How to get back into reading books!(and why it’s so good for our mental health)

By Grace Olson, Author. Scheduling self-care is vital if we are to be capable of performing well as a parent, and looking back at my early experiences of parenting, it really was a ‘performance’. As a parent you have to keep your feelings in check and you have to demonstrate the type of behaviour you want from your children even if your emotions are exploding within you.

So how can we do this? How can we schedule any sort of self-care into our busy lives? Well, the easiest way is to allow yourself some time each day to read a book. This year (2026) the government has launched an initiative called The National Year of Reading. They want to encourage the nation to read more physical books because it has become clear that scrolling through social media and reading electronically is harming our brains. It disrupts sleep, increases anxiety, reduces attention span and can lower self-esteem as we look at the ‘perfect’ lives and success of other people (which are often fake).