How Reading Supports Mental Health During Perimenopause
Reading books can reduce perimenopause anxiety, improve sleep, and support emotional wellbeing. Find out why bibliotherapy is worth taking seriously in midlife.
Reading as a mental health tool in perimenopause
Perimenopause brings a significant mental health burden for many women: anxiety that arrives without an obvious trigger, low mood that does not respond to the usual remedies, brain fog that makes concentration harder, and a sense of isolation that comes from experiencing something that is still not widely discussed. Reading, particularly regular engagement with books rather than fragmented online reading, addresses several of these experiences simultaneously. It builds the kind of sustained attention that brain fog erodes, provides access to other perspectives and inner lives that reduces the sense of being alone in one's experience, and offers a form of absorption that quiets anxious mental noise. This is not an incidental benefit. It is the reason reading has attracted serious research attention as a wellbeing tool.
Bibliotherapy and its evidence base
Bibliotherapy is the formal use of books and reading as a therapeutic intervention, and it exists along a spectrum from self-help reading prescribed by a GP to structured reading programmes facilitated by a therapist. In the UK, the Reading Well scheme, supported by the NHS and Arts Council England, offers a curated list of books for mental health conditions including anxiety and depression that can be recommended by healthcare professionals. Research on bibliotherapy consistently shows benefits for mild to moderate depression and anxiety, including in populations going through life transitions. While perimenopause is not yet the subject of dedicated bibliotherapy trials, the mechanisms that make reading effective for anxiety and mood are directly applicable to this phase.
Stress reduction and the physiology of reading
A frequently cited study from the University of Sussex found that reading reduced physiological stress markers by 68 percent within six minutes, outperforming other commonly recommended relaxation activities including listening to music, drinking tea, and going for a walk. The proposed mechanism is cognitive absorption: when reading fiction in particular, the brain engages deeply with the narrative in a way that naturally suppresses the default mode network responsible for rumination and worry. For women in perimenopause whose anxiety often takes the form of circular thinking and catastrophising, accessing a state of genuine absorption is both unusual and genuinely valuable. Even fifteen to twenty minutes of focused reading before bed can shift the nervous system toward a calmer state.
Reading fiction and developing perspective
Engaging with fiction has been shown to increase empathy and reduce feelings of loneliness by providing vicarious experience of other lives and inner states. These effects are relevant to perimenopause in several ways. Many women in this phase describe feeling misunderstood or invisible, and encountering characters whose inner lives resonate provides a form of recognition that reduces isolation. Reading about women navigating midlife transitions, whether in fiction or memoir, can also normalise and reframe an experience that culture still tends to pathologise or ignore. Several novelists and memoirists have written compellingly about perimenopause in recent years, and finding those books often produces a specific kind of relief that comes from being accurately seen.
Reading and sleep quality
The relationship between reading and sleep is relevant for women in perimenopause, for whom sleep disruption is one of the most common and most debilitating symptoms. Reading a physical book in the hour before bed, rather than scrolling a screen, removes blue light exposure while providing the cognitive absorption needed to quiet pre-sleep anxiety. The transition from reading to sleep tends to be smoother than the transition from screen use because the book does not generate notifications, create social comparison, or present emotionally activating content in the same unpredictable way that social media does. Many women find that establishing a reading habit before bed is one of the more reliable improvements they can make to their sleep without any medical intervention.
Choosing what to read
The choice of reading material matters in a practical sense. Heavy or distressing content before bed can worsen sleep and increase anxiety rather than reduce it. Some women find that perimenopause is a period when they genuinely cannot sustain attention through demanding literary fiction they would previously have enjoyed, and that acknowledging this and choosing more accessible or lighter reading is a sensible accommodation rather than a failure. Memoirs by women in midlife, novels with absorbing plots, comfort re-reads of books you have loved before, and even high-quality long-form journalism can all provide the absorption effect that matters most. The aim is engagement and calm, not self-improvement through challenging material.
Making reading part of a sustainable routine
The most common barrier to reading more is time, followed by the difficulty of concentrating when brain fog is active. Protecting a specific reading slot, even fifteen minutes in the morning or before bed, is more reliable than hoping to find time during the day. Keeping a book visible and accessible rather than buried in a drawer removes friction. Audiobooks are a useful alternative for women who find visual reading hard when fatigue is high, as they engage similar cognitive processes and provide the same absorption benefit. If you are tracking your perimenopause symptoms with PeriPlan, noting days when you read for at least fifteen minutes can help you see whether it connects to better sleep or lower anxiety scores in the days that follow. Small habits tracked consistently reveal more than intuition alone.
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