Reading, a tool for reducing stress!

I am going to recommend reading for stress reduction. I have used it to cure and reduce my stress in past couple of weeks. I was like madly searching for novels, and I completed like 9 novels, 3 days at max  for each. To me reading novels keeps your mind busy. People say that reading mostly  pleasurable novels is helpful, but sometimes reading depressive novels can lead you into thinking that your problems are much smaller than the problems of the charcters of these books.

According to research done at Sussex university, reading, even for six minutes, can reduce stress effectively. Psychologists believe this is because the human mind has to concentrate on reading and the distraction of being in a literary world eases the tensions in muscles and the heart. The research was carried out on a group of volunteers by consultancy Mindlab International at the University of Sussex.Their stress levels and heart rate were increased through a range of tests and exercises before they were then tested with a variety of traditional methods of relaxation.Reading worked best, reducing stress levels by 68 per cent. Dr Lewis, who conducted the test, said: "Losing yourself in a book is the ultimate relaxation. "This is particularly poignant in uncertain economic times when we are all craving a certain amount of escapism. "It really doesn't matter what book you read, by losing yourself in a thoroughly engrossing book you can escape from the worries and stresses of the everyday world and spend a while exploring the domain of the author's imagination. "This is more than merely a distraction but an active engaging of the imagination as the words on the printed page stimulate your creativity and cause you to enter what is essentially an altered state of consciousness." Studies reveal that listening to music reduces stress,  having cup of tea of coffee lower it  by 54 per cent and taking a walk by 42 per cent.