Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #95 Why You Need More Rest with Claudia Hammond

Episode Date: January 29, 2020

Warning: some people might find this podcast seriously restful. If that sounds appealing, it should do, because rest is something we all need to prioritise. So says this week’s guest, Claudia Hammond, who argues that being busy isn’t a badge of honour – and taking time out is definitely not lazy. We examine the science behind our struggles to relax and she shares some brilliant insights on our attitudes to downtime, the top 10 activities most likely to help us switch off, and what the benefits are for our health, wellbeing and productivity. If you need a reminder of why rest is so important – and permission to do it, without feeling guilty – this is it. So put your feet up (or head out for a walk, if you find that more restful), and listen in.   Show notes available at https://drchatterjee/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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

And I think we want to seem busy as well. And so I think, you know, 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 then, 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. Hi, my name is Rangan Chastji, GP, television presenter and author of the bestselling books, The Stress Solution and The Four Pillar Plan. I believe that all of us have the ability to feel better than we currently do, but getting healthy has become far too complicated. With this podcast, I aim to simplify it. I'm going

to be having conversations with some of the most interesting and exciting people both within as well as outside the health space to hopefully inspire you as well as empower you with simple tips that you can put into practice immediately to transform the way that you feel. I believe that when we are healthier, we are happier because when we feel better, we live more. Hello and welcome back to episode 95 of my Feel Better Live More podcast. My name is Rangan Chatterjee and I am your host. Now today's conversation is all about rest. When was the last time you did something restful? Something that allowed you to take a break, switch off from the daily grinds, forget your worries and truly feel relaxed. If you're struggling to remember,

you're not alone. My guest on this week's podcast is Claudia Hammond, an award-winning broadcaster, psychology lecturer and author of the brilliant new book, The Art of Rest. Claudia believes that rest is something we all need to do more of and argues that being busy is not a badge of honor and taking time out is most definitely not lazy. We examine the science behind our struggles to relax and she shares some brilliant insights on our attitudes to downtime, the top 10 activities most likely to help us switch off and what the benefits are for our health, to help us switch off and what the benefits are for our health, well-being and productivity. If you need a reminder of why rest is so important and permission to do it without feeling guilty, this conversation is it. So put your feet up or head out for a walk if you find that more restful and listen in and enjoy. Now, before we get started, as always, I do need to give a

quick shout out to some of the sponsors of today's show who are essential in order for me to continue putting out weekly episodes like this one. Vivo Barefoot, the minimalist footwear company, continue to support my podcast. I am a huge fan of Vivo Barefoot shoes and have been wearing them for many years, well before they started supporting my podcast. And I've seen incredible benefits both for myself and for many of my patients. For problems like mobility, back pain, hip pain, knee pain, balance, and so much more. I really like this brand and everything that they stand for. Vivo Barefoot makes shoes for all occasions and for adults as well as children. In fact, my whole family,

including my children, wear Vivo Barefoot shoes anytime that we are not literally barefoot. For listeners of my show, they continue to offer a fantastic discount. If you go to vivobarefoot.com forward slash live more, they are giving 20% off as a one-time code for all of my podcast listeners in the UK, USA and Australia. Importantly, they offer a 100-day try-off for new customers. So if you're not happy, you can simply send them back for a full refund. You can get your 20% off codes by going to vivobarefoot.com forward slash live more. Now, on to today's conversation. Claudia, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Nice to be here. Yeah, very nice to be here. We've been trying to set this up for a little while now.

A little while. It's always hard getting diaries to coordinate. Yeah, exactly. But when you said you were free today, sort of move things around to make it happen because I think you have written a fantastic book about a topic that I don't think gets as much attention as it should. Rest. 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. And 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. about the sleep deficit. I think there seems to be a rest deficit as well. It's something we do at the end of the day when, or not even at the end of the day, it's something we do when everything else is done. If everything else gets done and there's time, then maybe we rest. Well, I think that sort of highlights one of the big problems now, right? That

we'll do it when everything else is done. And I don't know if it's the particular problem of the 21st century. It certainly seems that way to me, but our things are never done. Our to-do lists, there's always something else to do. Even if we've completed one task, you know, another two or three come onto our plate. So I sort of feel 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. Because you may get through it one day, if you're really lucky, on one particular day. But by the next day, something else will come up because that's what life's like. And things just change and 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 is 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 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. Yeah. We're all on call now. We're kind of all on call. Yeah. Which is, it's just fascinating. And you can ignore, you know, we shouldn't look at our phones at 1130 at night. It's a really, really bad idea to look at your emails at that time. And lots of people set their alarms. So they do that, but we shouldn't do it it's these little things isn't it i think that's quite i think that's quite surprising for people to hear that actually we're just as busy as we were in the 1950s in fact for me that's super super interesting i wouldn't have felt i certainly wouldn't have thought that so then I guess it comes down to if we do have the same amount of free time as we used to is our perception that's actually the problem now yeah

I think it is our perception I think we feel very busy and we 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 you know 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 um some of those standards we're setting ourselves and in the meantime you know we should be learning a language and learning new things and improving ourselves and we decide to do some of those things yeah i guess where this does then become a 21st century problem is the internet and this era of information right so we can access

anything we want now they're literally the touch of a button and that example as you say about your friends are coming around so you want to cook them a really flash colorful instagram worthy meal you know i'm guessing in the 1950s and again i wasn't alive then so i'm just making a supposition here that's there wasn't this pressure i'm sure there was a pressure of some sort oh i've got friends coming around they're going to make a really nice meal for them but it's also i guess there are so many things we feel we could be doing and i guess our social media feeds are constantly bombarding us with things, amazing things that our network aren't doing. So one of our friends will have made a gourmet meal that just

looks beautiful. And another friend will have been on a mindfulness retreat in Italy. And then one of your friends is doing a sun salutation yoga sequence on a beach in Bali. And you're seeing them, you could literally be sat on a rainy day in the UK in your office. And, you know, for a bit of interest, you're scrolling Instagram and seeing that. And I guess in many ways we feel inadequate compared to that. So maybe that's putting a pressure on us to actually do as many of these things as we can. And I think we want to seem busy as well. And so I think, you know, the time use researcher Jonathan Gershuni at Oxford has 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. Yeah, I guess in many ways, I mean, there is this whole idea of perfectionist presentation on social media, that we present that beautiful image of our lives, the best moments in our lives. And I totally get that. I guess in some ways, rest has

a PR problem. And that if we could value rest in the way that you make a very strong case for in your book, then maybe we'd see more posts that, hey, just chilling on my sofa, hashtag resting. Do you know what I mean? In some ways, giving it a bit of a PR uplift. Yeah. And I think that will take a while to get that to happen because I think- Let's do it. Let's make it happen. Let's make it happen. But there's an interesting researcher called Sylvia who's done studies with a fake Facebook profile. And it's about a woman called Sally Fisher. And sometimes the posts say things like 5pm on a Friday, finished with work, that's

no more work for me till Monday, or 1pm on a Thursday, I've got an hour for a long lunch. And that's the not so busy Sally Fisher. And then there's a version of her that's really busy, which says things like 5pm on a Friday, I'm still working, I've got loads to do. And 1pm, I'm just stopping for 10 minutes to grab a quick lunch, I haven't got any more time than that. And they ask people what they think of them both. Now, they don't comment on their slightly dull social media posts. But what they do comment on is that they think that busy Sally Fisher is probably better at multitasking, that she has a more meaningful job, and that she's more successful. So we are judging people by this. And in fact, if people do get an hour for lunch every day, which is so rare these days,

we're somehow disapproving of that when actually, why shouldn't they? If they can, that's great. You almost feel as though you have to justify it. Yeah. Like feel guilty for saying hey i've got time to take a one-hour lunch break now it needs to be your birthday yeah exactly it needs to be an excuse because there's also a perception i think that we're going to come across as lazy yeah and yeah what you're just gonna chill out for an hour and do what just eat your lunch like the french do right and i've been thinking a lot about the French paradox recently um for people who are not familiar with this idea that the French can you know have seemingly

unhealthy foods by certainly by certain definitions yet not um not experience all the negatives of that as we may do in this country let's say for example like cheese and red wine and red wine and, you know, whatever. And there's a lot of theories around that. But the one that really makes sense to me is this idea for lunch break, this idea that actually, you know what, food time is food time. You know, we don't have our emails up. We're not also making notes. We're chilling out. It's lunchtime. We're going to sit down, whether it was with a glass of red wine or not. I find that super interesting. And I think it's some of those previous societal norms that have been eroded away that actually are getting in the way of how we're feeling, our health, our wellbeing. And would you define what the French do at lunchtime? Would you define that as rest? Yeah, if they find it restful. So as long as they like it, you know, if you've got to have a long

lunch with some people you don't like every day, then maybe that wouldn't be restful. But I can remember once actually going to make a program about a, it was about the French health service and how it works. And I followed a French GP for a day and, oh, he had such a great day. I mean, it was amazing. I don't think it would be recognizable to GPs in this country. We went into the waiting room, and first there were two people there, just two people waiting for things. And then he saw those people, and then there was one more person came in. There were only three seats in the waiting room, and I said, where does everybody else wait?

And they said, well, everybody who? And so he saw a few people, and then he said, we can go back to mine for lunch now. And we had all these bread and cheeses, and we spent quite a while, probably an hour and a half having lunch. And then he went back for some more patients. A glass of red wine at lunch? It was lovely.

I don't think we did. We were driving, to be fair, while he was driving. So, yeah, we didn't, there wasn't wine. But still, it was a restful day. Now, just to be super fair to French GPs, that may not be reflective of every French GP's life. It may not be everyone, that's true. But it was lovely. But I do have to say that is fairly incompatible with my experiences as a gp um well that sounds i've got a big smile

on my face thinking about that what you know i imagine you would be in a chilled out restful states and i imagine actually that your interactions with your patients would be very different if you felt chilled and relaxed. I think, you know, talking about my profession, I think, you know, there's a big problem in the NHS at the moment where there's many problems, but one of the issues is that patients don't seem to be able to get in to see the GPs that they want to see in a timely fashion. Yet every GP I know feels burnt out, stressed out, and feels that they can literally not see any more, physically not see any more patients. There's clearly something that doesn't add up.

And I think some of the dissatisfaction, I think, comes from the fact that, you know, if a doctor is busy and stressed out and trying to get through 40 patients in a day, there isn't going to be that, you know, with the best will in the world, it's going to be hard for that connection and that sort of, that calm, that real time to sort of open up and communicate. So 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 well-being is better. So it's kind of win-win all round. And now breaks just are disappearing. You know, only 1% of secondary schools have an afternoon break now. And in my day, it was an afternoon break. But now it's very rare for schools to do that. I think part of the reason here, or part of the problem is, is as you say, it's a societal

pressure to fit more in, to do more, to be more productive. And we, you know, we live in a society where we feel that more is more, but actually less is more. In the sense that, you know, we live in a society where we feel that more is more, but actually less is more. Yeah. 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 at some point during this conversation. But it's just incredible to try and convince ourselves point during this conversation, but 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 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.

Is there a different perception about rest depending on where you live in the world? And there was a study that you mentioned, which really struck me in the book. And I think it was quite similar to the one you mentioned maybe about five minutes ago, but I think if you're American or Italian, you looked at the same busy lifestyle with very, very different eyes. I wonder if you could just elaborate on that. Yeah, and this was done by the same researcher who did the Sally Fisher Facebook study that I was saying about. And so they invented, again, another fictional character called Jeff for the Americans and Giovanni for the Italians. And they said that they had a version of him who was very busy and worked long hours, and they had a version of him

who didn't work that much. And then they asked people what they thought of them. And the Americans thought that the one who was busy and worked long hours must be the successful rich one. And the Italians thought that the ones who didn't work so much would be the successful one because he was clearly so rich and successful, he didn't have to work so hard anymore. And so there are differences in how we view this status of busyness and whether we appreciate rest or not. 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

useful and 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. Yeah. So I guess that begs the question, what exactly is rest in the sense of what does it do for us? Because as you say, to some people running is a restful activity, to others it's torture and pain. So is rest therefore 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 then I've tried to look to work out, well, what is the essence of these activities? And these all come from a big piece of research

called the rest test, which a group of psychologists at Durham University did when they were part of, and I was part of a residency on the top floor of the Wellcome Collection in London. And it was amazing. And we looked at the topic of rest and there were composers and geographers and psychologists and neuroscientists, all sorts of different people. And we looked at rest. And as part of that, we did this big survey, which I launched on All In The Mind, my Radio 4 program, and on Health Check on the World Service. And 18,000 people took part. And we asked them all sorts of things about rest. And one of the things we asked them was what activities they found the most restful.

And I count down in the book a kind of top 10 Sunday chart style, you know, down from 10 to 1 of what the most restful are. And what is really interesting is that they are different for different people. You know, there were more. There were some that were more popular than others. But you need to find your own combination. Yeah. I've got to say, that was such a brilliant structural format for the book, I thought. You've done this rest test and you count down from 10 all the way to one in order, basically, in ranked order. That was a very, very novel thing to see in a book.

And I really enjoyed that part of it. So, yeah, thanks for that. I'm glad you liked it like that. Really really liked it. Out of those 10 from recollection I don't think anything involved the internet or social media is that right? No it didn't it didn't so people just didn't put that in their top 10 you know a few people put it down but not very many so what so why is that because because on some level many of us think we're unwinding don't we in the evening we get home from work and we go online or we'll go on to instagram or twitter or some other social media channels so i would bet i've not studied this but i would bet that a large proportion of people

in the UK and around the world now will come home from work and, you know, one of the main activities that we'll do in the evening is engage on social media. So therefore, if we are living in stressed out times where many of us are feeling burnt out and we want to unwindwind why is it that if many of us are doing that that it doesn't feature in the top 10 do you think so i think it's that people enjoy doing it but they don't necessarily find it restful and that actually they know they don't find it restful so they didn't pick that out as one of their most restful activities because it doesn't leave them necessarily feeling restful afterwards now that doesn't mean they necessarily

don't enjoy it and it doesn't mean that people don't like being connected with other people. You know, there are masses of, lots of people say, you know, only negative things about social media, but there are masses of benefits of it. And it completely can connect people, particularly if they feel there's something very unusual about them, they can find their people, wherever they are in the world, they can find people who are like them, who feel the same way as they do and that they can identify with. And that's a really powerful thing. So it's not all bad at all, but I think people know that they don't necessarily find it restful, that in a way it might make them feel more restless instead. And also I think that it feels, can feel a bit like work as well, partly just because a screen is involved and that's a bit

like work because work often has a screen. And I think there's lots of things now that we do in our spare time, which feel a little bit like admin. And so those don't feel restful. It's like if you decide you're going to go out with a group of friends, first, you've got to email them or message them all to find a date when they're all free and they go around and around in circles doing that. Then maybe you book somewhere to go out to and you'll fill in a form online in order to book it. And then you'll get your confirmation and things like that. And then you'll tell everyone about it. That's a bit like work. That's a bit like arranging meetings. And in one way, companies are very cleverly through new technology, got us to do

some of their admin for them all the time. Anything we want to do, we fill in the form. You used to phone someone up and they filled in the form, but now we do it all. So there is much more one way work is impinging into our rest rest time we're doing things that feel a bit like work and i wonder if anything with a screen you know that social media where you're doing stuff feels a little bit more like work and so that doesn't feel restful yeah i spoke to someone on the podcast a few months ago called elizabeth amens and she's written a book on life admin and she talks about these invisible tasks that that basically absorb a lot of our time and energy that we don't even realize. And actually when you start to quantify, you're like, oh my God,

I'm spending maybe two hours a day on life admin. And this stuff didn't exist 20, 30 years ago. I often think about the example of booking a holiday. Again, I'm not saying it's not a good thing that there are now low cost airlines an ability to drive down costs and everything. I get all that. But 20, 30 years ago, you want to go on holiday, you go to a travel agent. Tell them where you want to go, what you want to do. And they would take care of all the phoning, the hotels, phoning the airlines. All that sort of stuff is taken care of for you.

But now you can do every step of that yourself which is a significant workload on top of an already busy life right which goes back to the original point which is we're not busier than we were in the 1950s but it feels as though we are yeah and some of that is always life meant you know it's just everywhere there are all of these things that we have to do and none of those things ever appear in people's lists of restful activities you know yeah people don't put down booking a holiday as a restful thing even though they anticipate once they've done it it's booked it it's nice because you can anticipate it and that's great and that's positive it doesn't feel like a restful thing like other really restful activities yeah claudia one of the most

i think impactful things i've done on how busy i feel and my health and wellbeing, it's probably something that may surprise you about, what would it be now? January 2020. So I think it was around October 2019. I'd just done an event in London. I was in a cab. I was feeling a bit frazzled. And I thought, you know what?

I've been thinking about this for a while. I'm just going to do it now. I went onto my phone and I went to my Gmail app and I deleted the went onto my phone and I went to my Gmail app and I deleted the app from my phone. So I just thought, yeah, I can see your face. And it sounds like you're feeling very unrestful hearing that. But I tell you, it has changed my life. What? So you have to log in on a laptop now? I have to log in on my laptop. Right. So for the first few days afterwards,

you know, I was used to that habitual check. I was on my phone, oh, you know, where's my email at? I just want to see if I got any emails. I tell you what, after a few days, you get used to it. And what it's done for me is I feel I've got more time. I never measured how much time I was spending checking my email, but you know what, if you ever had a gap between a patient or at lunch, you know, or just before you go back in, or as you say in the evening, you just constantly, because your work email is on your personal phone, you can't get away. And it took a bit of getting used to. And again, some people may listen to this and might think, I can't do that with my work. Fine. I get it. As you say, it's a personal thing. I found a way to make that work for me. And although it was scary

doing it, and I did it in a frenzy when I just thought, right, that's it, I'm doing it. I'm going to see what happens. I've got to tell you, it has changed my life. Honestly, I would highly recommend it. Although judging from your look. No, it is impressive. No, I'm very impressed that you managed to do it. I'm just trying to imagine doing it myself and imagining how upset I was when my email wasn't working a couple of weeks ago. But yes, I know what you mean about after a couple of days, you would get used to it. And I think one big benefit is that, I don't know, if you're on something like you're on a train, you know, I've been on a train today and people used to look out for the window and they were already traveling somewhere. So you're already doing something.

So you don't need to feel that you're doing nothing. You're doing something positive because you're getting somewhere that you need to get to. But many people will read their emails the whole time while they're on the train because they sort of think it's saving some time. Now, that's true, but you're missing out on some restful moments because all those things you weren't allowed to do at school, like staring out of the window and doodling and daydreaming, there's evidence that all of those are good for us. And trains are the perfect moment to do that. But is it really saving time? Because we think it's saving us time, but constantly overloading our minds and bombarding them.

I'm sure that this will make you less productive later, more fatigued later. You know, in my last book, The Stress Solution, I talked about this idea of a personal stress threshold. And we deal with, I split up stress into sort of micro stress doses and macro stress doses. And I said, a micro stress dose is a little hit of stress that in isolation you can handle. In isolation it's no problem, but when they add up one after another, they get you closer and closer to your stress threshold. And when you hit your threshold, that's when you blow up with a colleague. That's when you have a row with your partner. That's when you feel your neck tight or your back goes because of stress. And I'm convinced more and more as I look at life now through the lens of micro stress doses, I think constantly

looking at our emails is a micro stress dose that on top of an already busy and overloaded life, I'm not convinced it is saving us time. No, and I think it's not because it's depriving us of breaks as well. And because we know that breaks then make you work more productively, then because you're doing that every time you could have a break, but it's also then keeps putting those things back at the top of your mind again. And so, whereas it's better if they're shelved off onto the phone. If we look about it, I don't know when smartphones came out. I mean, I know they're ubiquitous now, but it wasn't that long ago. No, it was only really 10 years ago.

Yeah, 10 years ago. And we didn't have email on our phone. So even though we were all using email at that time, we would go on a computer and send an email. And I've got to tell you, it's been such a – it's like this weekend has just gone by. I'm really trying my best to switch off because it's been a super busy few weeks. And, you know, it's hard sometimes to not have your phone with

you. You know, I do sometimes go out on a Sunday without my phone, but it's pretty hard these days. So many things that you go to require a phone. You want to go and park somewhere. Often it's, you've got to pay on the app, but not having my email on my phone, because I'm not going out on my laptop. Well, actually I can't check my email even if I because i'm not going out on my laptop well actually i can't check my email even have one see when i know that some days i would have been out at a weekend and you're just sitting somewhere you might have just have a quick look and you see this email that doesn't require a response exactly but the trouble is our expectations get bigger about how fast we think people will reply so it's interesting do people now think that you

take too long to reply to your emails or has nobody noticed? Do they start texting you instead? Yes, they do. I say they do. But then at least that's because it's important, presumably. I hope so, yeah. Or they want an answer. To be fair, I don't think I'm very good on email, to be fair.

I'm being polite to myself. I'm pretty rubbish on email. Because sometimes I just look at that inbox and I just think, I don't know where to start with that. And so I'll pretend it's not there and just ignore it or i'll get to finally i'm gonna play with my kids instead and pretend that's not happening and then people start getting a bit annoyed and i i get that but i'm also really keen to start trying to put my health and well-being first and it took a while to get to this point but i think that also is the nub of what's in your book it's like you're a giving us the information and the knowledge of why this is

so important to rest but also you give a beautiful prescription at the end of you know these sort of different steps that we can all take and i think it's up to each of us on an individual level to try and figure out you know on the back of your research well rest is pretty important how important is it for me and what steps am I going to take to start introducing more in my life one of the biggest changes I've made is is prescribing myself 15 minutes of gardening whenever I'm working at home and so I love gardening and it's for me it's the thing that makes me relax straight away you know 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 difference. I can feel a wave of calmness come

over me. Now, it won't be gardening for everybody. You know, 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 in, 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 a rested 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. And then, 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. And 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, you know, 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. 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 nine percent 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, for sure. And it reminds me about what a lot of patients have fed back to me, which is I also prescribe 50 minutes of me time for them a lot of the time, particularly I've got to say, and this may just well be my practice population in terms of what I see, but I tend to see a lot of the time, particularly I've got to say, and this may just well be my practice population in terms of what I see, but I tend to see a lot of women really struggle to give themselves me time,

you know, and again, just to be super clear, it may just be my population, but I see a lot of women in my practice who might have kids, who might have partners, who might have elderly parents who they're looking after, who seem to give, give, give and nurture, nurture, nurture, but don't feel that they can actually afford the time for themselves. And, you know, a lot of them would say, hey, Dr. Chachi, you've really given me permission to relax. And I always found that phrase really striking because I don't feel that my job as a doctor has ever been to give people permission to do anything it's like you know I don't I don't really subscribe to that paternalistic type relationship between a doctor and a patient I really like to to be more of a partnership and a kind of you know shared agreements together but you keep hearing that phrase permission to relax relax. I think, wow, it's reflective

of the times people need permission to relax. They need permission to rest. Yeah, they definitely do. And I think it's really powerful that. And I think that this shows why people have chosen some of these activities as well, because some of them are activities that are useful in some other way. So then they relieve the guilt of doing it. So like, you know, having a bath, you've got to get clean anyway. That's an important thing to do. So if you have a bath, then you also get left in peace for a while and you get to relax for a while and you get to, you know, hopefully not get interrupted, but you can feel as if you're doing something useful. And it's the same. It's very striking. I thought that reading came top and reading involves some effort, you know, involves cognitive

effort. It involves concentration. It involves your attention. And people don't need to feel guilty about it in the same way, because they're doing something else. And the same with going for a walk. So I wonder if that's why some of these particular activities are so popular, because they take away the guilt of doing those things, because they're useful for some other reason as well, whilst letting people still get to this essence of rest, which I think seems to be the thing that stops the worries going around in your head, the thing that doesn't make you feel guilty, the thing that gives you permission and allows you to do it, and possibly the thing that gives you a break from other people. It was really striking that the top five activities

are all activities that people tend to do on their own. And one of them was just being on your own. But they are things people tend to do on their own, because these are not necessarily the most enjoyable ones. And even when we looked at personality and even when we looked at extroverts on their own, we found that even then things like chatting and socializing didn't come in the top 10, even for the extroverts who should be getting energy from seeing other people. They still want a rest from other people sometimes as well, because then you haven't got to worry about what anyone thinks or what they want to do. can just as you were saying me time that that i mean there's so much to pick up on there this this whole idea of time alone um which i think was one of the

chapters wasn't it time alone yeah and i found that really interesting because we've got all this um we've got a lot of conflicting ideas out there. So we're busier than ever before. There was a beautiful quote, actually, I'm going to read it out. I thought it was lovely in the book, which sort of really speaks to the point I'm about to make. So this is in the I Want to Be Alone chapter. And you quoted from the book,

The Inner Level by Richard Wilkerson and Kate Pickett. Clearly the human brain is in a very real sense a social organ. Its growth and developments have been driven by the requirements of social life. This is the case because the quality of our relationships with each other has always been crucial to survival, well-being and reproductive success. So you've got here a very powerful quote demonstrating that we are social beings we're social animals we've always benefited from having people around us we've got all the research that's coming out as to how toxic and harmful loneliness can be

for our health yet one of the top things that people like to do in order to rest is be by themselves. So how do you make sense of these quite seemingly conflicting ideas? Well, I think it's absolutely true that human connections are really important and really vital. And we know how good that is for people's mental health if they are positive connections, positive relationships that they might have. if they are positive connections, positive relationships that they might have. But I think also we do want some time on our own as well to kind of recover from being with other people in a sense. And that also the loneliness that you talk about is when you don't want to be alone, when you're not choosing to be alone. And the next big study that we did with Welcome and the BBC after the rest test was the BBC loneliness experiment.

with Welcome and the BBC after the rest test was the BBC loneliness experiment. And in that, it was one of the questions we asked people was what's the opposite of loneliness? And people had said things like togetherness and things like that. People said all sorts of different things. But somebody stopped me in my street and said, I've been thinking about that question that you were talking about on your program. I've been thinking about what's the opposite of loneliness. And the opposite of loneliness is wanting some time on your own, because you are choosing to have that time on your own, which is very different from loneliness where it is imposed upon you because you haven't got the relationships you want. And if you look at the real definitions of loneliness are not having the relationships that you want, or the quality,

or the quantity of relationships that you want. No, I love that. And, you know, there is this, there's that constant balance that we're searching for, isn't there? That we like to be with other people, but too much of that and then we're craving that solitude, we're craving that time for ourselves. I know I get like that. If I've been doing a lot of events, seeing a lot of patients,

a lot, you know, I really crave a bit of time just by myself, just to be alone in my own thoughts or to read or do something. And it's, yeah, it is fascinating. I wonder if we've ever had that luxury and sort of our evolutionary past, you know, have we, you know, has that always been built into life? I suspect it probably had, you know, that there was that sort of campfire, connectivity time of sharing stories, but there was probably a bit of solitude there as well. Yeah, I think there was probably both. And I think that, you know, people will say, well, you know, loneliness is important from an evolutionary perspective. We need to feel pain if we're not connected with anyone at all, because it's being connected with people that

helps humans survive, and particularly in the past helped humans to survive. I mean, you can survive now on your own if you're happy with being on your own and never seeing anyone. You can do that now. But I think you couldn't in the past. And so you needed to, a bit like you feel hunger and that's painful if you need some food, that people would feel a kind of yearning for connections with other people and feel sad when they didn't have those. So you can see where loneliness has come from. But I think maybe people have always sought solitude as well.

And if you look at writers going back for centuries, we'll talk about solitude and its benefits for that. And people will talk about particularly things like solitary walks and how that improves their creativity and some time to think on their own. Sometimes you just need to think. Whatever it is you're trying to solve, whether it's a work problem that you're stuck on or something to do with a relationship or something else or a decision that's got to be made, you know, should you move or shouldn't you? Where should you live? Those sorts of things. Sometimes you just need some peace to think about it. Yeah. I really like the idea of, you know, solitudes being desirable when we know that we're part of a tribe and a community.

That's the key, isn't it? When we've got these close networks and friends and a job that we love and all this kind of stuff, solitude is great because the foundation, the backbone of our life has that connectivity there. Yeah. And all those other people that you do love and who you know love you, they are in the back of your mind when you're on your own yeah they're sort of with you they're sort of when you don't have that yeah then solitude may not have the same appeal and um yeah because it's you know it's completely different feeling yeah totally different well you mentioned a few minutes ago you mentioned um sometimes we like to be alone because it's recovery from other people and since you said that i can't that that that phrase is on loop in my head recovery from other people so i think about said that, I can't, that phrase is on loop in my head,

recovery from other people. So I think about the idea of recovery and a lot of people, you know, when they're alcoholics and they are, you know, they're maybe going through the 12-step program on AA or whatever method they're choosing, they often talk about being in recovery. And just an interesting idea there, recovery from other people. Are we living these super busy lives where we have so many so-called, in inverted commas, friends and followers and connections on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, even at work, all this kind of stuff. Do we need recovery from other people? Are we overexposed to other people in a way that we never have been before i think we are sometimes if we feel that something is demanded of us from them if there are too many people who you feel are demanding something needing something from you then i think that's that's difficult and you need some some time to kind

of recover from from being with other people all the time and some peace. And many people, particularly if they're feeling very stressed at work, you know, will get home. And what they want to do when they get home is to, they're desperate to have some time on their own and not talk to anyone at all for a while before they can gear up again for then talking to people. And I think that, you know, that can be a negative sign that things are starting to get on top of them. But I think that everyone in a sense needs, if they are seeing other people, unless they're desperately lonely and feeling desperate, the desperation of loneliness needs some time and some space.

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that they need to write for themselves. Is there an element of truth of that in this case? Yes. Lots of friends of mine thought it was very funny when I said I was writing a book about rest. Okay. Yes. And said, but you never rest. You can't write a book about rest. You're always working. And then the book was, you know, books take a really long time to write if you're writing them in your spare time as well as working all the time so um uh it was then you know i missed the first deadline and then then the next deadline oh i know i know these feelings i share your yeah so there was a four

there was a period of between christmas last year so i didn't work on christmas day or boxing day and then the day after boxing day i started back on the book again and i worked all the weekends apart from one until easter to get it finished as well as working all week, which I realized is not at all practicing what I preach. And in fact, writing, spending that time working whilst writing about how important rest is and how important breaks are didn't help in a way to sort of feel, so I'm doing this, I've got to finish this, I haven't finished it yet. And it's wrong that I'm not resting. But now it's finished. That's lovely. And so I can rest at weekends. And yet again, my new year's resolution is not to, not to work at all at the weekends. Now I haven't managed to

not to do it at all, but this weekend, for example, I didn't, I did some answering endless emails that I hadn't got around to answering on Saturday morning and doing some boring admin stuff. And then on Saturday afternoon and the rest of that and the whole, all of Sunday, I didn't work at all. And it was then amazing by Monday. You know, I think sometimes people think that they'll just do, if they've got to work at the weekend, they'll do some on one day and some on the other. It would be so much better to just, even just one day's break makes the difference. Stick it all on the Saturday if you have to and have the Sunday as the break.

And I would echo that. And really, you know know it's really important we get out of that all or nothing mentality so your goal had been not to work at weekends but the fact that you're even trying to meet that goal and maybe not fully achieving it but still having a whole day and a half off that's progress right yeah it is that's having an impact definitely and i think that's a very powerful story for people that it's not, you either have the whole weekend off or you work all weekends, you know, you can start implementing these themes in some small way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you can have, you know, it was a lovely sunny weekend last weekend and my husband and I, we decided we wanted to go and see a particular exhibition and we decided we would walk there from where we live. So it was about an hour and a half walk

to walk there. We walked up loads of streets we'd never seen before it was just really interesting and really relaxing and and i didn't feel i should be working which was which was great because now that i've written a book about it i know it's good not to it's good to rest and so i'm allowed to rest i think i think that's where that knowledge comes in and that as you say there's a lot of activities in here we're definitely going to sort of break some of them down and go through them that people will automatically they'll hear them go yeah i enjoy doing that um but i what i love about it is you give real scientific credence to why it's important what the actual tangible benefits are going to be for us for example you know listening to music right i was really drawn by that chapter because i've all you know i'm'm a musician, always been a huge fan of music. And I'm finding, I have found for a few years as I got busier and busier,

that I was listening to music less. And I've sort of started to re-engage with that over the last year or two. You know, now, for example, one of my favourite things to do is if there's no one in the house, which is quite rare because I've got two young kids, but the odd occasion it does happen. And let's say I'm preparing dinner. I love cleaning the kitchen up, putting on one of my favorite CDs. I've got an old Dave Matthews band CD that I've not heard in ages. And I pump that up whilst I'm cooking. And I've got to say, I feel great. And when my wife and kids come back, I feel recharged, rested. So there's something powerful about music, right? And you break it down a lot in the book. But let's talk about music. Why do you think so many people

have chosen listening to music as one of their most restful activities? So I think it's another of these things that takes people out of themselves, that takes them away from the worries going around in their head. And it's a kind of quick way of changing the mood. It suddenly changes everything that's going on around you. And it's a shortcut to doing that, if you like. And I think that a lot of people, if you look at the research, a lot of people do use music strategically, almost in the way you were saying you did there, that you put it on while you're cooking to kind of make a break from one thing to then everyone will be home and there'll be new busyness going on of a different kind. And so we do know, you know, there's been lots of

research now about the impact of the effects of music on the mind and on the brain. And we know that it has this very strong emotional draw for people and can change their mood very, very quickly. So what does listening to music do to the brain um so it does all sorts of things i mean it depends so it depends what kind of music you're listening to obviously okay so people um uh obviously the main thing is to listen to music you like um not music you don't like so you know supposedly you know music in lifts you know the mosaic you get in lifts is supposed to be relaxing, but many people say that they hate it and don't think it's relaxing at all. So what we need is the music that you personally find relaxing, which could be fast or could be

slow. There are some rules about, you know, the music that induces happiness tends to be, you know, faster and in a major key. And the music that induces excitement tends to be even faster than that. And the music that induces tranquility and rest is slower than that. And in the way, those are very, you know, predictable things that you could guess. But the most important thing is that you like that music. And then you can then look and see that the brain will have a particular response to that and that things will change. But they've also done experiments where they get people to put on music that they, to choose what music they would like to listen to in different situations. So there's a horrible study that was done back in the 60s or 70s, you wouldn't be allowed to do it now, where they insulted people deliberately in a really horrible way. So they'd be doing,

they'd give them a test to do a pen and paper task. And then they have someone who was a stooge in the waiting room say, haven't you finished yet? You're a bit thick, aren't you? And what are you wearing? And why did you choose that outfit? It's really horrible. And I'm surprised you got, they were students. I'm surprised you got into this university if you're that slow. And they were told that they could have the leeway to find the thing that insulted the most and that seemed to upset them the most, and then to pick on that even more. So if it was their clothes or their hair, they'd pick on that even more. So they got them until they were feeling pretty sort of rattled and upset and cross that somebody had been so horrible to them. And then they could choose some different music to listen to. And what they found was that people would choose in those

circumstances the calmest music to calm them down. Whereas in other circumstances, if they were just feeling happy, they would choose any old music. So basically, if you're feeling all right, you have the freedom to choose anything at all. Whereas when people want to recover particularly and use music for that, and the same with exercise, if they make people exercise really hard on bikes and they want to recover, they will choose the calmer music for that. So in one way, what you can do is if you want to use music strategically to unwind from your day, but perhaps you're then going out again and want to be lively later, is to play something calming and relaxing, something you find calming and relaxing first, until you start to feel a bit better and a bit as if you're recuperating from your busy day, and then to play something more lively, if you like, to get you going again. So you can even

do it stage by stage if you want to. Yeah many ways you can use it like a performance enhancing drug right to do what you want it to do at that time um and i guess if people you know feel connected to music as a way of therapy as a way of resting more um you know a tip i is, you know, and I've spoken about this before in the podcast, but, you know, if you look at the science of behavior change, you know, to make any behavior stick in the long term, you really want to make it as easy as possible to engage in that behavior. So, if what Claudia said, you know, appeals to someone, I would say, look, you know, have different playlists set up, like have a calming playlist set up, have a pre-going out playlist set up. You know, people do that for running, you know, have different playlists set up, like have a calming playlist set up, have a pre-going out playlist set up. You know, people do that for running, you know, they've got a

running playlist because I guess we've intuitively known that without the science people have known for years that with the right kind of music, it's going to help me run further and faster. And I think you should do your own playlist as well. So, I mean, if you go on like, you know, there are hundreds of calming, relaxing, if you look up restfulness or relaxation and playlist, there are loads of them. But if you don't like that music and there is such personal taste makes such a difference here, then that won't do anything. So you need to choose your, I'd say, choose your playlist yourself. Yeah. And for different occasions as well. I mean, your book is full of so many wonderful studies. In the music section, there was a bit about, I think it was the purpose for which you use music. So I think they measured cortisol, the, you know, the body's primary stress response hormone

in response to various things. And if you chose music for relaxation, not for distraction, it had a different impact. And I found that really interesting because I guess some of these restful activities in some ways are providing a distraction for us from our everyday lives, from the perceived monotony of our everyday lives, right? So, you know, the restful activity is a distraction from that. So, that study around music was really interesting to me that if we're choosing music as a distraction rather than actually for relaxation, it might even alter the perception of stress in our body. Yeah, that's right. And I think why you are doing things does matter and how you feel about that activity does matter. So in the chapter on TV, I talk about a study, a German study called the guilty couch potato, which found that if

people felt guilty when they watched TV, they didn't feel as refreshed afterwards as if they didn't feel guilty while they watched TV. So it's almost the activity you do and how you feel about it and whether you are allowing yourself to do that happily and have permission to do it that makes a difference as well you can you can kind of make a restful activity unrestful by feeling bad about it yeah that's very powerful claudia very very powerful and i guess if somebody wants to make a strong case for why they should not feel guilty about watching tv i think your chapter does a does a brilliant job of that um and actually, you know what, this past weekend, my kids were at my wife's parents' anniversary and, you know, things have been super hectic recently and we tried to, you know, do something special. But I've been on the road a lot recently.

We're pretty tired. There's been a lot going on. So we thought, actually, why go to all the effort of doing that? Let's just clean up the house, spend a bit of time here. We went out for a walk. We just relaxed. We didn't go on email, which is always helpful. But we watched quite a lot of telly. We chose a film on Netflix to watch a proper... I don't know what you're like, but in the week, if we're ever going to do that, I'm like, no, we can't watch that. It's over two hours long. Yeah, we can't have a film in the week. Yeah. And even if the kids go to bed a bit late on Saturday and I'm like, oh, if we watch that, I won't get to bed till 11.30. I'm going to be knackered somewhere. I can't do that. So we started watching at about 4.30 PM, something super early, watched a beautiful like

two and a half hour, three hour film. And I actually thought, man, I feel totally chilled and relaxed. You know, it was consciously choosing to do that as a way of relaxing. Yeah. Rather than, I wasn't using it to distract me. Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with doing it to distract you. But I was like, we chose that together as active relaxation time. And there was something quite special about it. Although we weren't talking throughout it, you know, we were probably hugging or, you know, sitting next to each other. You know, we felt sort of closer and more connected afterwards. There is definitely something about the companionship of watching TV together.

Because if you are doing it with someone else, we know that from studies that people talk about 20% of the time, but you don't have to talk. And it's again back to that sort of requirement of demands from other people. You don't have to talk at all. But if something comes to one of you there, you can say something and you're all sharing an experience together. And, you know, some people have called it the electronic half that we used to sit around fires and listen to stories. we used to sit around fires and listen to stories. Now we sit around a screen where some stories have been amazingly realized by really, you know, talented script writers and amazing filmmakers so that we can see these stories in front of us. We can see the most remarkable stories from all around the world acted out in front of us. Now it is true that some people are very against,

you know, TV watching. Some psychologists are very against it. And it is true that if people watch more than, there's a big Brazilian study that found that if people were watching more than five or six hours of TV a day, their well-being was on average lower. They were more likely to have depression, for example. They were more likely to be unwell. So now that could be that that's why they were watching TV. It's a snapshot in time, so we don't know which comes first. It could be that they were already ill or already had depression and they therefore then couldn't go out and do other stuff and were too unwell to do that and were filling their time watching TV. It's not necessarily

caused it, but it does seem that, you know, life satisfaction is lower if people are watching five or six hours of TV a day. But the same study also found that people watching less than one hour a day, their life satisfaction was a bit lower too, which was really intriguing. And I think it does provide an excellent method of distraction, also a way of switching off and something you're sharing together. You know, that we think of all those water cooler conversations about different box sets or what people are watching on Netflix or whatever, you know, there are, you can join with other people in this as well. That social experience. It's a social experience. It's also a way of trying out just as novels do.'s also a way of trying out just

as novels do it's a way of you know getting into other people's heads to see what you see what they're thinking you see how different people react in different situations and that is partly you know we learn from all these stories just as we learn from stories in books when we're kids i guess you know watching tv has always been associated hasn't it with there's always been this slight undertone of it's a bit of a lazy thing to do and it's not good for our health. And you look at that study and you mention, what, five, six hours of telly a day and the negative impacts that can have. And of course, there are many reasons for that. I mean, if you're watching that amount of telly,

it's also possibly not what the telly is doing, but what you're not doing because you're spending that much time, I guess, typically sitting in front of a television and not moving and not being active and not being out in fresh air and all that kind of stuff. And I guess it also probably depends on what you're watching, right? So if you're watching something that takes you off to another world, that makes you think about things differently, I think that's going to have a very different impact to watching news nights just before bed, for example. If you're trying to have a restful sleep, you know, watching the news, I would say, may not be the most restful activity, particularly at the moment. I guess also, you know, if you're watching a show, but you're also tweeting at the same time, I don't know, what do you make of that?

I think it's true. I think it's better if you're deliberately watching. A bit like when you watched the film that you were talking about, you deliberately all decided to watch that. So I think it'd be better if watching was mindful in a way. If rather than just sort of plunking down and thinking, oh, what's on then and flicking channels. Although I think people do that a bit less now because with all the streaming services, then you've sort of got to choose. People often now choose what they want to watch and we'll watch one particular thing that they then watch um consistently until that thing is finished um and so i think it's good if you've if you've made a decision rather than it all just happening and becoming the default you

know the kind of oh we've had our meal now let's see what's on let's see what's on and let's sit here for four hours i I'm not suggesting that. I'm suggesting using it more strategically and thinking now is our luxury rest time. You know, we've done our work. We've cleared up. We've done everything else. Kids are in bed.

Now we can watch something nice that we really want to watch. Claudia, it really strikes me, chatting to you, that much of what you're talking about is being mindful and being conscious about the choices we're making. And I think that TV example beautifully illustrates that, that it's not, you know, that there are many ways to watch TV. There are many things to watch on TV. There are

many different, you know, you can get Netflix, you can just mindlessly scroll. But even that whole idea that, hey, look, you know what, we, why don't we watch something together? Like, let's choose something together that's going to, we can have a shared experience about something that's uplifting. And in some ways, I guess we should, I don't know. I mean, I've many times sat there in front of Netflix with my wife and we're trying to flick and we're trying to flick and we're still there 40 minutes later flicking, trying to find something to watch. Yeah, that's really annoying. Yeah. And we actually said this weekend, look, that was so much fun. Why don't we actually just compile a list? So whenever you see something or you hear about something,

let's put it in a folder. And so we know that there's always a few things in that list. Now, we've not implemented this, just to be this so the this conversation happened yesterday so we're not quite at the implementation stage but i thought wouldn't it be nice if we always know that there is a you know there's 10 things there and then so if we ever choose to have a bit of time together watching something we can just go straight to that list and not be distracted by yeah mindless scrolling or whatever the channels are choosing to put on at that time and i don't know what you think about that? That might be a way. I think that's a really good idea. I think that's a bit more like what you might do with a book, say that you choose a book that you want to read, or somebody gives it to you and gives you a novel

and gives it to you as a present because they've thought about it and think that you might like it. Or you may go to a bookshop and choose, well, what is it I'd really like to read? And we don't go choosing TV in the same way necessarily. And I think perhaps we should. Yeah. And it goes back to that study that I mentioned from your book where, depending on whether you're choosing music for relaxation or for distraction, would alter the cortisol response in the body. Literally, biologically, physiologically, the way you're choosing to use that is changing things. I think that's very powerful for people so and it's also i think really reassuring for people because a lot of people like to unwind watching telly and you you had some remarkable stats in in the book

about how many people watch telly or you know really it's it's still a hugely popular past time yeah it's hugely popular and by telling you know i'm counting anything that's downloads or streaming you know anything that you're watching on a screen with moving pictures. But it is hugely popular. And I think there's a good reason for that. It's immediate, and it's strong, and it's powerful. And whenever anything new comes along, everyone says, well, cinema will be dead because there are videos, and TV will be dead, and the radio will be dead because there are videos and TV will be dead and the radio will be dead. But in fact, we just consume them all instead and use them at different times in different ways. And I think that's, you know, it allows us to have the distraction where we want it or to have some relaxation where we want it or to just get us absorbed in other people's lives that aren't ours is a nice thing. And you can then, you can use that either, same with novels, you can use that either by being completely distracted into their life or using it to reflect

back on your own as well, which we know people very much often do when they're reading. And people used to disapprove of reading novels in the same way that people are sometimes disapproving of people watching TV or videos now, that people used to, you know, compare. In the 19th century, people would compare young women reading novels with them going to, you know, gin houses and brothels. And it was novels were seen as a bad thing. And yet, you know, many parents now would be delighted if they could get their children to read some more novels. It's just not bad. For me, that was probably the most surprising thing I read in your book. I was so shocked to read that. I was

like, really? They used to disapprove of reading. Whereas now that's feted as like a, you know, a noble activity that we all want our children to do. We want them to read more and schools encourage it and society encourages it. That was super, super surprising for me. Yeah, it was just seen as a waste of time and that people were reading, and particularly it seemed to be women who were blamed for this and particularly women reading novels. It's women reading fiction that they particularly didn't like, that they were sort of wasting their time with these stories in their pretty little heads when they should be concentrating on other things. Whereas in fact, you know, now, of course, you know, literature is taken so

seriously as something, you know, hugely important in many people's lives and hugely important in history. So maybe a hundred years time television watching will also be fettered by parents maybe universities and we'd be like courage you know what we want you to i want you to watch more television please watch more television and stop doing whatever it is they're doing there because the same happened with magazines your magazines were really disapproved of when they first came in people worried about their teenagers reading magazines. Whereas I think now many parents would think, oh, if they read a magazine, that would be quite nice.

At least it's not on the screen is what they would think. It is amazing, isn't it? And, you know, I guess those social norms that we grow up with, they sort of, they often frame the lens through which we look at life. And I guess we all have our biases as well, depending on how we were brought up and what we think is a noble, restful activity. Exactly, yeah. And that's why I think people should choose for themselves, you know. So, you don't have to, you know, do these activities in this order of 10 and sort of, you don't have to put reading top if it wasn't for you, you know. So, 58% of people told us they liked reading as the most restful thing.

But that means 42% didn't. So, you know, those 42% shouldn't have to read if they don't want to read novels. So, I don't want to prescribe what people should do. I think they should pick the activities for themselves, but it's worth thinking about which ones are restful in which different ways and how that might then, and how they can fit into your own life. What was one of the most surprising things that you came across whilst researching and writing the book? I do like the, I do think the studies on doing nothing are interesting. I think it's interesting how hard we find it to do nothing and to particularly sit, you know, in a room and do nothing at all.

And so there's a study that Timothy Wilson, who's at the University of Virginia, did where he got people to sit in a room with a table and they didn't have their phones and they couldn't read a book and they weren't allowed to nap. And they had to sit there for up to 15 minutes. And the only thing that they could do was that they had a sort of ankleton attached to some electrodes and they could choose to give themselves an electric shock. Now, they didn't do it out of curiosity because they'd all experienced the electric shock once. They'd all had a go at it. And these were the people who'd said they would pay not to have another electric shock. So they chose the people who didn't like it and then left them in the room to see what they would do. And 71% of the men and 25% of the women gave themselves an electric shock, even though they didn't like it,

rather than sit in that room with their own thoughts and do nothing. And I think that's fascinating. And I don't know whether that's a kind of fidgetiness that in the end, could they just not resist it in the end because that button is there and it's the only thing that their attention is on. And so in the end they, they press it or is it that they really hate thinking about having nothing to think about? Fascinating. Yeah. I've seen this study before as well. And it's, I thought long and hard about this and I really think there's something about, you know, the way we are living life in society today, the way that we actually never really need to be alone with our thoughts anymore. These, these phones in our pocket, these supercomputers

mean we never need to get bored. We never need to. And I feel that, again, I'm not here to demonize phones or demonize social media. I use both of them actively. But I do feel that if every spare moment we have, we pull out that phone, you know, on a train journey, you can't sit there and look out the window at the fields, let's say, you have to check email or constantly looking at, quickly check on Twitter or whatever it's you're doing. I think that's coming at a cost because I feel that these days we feel more, we feel uncomfortable sitting alone with our thoughts because we don't have to anymore. And, you know, to the point where we might give ourselves an electric shock rather than be alone with our thoughts. And I actually think on a wider level, Claudia, that this is one of the reasons why we struggle with all kinds of different addictions and certain behaviours we're trying to

change. Let's say sugar consumption or alcohol consumption. Often, I find that we're trying to reduce these things by giving people information that too much sugar is not good for your health, you should reduce it. Too much alcohol is not good for your health, you should cut down, like sort of in through one ear, out the other, because I think there's enough recognition of what that sugar or alcohol, what role that's playing in your life. Because if you don't like being alone with your thoughts or your job is stressing you out, then actually that's the way that you cope with it. Like, you know, by mindlessly scrolling Instagram in the evening or, you know, having a glass of wine to help you deal with that. And I do think there is, I don't know, I think about this a lot.

I do think there's something about sitting with our own discomfort and our own thoughts is quite painful. And I think many of us just, we don't want to do it. And these days we don't even have to do it. And I think possibly we also fear boredom more than we should. You know, we think boredom will be worse than it is. And so there was one study where they paged everyone, you know, randomly and bleeped them and asked them what they were doing. And in fact, when people were doing what they called nothing, only 6% of the time were they actually bored.

So most of the time, they didn't actually mind, in fact, that they were doing nothing. But I think that we fear, we fear it. And so we spend a lot of time trying to fill our time again, which makes it less restful. And I think the same happens for kids. The summer holidays used to be really long and boring. They were. And maybe that was okay. And maybe then you had to find your own games and make some things and do some things. And you would make camps or whatever and think of things. And if there are nonstop activities laid on for kids, then I think they don't get the chance to be bored think of things. And if there are nonstop activities laid on for kids, then I think they don't get the chance to be bored as much now. And I think boredom

when you're a kid is quite good. Yeah, for sure. I absolutely echo that. Is the logical conclusion, or is the logical follow-up from that then, that could boredom be a form of rest? I think it could be. Yeah. If it's not, if it's not painful, which is why things like, this is why doodling is,

is, is good. And in a way, this is what the whole, you know, the whole adult coloring book trend was about. You know, lots of people were sort of very rude about that and say,

Oh, you know, what are adults doing? Coloring, you know, doing kids books, this should be for kids. But actually it, it gave people a way of switching off without having to do that sitting at a table

doing nothing which is quite hard and actually it's okay and i'm a big fan of doodling you know i doodle in talks while i am listening you know i doodle while i'm interviewing people and it's not that i'm not listening uh it's actually helping me listen yeah it's it's it's helping focus i've seen adult coloring books be transformative for so many of my patients it really had because it is you know why should these things just be for children who says i mean what you did you know what i mean where's the idea come from that coloring books are only for kids why you know drawing creating um making pretty things on paper you know these are things that make us feel good as human beings and for some

people that's the best way they're going to get at switching off. And very accessible, very cheap, very accessible to many, many people. I'm going to have some music because one of the things I loved, again, which I hadn't read about before, were vinyl clubs. I was like, oh my God, I need to join a vinyl club. Sounds amazing. So really for me, it was amazing how you're combining, all these people are combining, you know, a restful and enjoyable activity, listening to music with a social experience. People are getting together.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about vinyl clubs. So it's like a book club, but instead of everyone reading the book beforehand, there's an album is played and it's, they take turns to choose like at a book club, each member takes turns. And the album is played and one side is played. But everybody has to sit. And it's in someone's house.

And everybody has to sit and listen to it. And no one knows what it is until it's put on. And then they're not allowed to talk through it and say, oh, gosh, I remember this. Oh, it was when I was a student or whatever. They're not allowed to do that. They must wait until it's ended. Because one of the ideas is that they think that people are not listening to music properly. And then when the first side has ended, then it can be discussed and everyone can chat and do what they like and go and get a drink or whatever they want to do.

And then the second side is listened and then there's silence again while people really listen to what's happening, but in a communal way, which is lovely, which in a communal in a communal way which is lovely which is a bit in a way like you know concerts and gigs that's what that's what they are you're listening in a communal way to something that's that's beautiful yeah i loved that i thought it was such a lovely idea of people getting together listening to something listening to look i'm a bit of a you know i've probably got a slight bias here that i'm a huge fan of albums and I you know someone who's played in bands for years and written songs and stuff I kind of I really feel strongly that these things have been created in a certain order you know when you put a track list together there's a certain flow to an album and I do think and

again this is I hope this is not musical snobbery this is just my own bias is that you know I think we've lost something with this culture where we could just choose song and choose. I want that song from there, that song from there and make my own playlist. Of course I do that as well. And that's, that's great. But I do often try with my kids to actually listen to an album from start to finish.

And in the end, aren't there, there are so many songs where the next song, you can hear it in your head the moment you finish. Forever. Whenever you hear that song, you can hear the next one on the album that doesn't, doesn't happen as much now. Yeah.

So I can see, and I love that you said in these vinyl clubs that they're for the first for the a side of the the of the of the record you're not allowed to talk so you really are all i think i imagine that must be quite a powerful experience of sitting there with your you know your peers in a room listening not being allowed to talk but you're all sharing the same experience with the same speakers i think it's incredibly powerful and i wonder actually these things are going to start listening not being allowed to talk but you're all sharing the same experience with the same speakers i think it's incredibly powerful and i wonder actually these things are going to start exploding in popularity as um you know as many of us feel a bit more isolated in society and we're missing out on these kind of shared experiences and that and something that's

as you say of the longer longer duration as well that it's not just one song and then another song and another song because it's not as if music's not popular. Music is still hugely popular, but sort of jumping from track to track. And so maybe there will be a resurgence of listening at length in silence. If you were hosting a vinyl club tomorrow, what record would you choose? Oh, that's such a good question um i would choose a record i got for christmas now i'm gonna remember what it's called it's called polar bear polar something okay you know it i don't i think i do but i can't remember um jazz okay and they split up about uh two years ago maybe it's sort of jazz but it's oh it's amazing but it's brilliant and i've listened

to it a lot since christmas well'm going to get hold of it tonight then as a recommendation. I think for me, I'd probably choose, if I was put on the spot now, I don't know if you've heard of an artist called Ryan Adams, not Brian Adams, Ryan Adams with an R. His album Gold for me is just pure genius from start to finish.

So I can't think of anything I'd rather do than sit together with a group of friends and literally listen to that in silence. I think it would be just incredible. So, we're going well off track now, but it does give me an idea of what I might do as a restful activity with my friends at some point. Okay. So, music, I think a lot of people will get, and hopefully this has helped them realise actually there are some real value for your brain of listening to music. There was something you wrote about which made me actually think that, you know, you really made me want to

go to a classical music concert. I've not been for years, but the way you were explaining what happens in your brain, it was really incredible. And I thought, you know what? I used to play in orchestras. I used to do a lot of this stuff, but I haven't been for years. And you were saying how actually mind-wandering at these events is part of the experience. Yeah. Yeah. And it's okay. And that was something I very much hadn't realized. When I first started going to classical concerts, I went because my partner liked it. And he would sit there and seem not to be fidgeting at all, whereas I'd be quite sort of fidgety. And I was trying really hard to concentrate on the music. And I thought you were supposed to concentrate on the

music throughout and not be distracted by, oh, look what he's wearing. And I wonder whether they mind that they're always sitting right in front of the drums. That must be really noisy. Have they got earplugs? And all those sorts of things that I'm wondering. And I thought that everybody apart from me was concentrating properly. But it turns out they're not. And that sometimes they're thinking about other things and what they'll do tomorrow and all sorts of other things or memories that it might evoke. And that actually it's a jumping off point to

daydreaming. And daydreaming is another one that appears in the list and is something that we know does have real benefits as long as people are not just ruminating about negative things. And the same happens with reading. And so there are studies where they follow people's eyes while they're reading, and you can track their eyes and you see them going across the page and down the page. And then sometimes they're not concentrating, which is called mindless reading. And you can tell that they're daydreaming instead. And we've all of course done this where you end up reading the page again and again, because you're not taking it in. But they don't slow down for the unusual words. And usually people do slow down for the unusual words. So you can tell that people are daydreaming, but that that is okay as well. And that maybe things like a

concert and also a book may be a jumping off point for daydreaming where the brain can do its own thing and go off and make connections and think about what it will and actually be very active, you know, surprisingly active for something that feels restful. Yeah. I mean, that's really fascinating, especially in the context of reading, because I know that feeling that you want to get some time to sit down and read. And as you're reading, you just can't focus. Your mind keeps wandering. And I guess instead of beating ourselves up, we can recognize that that has benefits potentially. Yeah. That daydreaming is fine too. Yeah. So we shouldn't beat ourselves up for not concentrating on it. And obviously if you've got, you know, if you're reading something that you've got to

read for work and you're supposed to have done it within half an hour and you're not concentrating, or you're trying to revise for an exam or something, then that's difficult. Maybe you need a break and then come back to it. But if it's, you know, reading for pleasure, then that is absolutely fine to daydream. And we know that daydreaming seems to bring lots of different benefits and there's different theories about why that might be. You know, some people will say it's a bit like dreams consolidating our memories and organizing them, if you like, that maybe daydreaming is also doing something, is organizing our thoughts, is trying to look for different connections between things. Lots of people have looked at the links between daydreaming and creativity. And if people daydream for a while, then they may come up with some good ideas.

And that actually, and then another theory is Mosh Bar's theory, which is that maybe we're practicing for things that might happen, even bad things that might happen. You know, if who hasn't, you know, sat on the plane and imagined that when they're reading out the, you know, safety demonstration, well, what if it actually does crash? And what will that be like? Can you imagine all those things? And in one way, that's, you know, not very nice because you're about to do something and it makes you makes you slightly scared but on the other hand how much are we practicing for if that if that happens when we then think oh i've thought about this and what i

would do is this and sometimes we are daydreaming about the worst happening and uh or imagining what it would be like if someone died you know know, whenever we hear about someone else dying, we imagine about what it would be like if the people close to us died. And maybe that's not a bad thing. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, reading was an interesting one for me because that was top, wasn't it? Yeah.

Reading. Yeah. Like the number one thing that people would feed back that they regard as restful. And it's quite an active thing to do do reading, isn't it? It's going back to what you said at the start, it doesn't have to be an inactive task to be restful. But I would say with reading, it often requires quite a lot of cognitive reserve and brain power. So that's quite interesting that people find that restful, that we're actually

doing a task that's using up a lot of our attention and brainpower, yet we're finding that restful. And I think that is because of, partly it's distracting qualities that because you're really concentrating, then those worries that are going round and round in your head and that are bothering you, you're taken away from those.

You're taken straight into, particularly if it's fiction, you're taken straight into somebody else's life, or even if it's nonfiction, you're taken to the life of someone else and away from yours. And so I think it's distraction is a big part of it. Escapism is part of it. And again, that it forces you to, it forces you to stop and for a time, do something else and not jump from thing to thing. And I think that's partly the thing with all of these activities that they they get you to stop for a while yeah so so important claudia when did you come up with the idea of writing this book was there a particular moment was there

was it the fact that you saw the results of the study and you thought wow that's incredible i mean what was it that that led you to write such an important yeah so it was it was after spending you know part of two years at this residency at Wellcome and then seeing the results and then seeing how really interested people were in those results and how people were then saying, oh, so it's okay to rest then. And then, you know, I work presenting shows

about mental health and thinking, well, maybe we should all be resting more and maybe it is okay to rest and maybe we do need to start valuing it. And so I thought, so this is something I'll write about. Yeah. And one of those things that people reported back has been wrestlers having a bath, which is again, something that I think a lot of people feel guilty about. Yet it is one of the most luxurious relaxation experiences. Certainly for me, again, we've got to be careful because everyone's got a different perception on whether a bath is relaxing or not. But, you know, I've always

spoken a lot about swimming, for example, in terms of physical activity and why I think it's so beneficial these days. Of course, there are all the research benefits of what swimming does, but I think it's one of the few places where people still don't take their phones with them. So I think, you know, because even in the gym, people often on the bike or on the treadmill, looking at their phone or posting a selfie or whatever,

whereas you don't tend to see that in the pool. And so I kind of feel that being in a swimming pool is giving your body a workout. It's giving your mind a bit of a workout, but you're switching off. Yeah. That's what it is. It's these activities that help you switch off. That they almost force you to. They force you to sort of by you doing something else. Yeah. And so for me, I grew up in a family where no one had baths. I think they thought,

I don't know if it's a cultural thing. My parents came over from India in the 1960s. A bath wasn't just something that we did. I think that is a cultural thing. It's not a typically Indian pursuit. And I found that super interesting that, particularly over the last five, 10 years, the last five years, I'd say, as I've really been writing a lot about stress and relaxation and seeing the value and the scientific value of these pursuits and thinking, well, I love,

particularly this time of year. Yeah, it's fantastic. You know, it's dark, you just run a bath and even if you just have 15 minutes, you just feel like a, you feel, you know, you really feel like you've nourished yourself afterwards. You've taken a bit of time out. You know, you're not gonna, well feel you know you really feel like you've nourished yourself afterwards you've taken a bit of time out you know you're not gonna well of course you technically you're

not really gonna do your emails in a bath i'm sure some people do lean over the edge with their phones do they yeah yeah i mean it's always dangerous i will sometimes listen to a podcast in the bath um i have occasionally been on social media but i generally will put either put a podcast on that i want to listen to some music or I just leave the phone outside and then you know you just but it's it's something that is quite a British thing to do I think having a bath and it was a UK test wasn't it uh it was global was it global yeah yeah it was global so in fact people from 135 different countries took part I wonder you may not know this but was there a difference in people from different countries

in terms of liking a bath? And if there is that, you know, did more Brits like having a bath than let's say people from other countries? There wasn't especially for having a bath. There was for a few activities. And so being alone came top in Germany and being out in nature came top in Canada

rather than reading. And other than that, many of them were the same, but the people that having a bath was particularly popular with were young people, which I thought was interesting that the younger people liked baths more than the older people. And I wonder if it feels like more of a more of a luxury um than it did and it's interesting because you know many new homes now being built without baths and many hotel rooms now you can see where the bath was and i said they've got a long shower compartment which i think is a terrible shame personally because i love them and i'd be very sad if the bath goes i know they're not so environmentally friendly but you can make up for that in other ways. Actually, that reminds me, I think I've read this. What was it? It was a story.

You, I think, and your partner were hiking somewhere. And I think you mentioned the story about you. You were looking forward. Yeah, tell it. Why don't you tell it? We were hiking in Torres del Paine in Argentina, the most amazing, amazing place. And I thought this walk was going to be about three and a half hours long I didn't particularly like walking then anyway 11 and a half hours later when we got back with my knees really hurting and so on but it converted me to walking I suddenly realized how again you haven't got to concentrate at every moment of walking I thought you had to do that too maybe this is just me but you're allowed to daydream while you do that and you don't have

to enjoy every single moment you're allowed to think oh my knees are a bit sore now but we finally got back. We had booked a room in a B&B beforehand. And so that we definitely had somewhere to stay when we got back. It was very late by the time we got a bus after the walk. And we got back to the B&B. And I could see the light on in the room that we were going to have. Not a special room or anything, but it did have a bath.

And I could see another couple unpacking their stuff in our room, ready to get in my bath, as it felt at that moment. And all afternoon, while my knees were really hurting, I've been thinking, oh, but soon I get to get in that bath. And it'll be fine when I get in that bath. And we got there. And because we were so late, she thought we weren't coming back, the person who owned it. And so she'd given the room to somebody else. Alas. somebody else alas so we had to carry on walking around in the dark at sort of half past nine in in the evening in this tiny town trying to find somewhere else to sleep that doesn't sound very

restful no that wasn't restful that wasn't restful but this image of the bath had been in my mind yeah that really struck me when i read that i felt your pain as i was reading that i look i've really really enjoyed chatting to you um I really do think it's a wonderful book and it's really elevating rest to the position I think it deserves and as you say sleep has started to get that recognition in with the public with healthcare professionals with doctors with businesses I think people are now starting to recognize the importance of sleep. And I really hope your book helps provide, you know, a spark in some ways for rest to also be given the same priority. I would imagine so far, from what I've seen, that, you know, individuals might start to

understand the value of rest. I really hope companies do because I think businesses can play a huge role in our well-being. Have you seen any evidence that, you know, companies and businesses are actually taking rest seriously? Well, it's interesting. I mean, I've had, because I've had lots of, since the book came out, I've had so many tweets from people saying that they're putting it into practice in their own lives and they're already trying things and that that's working, which is, you know, absolutely lovely that

not only do people read it, but take notice of it, try it and then find it works is, you know, very, very satisfying. I haven't seen that much from businesses so far. And I think, you know, it's interesting, there's all this talk about the four day week, and could we work four days, but be paid for five days and work and fit the work into fewer hours. And in one way, that seems a great thing, because then people could have three days off, and that would be very good for them. I think the big risk for that, and nobody knows yet because not enough research has been done on that, but in order to make those four days really work, and if you had the same amount of work to fit in, you would have to work flat out on those days, which would take away those restful moments. And those bits where like,

you know, you chat to a colleague and you all chat about, you know, the box set you've all been watching or muck about for a bit. Those are really powerful things that can make, could make an unbearable job bearable and just make work great. And a workplace that's a friendly place, great. And that helps you build relationships with people. And they're just important in loads of ways. So I think if we were to expunge all fun and any tiny break or any moment where you're not concentrating, that would be a really bad thing. And I think that it's true that many companies now talk about taking wellbeing seriously. But that may just mean they have someone to come in and tell everyone they should do yoga when what they could be doing instead is changing some working practices so that people can take an hour for lunch because you know i was saying earlier well you know it'd

be great if everyone took an hour for lunch of course people can't because they can't get the work done in that time or they'd have to stay on at the end of the day to do it when they're probably not paid for their lunch break and probably are allowed an hour's lunch break and then some places you know many shops only allow people 20 minute breaks at a time and that's not really long enough but a lot of companies i guess you know the opposite to that is that they won't recognize that actually giving their employees an hour off for lunch or even half an hour off at lunch will probably increase their productivity and their speed of work when they get back so i think it's all these things need to be factored in and you're right it's a really great way of looking because i'm you know i'm sort of

very interested in this four-day week research um again, I'm likely wanting to see more of it to see literally what are those impacts. But there was, I think, a Swedish company a couple of years ago who reported that, you know, our employees love it. You know, they're getting three-day weekends, they're being way more productive in those four days. But I guess then if you're looking at rest time and you qualify some of those moments, looking at Instagram or actually chatting at the water cooler, if we call those restful moments, it's interesting, isn't it, to think about this dilemma. Like, could you have the same amount of rest in your life? you don't have rest for four days and i've been a bit extreme here but you have it you have loads for three days or can you have it just dotted in throughout

what's going to have more impact i don't know the answer to that exactly but that might be the trouble that you may have four really intense days and spend your fifth day sort of recovering from all of that exhausted then perhaps do something nice at the weekend, might it have been better to work the five days in the first place? Who knows? And again, we don't know that. So I think in one way, it's a really good idea. I like the idea that people are talking about trying to help people have more balanced lives and employers trying to enable people to do that. I think it's a really forward thinking thing to look at. I think it needs to be implemented really, really carefully because it just all depends on the workload. And I guess tech might be able to help us there. Tech might be able to help us be more productive

and efficient on those four days, especially, you know, emails are known to be one of the biggest time drains in society. And I think, you know, if there were better practices around how many emails get sent, how can we be a bit more productive in our work days. I think there could be a way of getting into work, but time will tell and we'll see if it does take off as an idea. Claudia, this podcast is called Feel Better, Live More. When we feel better in ourselves, we get more out of life. And I think we could strongly make the case that when we rest more, we get more out of our lives. I always like to leave the listeners with some actionable tips in terms of things that they can think about doing immediately to start improving the way

that they feel. I know we've covered a lot of them already, but I wonder if you could give some of your top take-home tips. Of course, I would highly recommend people read the book. I think it's brilliant. I think there's so much useful information in there, but 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?

And you can make more time in the future by stop overestimating how much spare time you'll have in the future. Most people think that in the future, there'll be better organized versions of themselves and they'll have more spare time. And I'm sorry, but that is not the case. You're probably not going to be a better organized version of yourself in the future, which is okay too. So you're not going to have more time unless you start saying no to some more things in advance. And I think one thing that's really useful is because we think the future will be different, we tend to say yes to things that are further away in the future when maybe we shouldn't. So if somebody asks you to do something in six months time that involves traveling to the other side of the country, and then you think, oh, that's a good

idea. I'll do that. Maybe if you imagine it was the week after next, would you be horrified by that idea? If you would, because you couldn't possibly fit it in, you'd be too busy. The same will happen when you get to that in six months time. So imagine the thing in the future is in a couple of weeks and then see, do you still want to it or not or is it something you don't can't fit in and also i think if people are trying to to make more time for rest 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 be you know belong to a choir or something and then think works getting you know there's too much work and 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 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 started 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 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. That's okay. Yeah. Taking the pressure off ourselves.

It's okay. Yeah. Claudia, thanks so much for sharing that. If people want to connect with you online, where can they find you? They can find me on my website at claudiahammond.com. They can find me on Instagram and Twitter at Claudia Hammond. We will put a link to everything we spoke about. We'll put a link to your book. We'll put a link to your social media handles in the show notes page for this episode of the podcast. Claudia,

thanks so much for making time. I found it quite a restful experience talking to you today. I hope you did as well. I did. It was very nice. Lovely chat. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe we'll continue this at some point again in the future. Cheers. That concludes today's episode of the Feel Better Live More podcast. What did you think? Did you like Claudia's tips there at the end? Which one was your favorite? As always, do have a think about one thing you can take away from our conversation

and start applying into your own life. I think that 15 minutes of restful activity each day can be a really simple way of reconnecting to rest, reconnecting to who you are, and reconnecting with yourself. Do let Claudia and I know what you thought of our conversation on social media. Claudia is active on Twitter at Claudia Hammond and on Instagram at Claudia underscore Hammond underscore. I, of course, am on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and on LinkedIn. I, of course, am on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and on LinkedIn. And look, everything that Claudia and I discussed today,

including links to some articles in the media about Claudia and her work, and links to her books, are available to look at in the show notes page for this episode, which is drchatterjee.com forward slash 95. So if you want to continue your learning experience now that the show is over, do head on over there. Now look, prioritizing some time for yourself is something I think is very, very important for our physical health, our mental health, but also our emotional health. My brand new book, Feel Better in 5, makes looking after yourself really, really easy. This is a book

that is all about helping you to take action in your life. Everything in the book takes only five minutes to do. And this is not only what I have found to be practical and sustainable in nearly 20 years of clinical practice, it's also what the science of successful behavior change supports. So if you're looking to understand how to create new habits that you can build on over time, do check out the book. The message in it is deceptively simple, but it is a highly effective plan. And feedback so far has been really, really good. Many of you I know are already using this book as a way of making helpful changes in your life.

And look, even the busiest person has five minutes to look after their health. The book is available in all the usual places online on Amazon, Waterstones, but also in bookstores around the UK. It's also available in Australia, New Zealand and India and many more countries we'll be following very, very shortly. and India and many more countries will be following very, very shortly. The book is available as a paperback, as an ebook, but also as an audiobook, which I am narrating. So if you're looking to make 2020 your year and are looking for a simple plan that is going to help you achieve your goals, I really do think that Feel Better in 5 is going to help you. If you enjoy my weekly shows, please do

consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or whichever platform you listen to podcasts on. I know many of you now are new to this show, so please do leave a review. If you think that the weekly conversations are bringing you value, you really help to raise visibility of the podcast, but you can also help me spread the word by taking a screenshot right now, sharing with your friends and family on your social media channels. Or you could do it the good old fashioned way and simply tell your friends about the show. I really do appreciate your support. A big thank you to Richard Hughes for editing and Vedanta Chatterjee for producing this week's podcast. That is it for today. I hope you have a fabulous week.

for producing this week's podcast. That is it for today. I hope you have a fabulous week. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back in one week's time with my latest conversation. Remember, you are the architects of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it because when you feel better, you live more.

I'll see you next time.