By Kathy Bryan
Reading to De-Stress
An Article in Many Parts
I firmly believe in the power of a book to help me manage my stress. Does that mean I have always read everyday? Of course not; I have fallen out of love with reading, and struggled to make the space in my life for a good book before, but I do seem to come back to reading eventually. I know though that over the past few years, reading has really helped me; just five minutes in a good book helps me to find new perspectives. Now, of course, this isn’t for everyone; there is no one-size-fits-all guaranteed stress relief. If I tried telling my husband or son that reading would help them unwind, they would think I had gone mad. I still think they are missing out on so much in not reading novels and uncovering new stories, but I can’t make them. I just make sure there are books they can access if they want to.
When I was asked to write this piece, I did a quick Google search: surely, someone has looked at this. As you can tell, I was, and am, confident that there is a positive relationship between reading and reducing my stress, but did the research bear this out?
Guess what: there was a study, carried out in 2009 at the University of Sussex, which found that reading for just six minutes a day can help reduce stress by 68%. There are a number of articles that talk about this, and many of them link back to this one study. Some articles look specifically at the role of reading fiction: “reading fiction can take your mind out of the real world for a short time.” Written at the end of March this year, this article also recommends making reading “your time,” and not trying to do it alongside other things (like listening to music or having the television on), to enable you to get the full benefit of the stress relief. I am not going to quote more articles at you; they are all out there and a quick search will find them for you.
The topic of stress relief is rather central to Über Moms Book Club. When we first started the book club, we did so because we were entering the uncertain times of lockdown, and the first wave of Covid-19 had just hit Germany. A few of us felt that perhaps a book club could offer our members something extra: a way to escape.
We are now onto our 7th book, There Are No Grown-Ups by Pamela Druckerman, and we have covered some big topics in the books we have selected. Perhaps not all of them have been a stress relief for everyone, but I hope they have allowed us to take a step out of our own lives for a while. I think it is fairly evident that not everyone will turn to the same type of book to find that stress release, heck, I am not sure I turn to the same type of book every time I need to. Sometimes we need a soft cuddly jumper of a book, which wraps us up and comforts us; sometimes our stressed minds need a book that challenges us, and actually helps us question and search for answers. One thing is for sure: there are plenty of books just waiting for us to discover them. The joy of the book club has been to read books we would possibly not have heard of or not chosen to pick up otherwise.
By way of a corny segue, that leads me neatly (??!) to Burnt Sugar, the book we read in August, and met to discuss on Thursday 10th September. Burnt Sugar is one of the long listed books for this year’s Booker Prize; I look forward to seeing how it gets on. It covers a lot of topics, and looks at the relationship between mother and daughter, and a lot of issues around this. Set in India, it looks back to the narrator’s childhood, bringing us up to now. On balance, there were probably more of our readers who enjoyed this book than didn’t, but opinions were definitely divided, and we had a lovely conversation about it. Even though I was one of those who was not taken by the book, I would still encourage you to give it a go; the writing style and use of prose are striking, and it would be lovely to hear from you to hear what you make of it.
The Über Moms Book Club is always looking for new members! We have read a variety of books since starting in March 2020, and plan to carry on doing so. Not all of our books will be comfortable, cuddly books; we will read challenging books, and books that ask us to question our perceptions, our understandings, and often lead us to come to a variety of conclusions. But it is also there to give us a reason to take those six minutes, to stop and to connect with something else.
As mentioned above, this month’s book is There Are No Grown-Ups by Pamela Druckerman, following that we will be having a book on a specific theme (watch this space), and for that book our meeting will be open to all. To be a member of the Book Club, you only have to be a paid up member of Über Moms. There is no pressure for you to attend every month, so if life does get in the way or a particular book really doesn’t float your boat, you can give it a miss.
Over the next few weeks I will be working on the Über Moms Book Club Facebook page. This will be a space for us to share book recommendations, offer books to swap, lend, or give away, and make suggestions for future Book Club reads. Our meetings will continue to be online until at least the end of the year, and will be on the 2nd Thursday of each month. So, we can chat in our PJs, with a glass of wine in one hand, or sit and pair socks as we talk, but at the centre will be (hopefully) a great conversation about our latest read.
Kathy Bryan
Kathy Bryan is a stay at home mum with 15 years experience of raising three independent, loving, fun-filled, maddening children. Prior to moving to a village south of Munich, she lived with her family in the middle of England. Being a firm believer that being a stay at home mum does not mean you have to forget who you are, she was always busy in the village, both as a Governor at the school and helping organise village fetes amongst other things. Since arriving in Germany and getting settled here Kathy joined Über Moms and is an active member of the Runners Group and recently started Über Moms very own book club. When not chasing children to do homework or running the highways and byways around her village Kathy can be found sewing patchwork and working out ways to hide “another quilt” in the house.