In 1966, Timothy Leary, the psychedelics guru, famously told a crowd of 30,000 hippies in San Francisco to “tune in, turn on, and drop out.” In the wake of last month’s election, an awful lot of my friends and colleagues are following his advice. After tuning in and turning on to the news before the election, they are now dropping out.

“I can’t watch what’s happening in Washington,” a friend told me at dinner last Friday. “I just can’t take it.” He is not alone. News channels CNN and MSNBC lost half their viewers in the weeks following the election.

I sympathize with anyone who is tuning out. It’s painful for me, too, to watch an anti-vaxxer being tapped to head the Department of Health and Human Services and an apologist for Putin being nominated as director of national intelligence. I do encourage them, though, to tune back in. Let’s not give up actively participating in our country’s democracy. As the abolitionist Wendell Phillips said in 1852, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

And yet, I don’t think critics of Trump’s policies and motives can or should be truly vigilant every hour of every day. We all need time to work, tend to family and friends and take care of ourselves. Plus, I would like to recommend one more item for your to-do list in these turbulent times — reading novels.

Reading a work of fiction allows one to flee this fraught world and enter another created through the magic of an author’s words. As the poet Emily Dickinson put it, “There is no Frigate like a Book to take us Lands Away.”

After being battered by the post-election news, I’ve turned to novels that offer me an escape to lands faraway. In the last few weeks, I finished a murder mystery set along the Seine in Paris, a thriller that plays out at an English airfield, a recounting of a lonely man’s last days, a narrative of a chase through Canadian forests, a classic whodunnit unspooling in an L.A. courthouse and a suspense novel sprawling across an Australian sheep ranch. In each, the protagonist finds the inner resolve to rise up against what life throws at them.

It’s deeply satisfying to lose oneself in a fictional world where sexual offenders, supporters of authoritarianism, corrupt officials and advocates of fake science do not prevail. I finished each book renewed and ready to engage in what gamers and digerati call IRL — in real life.

An article in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience suggests science supports what I get from my reading. The authors suggest readers of fiction “make good citizens because reading may improve one’s ability to empathize with and understand the thoughts and feelings of other people.” Fiction readers “demonstrate greater civic engagement, including higher levels of volunteering, donating and voting, than non-readers.”

As is well-known, there’s a dichotomy on the political views of women and men. Can some of this be attributed to women’s proclivity for reading fiction vis-a-vis that of men? In a 2017 survey, the National Endowment for the Arts found half of all women had read fiction in the previous 12 months. Only a third of men had. As the celebrated author Ian McEwan said, “When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.”

On top of all that, it appears reading fiction is good for your cognition. In his “The Book of Memory,” Richard Restak, a professor of neurology at George Washington University, prescribes fiction to keep one’s brain sharp. Reading novels requires an investment of time and attention that “provides an especially helpful exercise in working memory” which nonfiction does not.

So where does all this leave us?

Reading fiction not only provides a refuge from the fraught world we live in, but it also apparently encourages us to empathize with our fellow citizens and provides hope for a happy ending. It’s even good for our minds.

I’ve just signed up for a college class next semester on the epic novel “War and Peace.” (The book is 1,200 pages long!). I’m bound to learn something from how Leo Tolstoy’s characters deal with justice, love, villainy, conflict and courage that will help me grapple with the same issues IRL.

In the next couple of days, I’ll be putting a few more novels on my holiday gift list. I invite you to do the same.

— Keith Raffel has served as the senior counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee