Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #162 BITESIZE | Why Rest Is Important and How To Get More | Claudia Hammond

Episode Date: March 5, 2021

Rest isn’t an indulgence - it’s good for our health, our wellbeing and our productivity. Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my new weekly podcast for your mind, body and heart.  Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests.' Today’s clip is from episode 95 of the podcast with the award-winning broadcaster and author Claudia Hammond.  In this clip she explains how our attitudes to rest and relaxation have changed and why busyness is often seen as a ‘badge of honour’. Rest seems to be something we do when everything else is done, if there’s time. But our ‘to do lists’ will never be done and we shouldn’t feel guilty about taking some downtime. Claudia reveals how to re-frame wasted time as rest time and how to find more opportunities for rest throughout the day. Rest means different things for different people, but it can be anything that helps you to relax and switch off. Rest can be active, like running, walking or reading. So, find out what works for you and schedule some time for rest to feel the many benefits for your body and mind. Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/95 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. 

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10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More, bite-size your weekly dose of optimism and positivity to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 95 of the podcast with the award winning broadcaster and author Claudia Hammond. In this clip, she explains how our attitudes to rest and relaxation have changed and why busyness is often seen as a badge of honor. The reality is that for most of us, our to-do lists will never be complete

and we don't need to feel guilty about having some downtime. Rest isn't an indulgence. It's good for our health, our well-being and our productivity. So what is rest? So I think rest is different things for different people, but it's anything that helps you to relax, helps you to switch off from worrying, and helps you to take a break and take a pause. But it can be a very active thing while you do it. It hasn't got to mean sitting in a chair doing nothing. And I think we need to start taking it seriously in the way that sleep has started to get taken seriously now. People will talk about the sleep deficit. I think there seems to be a rest deficit as well. It's something we do when everything else is done. If everything else gets done and there's time, then maybe we rest. That sort of highlights one of the big problems now, right? That we'll do it when

everything else is done. If we're waiting for our to-do list to be done in order to rest, well, we're never going to end up resting. Yeah, we're going to wait forever. And I think one thing people need to do is to accept that their to-do list will never be done. Things come along and need to be done. So we will never get to the end of those lists and we just need to accept that lists are always there. What I think is interesting is that we feel so busy now and we'll say this is a 21st century thing. But if you look at time use surveys, people used to also be just as busy, say in the 1950s. People didn't have loads more spare time then, but it doesn't feel like that. It feels as if we are busier than ever and constantly under pressure.

And I think there's various reasons for that. I think partly it's that work and non-work can start to cross over a bit now, partly because of the technology that allows us to be on call all the time or feel on call all the time. And I think even if your boss isn't emailing you at 10 at night, they could. And there's that sense that they could. And it's a bit like if you talk to people who are, you know, air stewards on call or doctors on call who've got a day at home, maybe doing nothing in theory, they say they can't quite rest because they know that they could be called at any moment. And I think in one way, we've, in a way, we've all got into that position a bit. So then I guess it comes down to if we do have the same amount of free time as we used to,

is it our perception that's actually the problem now? Yeah, I think it is our perception. I think we feel very busy and we genuinely do. And I think partly people set very high standards for themselves now as well. So we want to be fit and that's a good thing to be fit. And obviously that's good for our health, but we want to be fit. People want to look a certain way. We want to make amazing meals when our friends come around. Some of those standards we're setting ourselves. And in the meantime, we should be learning a language and learning new things and improving ourselves. And we decide to do some of those things.

I guess in some ways, rest has a PR problem. The time use researcher, Jonathan Gershuni at Oxford has said that business has become a badge of honor in a way. And I think that's true. So if someone says to me, how are you? I'll say, oh, I'm really busy. You know, this has work and I'll say, oh, it's busy, you know, a little bit too busy really. And that does feel true. But on the other hand, how much is that also a sort of claim to status to say, oh, well, if I'm really busy, I must be quite important and quite in demand. And it's interesting that if you think back to, I don't know, say in the 19th century, gentlemen of leisure, as they were gentlemen, the rich ones, they would be showing off that

they could go to the country and do nothing at all. And now, if you look, say on Instagram, at the richest, most famous celebrities in the world, a lot of what they're doing is being busy. I mean, they're showing you all the things they're doing. They're not just lying around doing nothing at all. Their status is partly about being busy. So now success looks different now from how it did. I think success now looks like busyness. I think this lack of rest in society is no trivial matter at all, is it? No, and it applies to everything. So there's plenty of evidence that after a break, people perform their tasks better.

You know, they are better at doing their work because most productivity and most jobs these days aren't just about hard grind for as long as possible. In fact, to do it better, what you need is to think for a moment in many, many jobs these days and to have time to think and time to work out how to do it.

And there's research from South Korea on these micro breaks, which are only a couple of minutes long. And if people just have a micro break every hour, and that might mean leaning back in their chair and shutting their eyes or looking out of the window or going and making a cup of tea, an hour later, they're still concentrating harder. And at the end of the day, their wellbeing is better. So it's kind of win-win all round. I think part of the problem is, as you say, it's a societal pressure to fit more in, to do more, to be more productive. And we live in a society where we

feel that more is more, but actually less is more. In the sense that, you know, I've seen a lot of that research as well. You take a break, you go out for a 15-minute walk at lunchtime with no device, you know, you come back more creative, more productive. You fight up, and I'm sure we'll talk about the default mode network. It's just incredible to try and convince ourselves that actually taking breaks will make us more productive. And I think that's very powerful for people. Yeah. There's a German study that found that people tend to, if they're up against a deadline, they tend to reward themselves with a break at the end. So they think what I'll do is I'll head down, I'll get this done,

