Psychiatry found daily reading can reduce the risk of dementia, while research from Yale University found people who read books lived for around two years longer than those who didn’t.
A lifelong insomniac, reading helped me nod off – in a study in the National Library of Medicine 42 per cent of participants said reading before bed bettered their sleep quality. Of course my sleep was further improved by the lack of alcohol-induced chemicals jolting me awake at 3am.
I saved the longest books, such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, for weeks off work, but inevitably, something had to give to make time for the 60-odd pages I averaged a day. Mostly, that was Netflix and social media – research is scant on this subject, but reading is one of the best antidotes to screen time I have discovered.
Closing my last book of the year-long challenge on New Year’s Eve, before enjoying a raucous, but sober, evening with family and friends, I felt proud and exhilarated by my achievement, and amazed by the brain’s capacity to forge new habits, even in midlife.
Perhaps predictably, parenting and work demands meant I couldn’t keep up my rate of reading, even without the distraction of wine, and nor, in an alcohol-centric world, could I withstand the pressure to stay completely sober. By the time I finally had a drink this January, after two years booze-free, I was averaging a more realistic book a fortnight.
Nonetheless, having the time and focus to read this much is one reason my alcohol intake remains reduced, at around a half bottle of wine a week. And as another New Year approaches, I find myself eyeing up my dresser for more dusty, unread books – and wondering if I might do it all again.
FIVE EASY READS TO REIGNITE YOUR LOVE OF FICTION
You Are Here by David Nicholls
A love story set on a hike, One Day author Nicholls’s most recent book, and like his others (Starter for Ten is my favourite), a poignant, hilarious, wincingly accurate portrait of humanity.
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
A thought-provoking but funny story about a female scientist struggling to be taken seriously in the 60s. This was my last book of my challenge and lived up to the hype.
The People on Platform 5 by Claire Pooley
As good as her memoir, The Sober Diaries, which helped me stop drinking, Pooley’s tale of an eclectic group of train passengers is bursting with compassion, intrigue and relatable characters.
The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
About a boy stuck on a boat with a tiger. I didn’t think I’d like it either, but its awe-inspiring narrative of love, fear, faith and survival – told so cleverly – had me hooked.
Sun Damage by Sabine Durrant
Show me a scary TV programme and I’ll hide behind a cushion. Give me a scary book and I can’t look away. This story about con artists is the last psychological thriller I read and I finished it in two sittings.
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