Did you know?
Stories provide many health benefits.
According to healthline.com (2019), reading is very, very good for you. It’s especially important for children to read as much as possible because the effects of reading are cumulative. Research shows that regular reading:
- improves brain connectivity
- increases your vocabulary and comprehension
- empowers you to empathize with other people
- aids in sleep readiness
- reduces stress
- lowers blood pressure and heart rate
- fights depression symptoms
- prevents cognitive decline as you age
- contributes to a longer life
Stories breed empathy and persuasion.
According to Yale School of Medicine (2020), “Neal Baer knows how to tell a good story. A Harvard lecturer and pediatrician, Baer has been weaving public health research into compelling narratives as an executive producer for top shows like Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and ER for years.
He told an intimate online gathering of Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) students and faculty members just how he does it.
“Empathy is the gateway to changing hearts and minds,” Baer said during a virtual dean’s lecture last week “You know the data. The challenge is to make it understandable and compelling to the public.”
Stories increase oxytocin and lower cortisol.
According to Psychology Today United Kingdom (2021), “New research by Brockingham and colleagues shows just how deep these human connections through stories run. They asked whether storytelling could actually modulate physiological responses to stress for children in the ICU as compared to a control group who engaged in riddle games for the same amount of time.”
“Children who listened to someone telling stories for just 30 minutes showed decreased cortisol responses; cortisol is a hormone that is released in response to stress and higher cortisol is related to increased bodily and psychological distress.”
“More striking, these children showed a marked increase in oxytocin, a hormone that is related to human bonding. Higher levels of oxytocin are related to greater feelings of love and empathy. And these increases in oxytocin and decreases in cortisol were also related to lower ratings of pain and higher levels of positive emotion about feeling better and getting better. Stories helped these children heal.”
Stories may lengthen lifespan.
According to today.com (2023), “Good news, bookworms: Reading books might be part of the key to a long life!”
“A 2016 study published in the journal Social Science & Medicine found reading books can reduce mortality by up to 20%.”
“According to the researchers, ‘any level of book reading gave a significantly stronger survival advantage,’ particularly for adults 65 and older who ‘redirect leisure time’ from watching TV into reading books.”
“The study also found that reading alone isn’t enough — it’s reading books that makes the difference. Books contributed to a ‘survival advantage that was significantly greater than that observed for reading newspapers or magazines,’ the authors noted.”
Stories are therapeutic.
According to usnews.com (2018), [Debby Bitticks] says there are 101 reasons to document your life story. These include: remembering the challenges and triumphs you faced on your life journey; an opportunity to analyze your past while gaining insight about who you are today; understanding how your experiences have influenced the path you chose in life; and becoming aware of ambitions or dreams that you have not yet realized. The list goes on from there, too.
A recent article by Matthew Solan, executive editor of Harvard’s Men’s Health Watch, shed light on this. From the article: “The actual writing aspect also can be a therapeutic tool as you explore issues that may still trouble you. A study published in the March 2018 JAMA Psychiatry found that writing about a specific upsetting memory was just as effective as traditional cognitive processing therapy in treating adults with post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Stories improve healthcare.
According to usnews.com (2019), with regard to health care, storytelling has been employed in certain areas with some success. One of the major areas of impact is in the realm of patient safety. Having patients and families tell their stories of preventable harm events has shone a spotlight on the process issues that exist that may result in injury.
Many hospitals have embraced this phenomenon and overall, there is belief that such stories have improved the preventable harm in many care centers. Why? Most likely, it adds the human aspect to the facts of a case, touching the empathy cord inside most human beings. It adds both accountability and urgency to improvement activities. The result has been a national movement to do better.
Stories entertain and build societies.
According to usnews.com (2019), everyone loves a great story. Storytelling really has its roots in the beginning of human existence, a communication system that developed with the first societies. Its purpose has always been critical: to be the oral history of significant events, to transfer knowledge and to ensure the longevity of traditions, values and social norms.
We spend hours consuming the tales of other people through all aspects of journalism – magazines, blogs, news broadcasts and conversation. The world has seen an entirely new industry in the genetic and ancestral searches for people to track down their family history – the story of their lives through previous generations.
Stories are also for entertainment and society building as a vehicle to understand the complexities of the world as it exists. As an Indian proverb suggests, “tell me a fact and I’ll learn. Tell me a truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.”
Stories combat anxiety.
According to TIME (2022), before Goldstein became immersed in the virtual circle’s stories, she found herself “rabidly reading” a different kind of story: the news. But the recent retiree soon realized that constantly keeping up with the news was “a lot”—a feeling so ubiquitous that even the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised taking breaks. Goldstein, a self-described anxious person, realized she needed an escape.
