Exploring the Benefits of Audiobooks

This guest post was written by James McCann. James is an instructional designer, former library employee and reading tutor, and lifelong lover of books. He’s currently reading The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. You can find him on LinkedIn.

Audiobooks are increasingly becoming more and more engaging for audiences, and I frequently hear that even the most voracious of book readers have turned to audiobooks as their primary source of taking in content. As I began to explore the benefits of audiobooks, I made many interesting discoveries. I have listed several below, but this seems to be the tip of the iceberg as audiobooks are being studied more and more for potential benefits.

1. Audiobooks can help with adolescent and adult obsessive-compulsive disorder.

I have fond childhood memories of my mother running the vacuum in what I felt was an obsessive manner in the mornings while she had her headphones on and was listening to the latest John Grisham (nah, Danielle Steel ;) novel. Unfortunately, she did not pass down her (alleged) obsessive vacuuming habit down to me, but throughout the years I have been able to while away the hours cleaning, driving, doing the dishes, or even walking on my favorite trail while listening to an audiobook. There is no doubt that audiobooks can help pass the time, but what’s much more interesting is that they have been noted to help adults and adolescents with OCD. In a recent study, Rempel et al (2023), noted that listening to audiobooks or guided meditations can help reduce OCD severity in both adults and adolescents by up to 67% while they are listening to these materials. They are hoping to conduct studies that will attempt to gauge the effectiveness of audiobooks regarding long-term OCD symptoms and whether or not they can alter critical brain functionality that could help permanently reduce OCD symptoms, making audiobooks essential items for those suffering from OCD.

2. Increased voice familiarity can help positively affect behavior such as driving.

One reason that I truly love audiobooks is that they provide a sense of comfort and safe space needed for especially bad occasions such as driving to work on I-95 through the vein of chaos. Such occasions can call for a comfortable voice, such as Jim Dale to help transport you from the miserable world of high-speed highway driving into the magical world of flying Thestrals and buzzing Nargles. Having Jim Dale or David Sedaris accompany me on these drives has always had a lowering effect on my blood pressure, but it turns out that having this familiar voice has actually made me a better driver! Yes, you read that correctly, as McKenzie et al (2021), conducted a study in which participants listened to audiobooks in 22-minute chunks that had the same narrator and complexities on their daily commutes. The participants that were assigned audiobooks with a familiar voice were noted to have fewer driving errors and mistakes (e.g. speeding, red light violations, collisions, etc.) than their fellow participants who had an unfamiliar voice for the same 22-minute chunk of time. Bottom line, the more you listen, the more you gravitate towards a voice you like, the better driver that you can potentially become.

3. Audiobooks can help facilitate second language acquisition.

Perhaps you are like me and have always liked the idea of learning a new language more than the realities of the daily struggle that adult learners face while trying to memorize the dreaded subjunctive tense. Although second language acquisition is unquestionably an uphill battle, audiobooks have been noted to help smooth the transition as learners gain insights into accurate pronunciation and tonality of a new language. For instance, I once knew a very wise man (not at all full of himself) who valiantly attempted to learn the difficult language of Brazilian Portuguese in his early 30’s. He had vague notions of laying on a playa in Rio while ordering a crisp Acai bowl and tanning his pasty back during the month of Janeiro. Had he known that just listening to audiobooks could help expedite that journey, perhaps he would have stayed the course, but alas. Marchetti & Valente, 2018, have noted that the interactivity found within audiobooks can help increase language acquisition, especially if learners are listening to the material while also reading it. Students can become fluent faster as they are able to match what they are reading with correct pronunciation spoken by a native speaker.

4. Audiobooks can help increase young readers’ fluency.

Alright, this one is not necessarily targeted at adults, although it is helpful to know that audiobooks can help increase fluency of young readers. I have worked (as has your lead blog writer) in schools where my primary role was helping young students learn how to read. Although this sounds like a simple job, there were extreme difficulties in this process, and I count myself as truly lucky to have grown up with an obsessively compulsive vacuumer of a mother who also happened to be a librarian and therefore exposed us to reading at a very young age. Many of my students, in fact I would venture to say most, have not had such advantages in their young lives, and therefore have a very different relationship to reading. Reading and books are not objects of excitement and curiosity for these young readers, rather they are sources of frustration and discomfort as the challenge of reading can seem insurmountable to many of these students. Fortunately, audiobooks can help ALL young readers attain fluency in reading at faster rates, as Padberg-Schmitt (2020), has conducted studies with young students which showed that students scored higher on reading assessment when they were listening to the words while also reading them. Not only did the students score higher on assessments, this study was also shown to give the young learners more enjoyment in the reading process, making audiobooks a great option for readers of all ages.

5. Audiobooks can decrease anxiety.

I have perhaps hinted at this while describing my chaotic commute on hectic I-95 in central Maryland, but a major factor for me listening to a comfortable audiobook is to decrease my anxiety levels while at the wheel. Audiobooks have also helped me smooth over terrible, horrible, no good, very bad green outs (IYK,YK) by decreasing my anxiety levels. Turns out, audiobooks have been noted to help with a variety of much more pressing mental health issues such as: lowering anxiety levels of children waiting in pediatric emergency departments (Duker et al, 2021), alleviating mental health issues in the elderly (Ameri et al, 2017), utilized as effective ways to help recover from stress (Borchardt & Zoccola, 2018), studied as an effective relaxational intervention tool for prenatal women suffering from anxiety, anger, hostility, depression, fatigue, and confusion (Shaw & Herman, 1994), and used to help treat postoperative pain in children undergoing major surgery (Sunita Suresh et al, 2015).

Again, this is just the tip of the iceberg in audiobook benefits research, so hopefully these benefits can help us all gain an appreciation of just how powerful of a tool an audiobook can be.