I’ll be honest, I haven’t always had a love of reading! You might find it strange to think I’ve started a book club page on my website when I haven’t had a lifelong passion, but for me, reading brings me something different than enjoyment. Instead, it benefits my brain and body and helps my learning and development.

I was in my mid-20s when I was diagnosed with a learning difficulty. This wasn’t picked up when I was at school, and during my psychology master’s, I did a module on developmental psych. During the lecture, they taught us about specific learning difficulties and I remember sitting there thinking, “wow… I do a lot of that stuff…”

I reached out to Student Wellbeing and thankfully, my university sent me for an assessment and I met the criteria for a specific learning difficulty due to my lower reading and writing speeds. No wonder I didn’t do as well in my written exams but excelled in essays! This doesn’t impact my intellect or ability to learn, I just take a bit longer and benefit from extra help with my studies (such as extra time during exams).

Being a psychologist, I know your brain can be trained and (literally) changed through something called neuroplasticity. Your brain will change and adapt due to experience. Just like you’d go to the gym and build strength through exercise, you can do the same to your brain. So I set out to read more books and develop my brain to be a better reader.

Within about 9 days (the time it took me to read my first book), the difference I felt in my ability to focus and reading speed was amazing. But not only that I was sleeping better, felt so much happier in myself and the books I was reading were building my vocabulary and knowledge helpful for my job.

You can read a great article on Healthline about how beneficial reading books are on your physical and mental health here (https://www.healthline.com/health/benefits-of-reading-books)

I often recommend books to people at work and in my training courses, and I’ve had people give me great feedback on how much they enjoyed them.

So this is what has inspired me to start the book club: a space for me to write something about the books I’m reading and I hope if you’re interested in psychology, business or wellbeing, you might like to read them too.

I hope you find some interesting things among these pages and take advantage of the many, brainy benefits of a good book!

Happy reading,
Ellice