and then I'll go and make a cup of tea as a reward. When in fact, what they should do, if you possibly can, is to go and make that cup of tea because then you'll do the rest of the work faster. But we save it as the reward at the end. And that's actually a mistake. We should be doing it as we go so that we can work more easily. So is rest a very individual pursuit? Yeah, I think it's very individual. And what I recommend people do in the book is to find their own combination activities, to find their own prescription for rest, if you like, for the activities that work for them. And of course, rest hasn't got to mean sitting around doing nothing. So 38% of people in this big study that I was part of told us that they found

walking restful, even though that involves activity. 15% found exercise restful. And 8% said running was something that's restful. So it doesn't have to mean inactivity and just sitting still doing nothing, which most people find really hard, actually. One of the biggest changes I've made is prescribing myself 15 minutes of gardening whenever I'm working at home. And so I love gardening. And for me, it's the thing that makes me relax straight away. I can

go out there and start deadheading things or playing around. I've got a tiny, tiny greenhouse that just I can stand in. And it makes such a difference. I can feel a wave of calmness come over me. Now, it won't be gardening for everybody. Some people hate gardening. So it's a question of finding that different thing that can do that for you. And now when I'm working at home, I prescribe myself 15 minutes of rest when I should be working, if you like. And I decide I'm not going to feel guilty about this. This is for my mental health and so that I can work and do the things I want to do. And it's good for me and I'm going to do it. And I take that time and I do it. And it's been amazing. Do you think that there's something about,

is there some sort of power, the fact that you're prescribing it for yourself? So you may have been doing the same activity anyway, but by framing it through the lens of, oh, this is now restful time for me and my mind and my body. Do you think it has additional benefits or do you think it actually helps, makes us feel good that actually, oh, I didn't think I was resting, but actually maybe I am. I think it makes us feel good because we can notice it. Because another thing you can do is to notice that there might be more small restful moments in your life than you think, particularly for the people who are really busy. And of course, people, you know, caring who are say working and

caring for small kids and perhaps caring for older relatives as well, or for somebody who's not well, it's very, very hard for them to get breaks at all. But what people can do is try to notice those small restful moments that there might be and to reframe wasted time as arrested time. So if you come home to yet another of those sorry you were out cards on the doorstep, and then you go down to the sorting office and there's a massive queue. And if you're me, you're really annoyed and thinking, oh, it's just so annoying. I've got a queue and I don't even know what it is. But maybe instead on a different day, if somebody said to you, you can have 10 minutes now in the middle of your busy day to do nothing at all. You can just stare at the world, go by. Would you like that? You'd probably say, oh yes, please. I'll take that. Thank you. I'd

love 10 minutes to do nothing. Thank you very much. So what we need to do is to then think, well, this is my 10 minute break. So I'm going to stand here. I'm not necessarily going to, you know, not going to go straight to my phone and look at my emails. I'm just going to stare at everything going on around and look at everyone else in the queue, maybe chat to somebody in the queue and that it's okay. And so it's noticing other moments and reframing those as rest as well and seeing how much rest can you find. Yeah, I like that. I love that about reframing those wasted moments as rest. And I think that will make us feel good. And I think there is a thing about the permission to rest as well. It's been really striking already. But the questions people have asked at events where I've been talking about rest is people are saying that they knew they liked having a hot bath or whatever it was that they found restful or reading or these different activities that people said they knew they liked that.

restful or reading or these different activities that people said they knew they liked that, but they hadn't realized that it was okay to do that. And they, it's almost as if I I've said, well, the evidence says it's okay. So it's okay. And now you can do it now. Of course you can just do it anyway. You know, people haven't got to wait for me to say it's all right to do something, but I think it's really interesting that we feel guilty. And so in our, in our study, 9% of people said that they felt guilty whenever they arrested because they felt they shouldn't be because there are always things to be done and they wanted to be better and get all their things done. But maybe we shouldn't, you know, we should protect our own mental health. Yeah, I think we could strongly make the case that when we rest more, we get more out of our lives. I wonder if you could share some of your top tips for my listeners.

Yeah, so I think what people should do is find their own prescription for rest and work out which activities, as we said, are the ones that will be most restful for them. Maybe then prescribe themselves 15 minutes of doing that activity when they can. And to somehow stop fetishizing busyness, to sort of think just because you're busy, what are you busy with? Is that a good thing? Is that what you want to be doing with your time? Is that a good thing? Is that what you want to be doing with your time? There's one thing to be really careful of, and that's to not accidentally give up the most restful activity you do, which sometimes people do. So sometimes people, I don't know, they might belong to a choir or something and then think, there's too much work and time with family and it's all getting on top of me. I know, I'll stop going to choir. When that might be, when they get there, the one thing that is sort of keeping them going in a way that's really good for their mental health and that I know I'll stop going to choir. When that might be, when they get there, the one thing that is sort of keeping them going in a way that's really good for their mental health. And that is the thing where they feel rested and refreshed after it. And so if you're going to start making time

by giving up things, you need to choose very carefully which things to give up. If it's a thing that's starting to feel like a chore, you know, I was learning, I was learning Spanish. The teacher was really nice. The lessons were really interesting, but I was learning I was learning Spanish the teacher was really nice the lessons were really interesting but I was constantly doing the homework on the tube just before it and it was adding one more thing to do and it's partly that you know self-improvement I wanted to be able to speak Spanish I'm not going to be able to speak Spanish and that's okay and I can live with that and it would be nice to be fluent in Spanish not going to happen I can ask for a beer. So, you know, that's okay. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Please do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the full conversation with my guest. And if you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my new bite-sized Friday email.

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