Liu Xiang of the Han Dynasty said: "Books are still medicine, and good reading can cure fools." It means: books are like medicine. Good reading can cure diseases. In fact, reading does have the miraculous effect of "preventing diseases" and "curing diseases".
Liu Xiang's words in the Western Han Dynasty. Liu Xiang is a great scholar and a great editor. He was born into a noble family. He is the fourth grandson of Liu Jiao, the younger brother of Emperor Gaozu Liu Bang. He worked as an assistant bureaucrat close to the emperor, but his main job in life was not to be an official, but to be an editor and read books. He devoted all his energy to the proofreading of Tianluge (Royal Library) and served as the "editor-in-chief" of classics, biographies, poems and poems. He spent more than 20 years rearranging the palace books accumulated in the past 100 years, collating the Warring States Policy, and compiling New Preface, Shuoyuan, Biography of the Fierce Woman and Biography of Hong Fan's Five Elements.
Reading is closely related to health. Reading can relieve people's sense of loss, loneliness and loneliness, make people concentrate, eliminate other thoughts, be calm and be beneficial to health; Reading can clear the heart, teach people to understand, and avoid situations that are harmful to physical and mental health, such as "anger hurts the liver and fear hurts the lungs". Reading can also guide patients to concentrate on reading, temporarily forget the distress caused by the disease, so that patients have a broad artistic conception and a comfortable mood, which is conducive to physical recovery.
There are countless Chinese and foreign celebrities who spend their whole lives with books and use them to get rid of diseases and strengthen their health. Confucius had a rough life and was displaced. He finally lived to be 73 years old and loved reading, which is obviously a way for Confucius to benefit from health care. Lu You, a great poet in the Northern Song Dynasty, lived in the countryside in his later years and often amused himself by reading. His personal experience is: "a scroll is a good doctor when you are sick" and "read it with relish and forget your old age".
Reading is the best way to cure mental illness, and experienced psychologists often use reading as an auxiliary means of psychotherapy. Because reading can increase medical knowledge, eliminate misconceptions, and let patients better understand their psychological and physiological reactions when facing setbacks. Reading can also help patients to eliminate fear, shame and self-blame, improve their interest in life, strengthen their normal behavior in social activities, and inhibit their inappropriate behavior patterns. Reading can help patients release repressed psychological contradictions, divert attention and achieve the purpose of physical and mental relaxation.
Reading can delay aging and prevent dementia. Medical research shows that Alzheimer's disease is ultimately the decline of brain function and the loss of memory ability. Diligent reading can promote "brain movement", and continuous brain movement can directly promote brain health, so as to prevent the occurrence of Alzheimer's disease by controlling the whole body function through brain coordination. For people who are diligent in reading and using their brains, the cerebral vessels are often in a relaxed state, thus delivering enough oxygen and nutrients, thus delaying the aging of the central nervous system, driving blood circulation, maintaining the coordination and unity of the functions of various systems in the whole body, and promoting human health. Degues Powell, a psychologist at Harvard University in the United States, tested 1600 people aged between 25 and 92 who love reading, and found that people in their 80s performed almost as well as young people. Some people in their eighties and nineties are close to the highest level of intelligence at any age.
For women, the unexpected gain of reading is to lose weight. The French "Eating Habits and Weight Observatory" conducted a study on 6666 residents in the Dover Strait in northern France, which lasted 10 years. The results show that most obese women are women with low education level. Women who love reading are less likely to get fat, because women who love reading are more aware of the importance of life balance, so they are more willing to take physical exercise.