How re-reading a good book can make you feel better

An ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, once wrote, ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.’

I love that quote. It’s a description of how we’re all work in progress. Every experience we have changes us just a little. Every person we meet has an impact on who we are. Everything we encounter alters the connections between our brain cells, either strengthening existing connections or forging new ones.

Of course, we don’t generally notice these changes because they’re usually gradual. We wake up each morning feeling pretty much the same person that we were yesterday morning. But the fact is, we’re not the same person, we’ve evolved just a little bit.

Occasionally something might happen that draws our attention to how much we’ve changed. Perhaps we find a diary or journal from years ago and we realise that we’ve matured in the intervening time. Or maybe we bump into a former work colleague who’s still employed at the company we left, and we’re surprised that we’re no longer affected by the toxic work environment. Or we go to a place that held unhappy memories for us in the past, and we’re relieved that the unpleasant echoes have lost their power.

But there’s another way to work out how much progress we’ve made in our lives. And that’s to re-read a book or re-watch a film or TV series we enjoyed. If you’ve ever done that you might be surprised at how differently you interpret the plot, or how you empathise with the characters differently, or how you notice nuances that you missed previously.

The book that does this for me is a self-help book by American psychotherapist, Richard Carlson, called ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff’. It’s a fabulous little book filled with short stories from his many years of working with clients, highlighting strategies for helping them cope better with life. I’ve read it many times over the years, and each time a different story resonates with me, depending on what’s going on in my life.

The first time I read it, I was working stupid hours. Holding down a full-time job, whilst keeping my part-time massage business going, doing some part-time teaching and building my hypnotherapy practice. I was meeting myself coming back. And the chapter that caught my attention was to do with in-trays. Richard Carlson pointed out that in-trays are designed to have things in them. And when you die there will still be things in your in-tray. When I read that, I quit thinking that I had to get everything done in the vain hope that one day I’d be totally caught up. That can never happen. Even with simple things like laundry, there will always be something needing to be washed or ironed. Reading that chapter took the pressure off.

The book had such an impact on me that I recommended it to a good friend and sometime later we met for coffee and compared notes. I was amazed at how she had honed in on different chapters. It was as if we’d read completely different books. And later, when I came to re-read the book, I picked up on totally different themes and messages, because I was in a completely different headspace to the first time I read it. My workload was more manageable, I’d come to terms with never having an empty in-tray, so the in-tray chapter no longer had the same impact. But other chapters did.

A similar effect happens when I re-watch the feelgood film, Love Actually. It’s such a clever film. On the surface it’s a light-weight, heart-warming film with a simple series of interwoven plots. But when you watch it again, you can spot the multi-layered intricacies. The first time I watched the scene where Alan Rickman’s character was buying a necklace for his lover while shopping with his wife, I thought that Rowan Atkins’ character was a bumbling ‘Mr Bean’ type chap who was making a mess of packaging the gift. When I watched it later, I realised he knew exactly what was going on and was deliberately making a meal of it, to make Alan Rickman’s character uncomfortable. How did I miss that the first time around? Awesome!

And there have been formal studies looking into the effect of re-consuming, whether that’s re-reading books, re-watching films or returning to favourite places. One such study was carried out in 2011 by marketing professors Cristel Antonia Russell and Sidney J. Levy who were trying to find out why people like to re-consume familiar material. Not surprisingly, they found that participants gained a deeper insight into the material, a bit like I did when I rewatched Love Actually. What was more surprising is that the participants gained insight into their own personal growth, because they became aware of how differently they responded this time to the previous time, like I did when I re-read ‘Don’t Sweat the small stuff’.

So, if you want to feel good about how far you’ve come in the last few years, try tapping into something you previously read, or watched on TV, and reflect on how differently you respond this time.

This can be particularly helpful if you’ve been through a rough period in the past. My guess is you’ll be surprised at how much healing has taken place.