Though Goldstein says she’s always loved folk storytelling, she’d “never gone to anything like this, or known it existed” until Ethical Culture—a group she’d long been a member of—started offering virtual storytelling circles during the pandemic. Now, for the past year and a half, she’s attended regularly. “It wasn’t talking about COVID, it wasn’t talking about politics, it was just comforting,” Goldstein says of the circle. “I found my anxiety definitely lessening.”
Stories can heal trauma.
According to Harvard Business Review (2021), “Even as we inoculate our bodies and seemingly move out of the pandemic, psychologically we are still moving through it. We owe it to ourselves — and our coworkers — to make space for processing this individual and collective trauma. A recent op-ed in the New York Times Sunday Review affirms what I, as a writer and professor of writing, have witnessed repeatedly, up close: expressive writing can heal us.”
Stories connect us.
According to Harvard Health (2021), “One thing is certain: all of us have been changed by the pandemic, individually and collectively. Our life stories have shifted and will continue to shift in response to what we have experienced. In April of 2020, early in the pandemic, I wrote about how telling our stories can help us navigate and ultimately make sense of the trauma and loss associated with COVID-19.
Building on research from the field of narrative psychology that supports the mental health benefits of narrative, I have dedicated much of the past decade to helping people heal through storytelling. Studies have shown that digging into our personal stories, reflecting on them, and editing them as our lives evolve, is good for us. Sharing them with others, though it makes us vulnerable, is an important part of this healing. When we witness someone else’s vulnerability in a safe and supportive environment, we feel less alone, and often just plain better. Stories connect us as human beings and build bonds between us. We need them now more than ever.”
Stories improve literacy.
According to ala.org (2016), “Six categories emerged from the listeners’ descriptions of the story listening trance phenomenon:
Realism: the sense that the story environment or characters are real or alive
Lack of awareness: of surroundings or other mental processes
Engaged receptive channel: both physical watching and mental visualization; both physical hearing and mental “chatter”; kinesthetic; and emotional
Control: of the experience by the listener, or someone or something else
“Placeness:” the sense that the listener “goes somewhere” (often “into”) another space
Time distortion: the sense that subjective time moves at a different speed than objective, clock time.”
Stories make us laugh.
According to Harvard Medical School (2010), “Hearing just the first few words [of a joke], your brain springs into action. The path of neuronal activity is a complex one that enlists various brain regions: the frontal lobe, to process the information; the supplementary motor area, to tap learned experience to direct motor activities such as the movements associated with laughter; and the nucleus accumbens, to assess the pleasure of the story and the reward that the “aha!” brings. When the punch line hits home, your heart rate rises, you jiggle with mirth, and your brain releases “feel good” neurotransmitters: dopamine, serotonin, and an array of endorphins.
Jokes work because they defy expectations. The surprise aspect of these tales kicks in the frontal lobe’s search for pattern recognition. If the prefrontal cortex deems the information attention worthy, it dedicates more processing power to it. If the information remains relevant through the punch line, the brain shifts its response to its pleasure-and-reward center.
(Funny) stories trigger physiological responses.
According to articles from physiology.org and harvard.edu, humor triggers fascinating physiological responses in our brains. When you “get” a joke:
Dopamine Release: Your brain releases dopamine, the “feel-good” neurotransmitter. This enhances your experience of pleasure and contributes to the positive feeling associated with humor.
Serotonin Boost: Laughter also increases serotonin levels, which can buoy your mood and promote feelings of well-being.
Muscle Relaxation: When you laugh heartily, your facial, chest, abdominal, and skeletal muscles contract and relax. This eases muscle tension and can alleviate chronic pain.
Stories assist healthcare workers.
According to nih.gov (2023), “The Subjective, Objective, Assessment and Plan (SOAP) note is a way for healthcare workers to document in a structured and organized way. This widely adopted structural note reminds clinicians of specific tasks while providing a framework for evaluating information. It also provides a cognitive framework for clinical reasoning.
The SOAP note helps guide healthcare workers use their clinical reasoning to assess, diagnose, and treat a patient based on the information provided by them. SOAP notes are an essential piece of information about the health status of the patient as well as a communication document between health professionals.”
The heart reacts to immersive stories.
According to University of Minnesota Medical School (date unknown), “When [an actor] really gets into character, their blood pressure goes up, their heart rate increases and their mind and body can’t differentiate between reality and acting,” said Michelle Sherman, PhD, professor in the University of Minnesota Medical School’s Department of Family Medicine and Community Health. “Your body goes through this emotional experience in intense ways, and that’s hard to just turn off.”