Let's Go On A Reading Adventure! 📚🌳 | March 2025
In this month's Green Prescription, discover how reading rewires your brain and get ready to go free-range reading.
Welcome to The Feel Good Life! A newsletter about health, prevention, empathy, and hope. Join me, Dr. Mariana, as I explore all sides of good health and a good life. New around here? Get started.
**Today we dive into a new monthly Green Prescription—a benefit for paid subscribers. If you want to learn more about it, please go here.
As a new season approaches and the weather starts changing gears, we find ourselves in the middle of a comfortable climate in almost every corner of the world. I’m currently in Costa Rica, where March is the peak of summer, and it feels like the perfect time to get creative and embrace the change of seasons. Whether you’re preparing to leave the cold winter behind, or gearing up to welcome the cosy autumn, you’re in for a treat!
In last month’s green prescription, we set ourselves to enjoy one nicely planned trip, near or far, where we could create the exciting expectation of a day out in the green, the forest, the lake, or the beach. A little planning to let our brain prepare, create the hype, and enjoy the process. Personally, it was a success! A beach day trip with my best friends turned out to be not only fun (despite the ironically grey weather) but inspiring too—I visited a bike park created by Costa Rican olympian athlete that I highly admire. I was (literally) touching someone else’s dream. ❤️
In this month’s Green Prescription, I want you to think about your own dreams as the weather changes. I want you to feel the energised hope that comes with those earlier mornings rays of light, and soak in the incredibly orange-pink sunsets as the new season approaches.
This month, I want you to take advantage of the sunshine and engage in a small yet rewarding trip.
Let’s take a peaceful and recharging reading trip to the outdoors!
Reading is something lots of people enjoy, whether on paper, digital, or even through audiobooks, the amazingness that comes when we immerse ourselves in someone’s creative mind through a book or any piece of writing is something that marvels me every single time when I think about it.
Not to mention how reading rewires our brain in fascinating ways. In January, I shared a newsletter on how the brain works and all the incredible ways in which it keeps us alive, sane and in enjoyment of life. Our nervous system is beyond magical. And activities like reading certainly boost this magic.
Have you ever wondered what reading does to your brain?
We all have heard that reading is good for the brain, but how exactly? Let me explain.
When we learn to read, we are showing the brain certain images and patterns that it will eventually recognise and associate with a specific sound (letters). The brain creates a ‘letterbox” that it will now store and remember. Every time you read, the eyes send the letter patterns as visual images to the brain, the brain will recognise the letters, then send this information to temporal lobe where the specific sound to these patterns will be recognised, sending the final (complete) message to the frontal lobe of the brain, where the entire word and concept is grasped with clarity.
For example, as you read these words I just explained, your brain is instantly (and very quickly) processing the letters/sounds that make up a concept that make up this new knowledge that you just understood.
Here’s a visual example of how this process works in the brain: