You may have been a bookworm in your school days but lost the habit somewhere along the way. Maybe you were the kind of person who galloped books one after the other but you can’t read more than a few pages today.
This does not necessarily mean that you have lost your identity. It means something much worse; you may have lost your sense of empathy. The real cause of this is PTSD.
- Things gradually change in your life and one bad day takes away the ability to read a book as fast as you once could.
Unresolved Trauma- The Hobby Killer
- There are more than a few possible reasons to lose interest in the things you once believed to love most. Even in cases wherein you feel like a habbit defines who you are, chances are that you will lose it.
- You may experience a fall in your mental health as you move forward in life. There is always a vast differentiator between the two things. Going through life, you are bound to have a few traumatic experiences; these are probable cause for your deviation from hobbies you enjoy.
- There are other reasons as well, as you move through life. Maybe you are required to read as you go through college, maybe you take up a job to write. There is often a common thread in all of these scenarios – facing traumatic events all on your own.
This takes a lot of the pleasure away from reading as your everyday hobby. Even lovers of literature can lose interest in the act of reading. The struggle, it turns out, is not reading but taking the emotional and mental satisfaction out of it. The culprit: PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. There is a psychologically defined reason for feeling out of touch with yourself and your emotions. PTSD, ADD, ADHD and anxiety are all the common things that people figure they are suffering from. The real culprit is Unresolved trauma.
How PTSD affects your ability to read
- Many people go through PTSD with a lot of unresolved trauma in their brain. Consequently, their brain tricks them into believing that they are in danger, constantly. When you develop PTSD, the mechanism of dealing with things gets cognitively stuck. The brain relies on the information stuck with you: you are in danger.
- This leads to flashbacks and various symptoms that affect your physical wellbeing as well. Reading requires a higher level of brain function. PTSD can often lead to the prefrontal cortex of your brain to shut down. This takes away the pleasure of reading from your life.
- Do you suffer from this condition? Let us know about your experiences in the comments below.
