If You Want To Be More Productive, You Need More Rest. Here’s How To Get It. | Claudia Hammond
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It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing? I shouldn't have to make this argument, but here goes. If you want to be more productive, you need more rest.

The reason I shouldn't have to make this argument is that you shouldn't need me or anybody to give you permission to rest. But that's what happens when you live in an optimization and productivity obsessed culture where many of us wear our busyness as a badge of honor. I'm not being judgmental here. I occasionally can be one of those people. But anyway,

What I said at the beginning is true. In order for your brain to function at its best, you really do need to give it breaks. Rest can lower your blood pressure and your heart rate and boost your concentration and resilience. So you can choose your motivation for rest because you want to boost your productivity or because you just plain deserve it as a human being. Anyway, both are true.

So today we're going to talk about how to get over your guilt and weave more rest into your day. My guest is Claudia Hammond, who's an award-winning broadcaster, author, and psychology lecturer. She hosts several BBC podcasts, including All in the Mind and Health Check on BBC World Service. She's written many books, including the one we will discuss today, which is called The Art of Rest, How to Find Respite in the Modern Age.

In this conversation, we cover how to define rest, the health risks of fatigue, why your rest is more effective if you don't feel guilty about it, why watching TV can be so restful in moderation, why taking breaks should not be considered a reward, how to create your own personal prescription for rest,

why a resting state for the brain is actually quite active, the restful act of daydreaming when, and this is key, when it doesn't lead to ruminating, heat therapies for reduced cortisol levels, why some forms of movement and exercise can be very restful, the number one most restful activity based on her research, and practical advice for incorporating more rest into your busy life.

I should say this episode is part of our month on Get Fit Sanely series, where we talk about how to take care of your body without losing your mind. This is week two. We're just getting started. One very cool aspect of this series is that every episode this month comes with a companion guided meditation from my friend, the great Dharma teacher, Karlai. Today's meditation is all about rest. It's called Reclaim Your Inner Slacker. These meditations are only for paying subscribers. So if you aren't signed up, head on over to danharris.com. You can make it happen right there.

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A couple months ago, my family and I went to Nosara, which is a cool little town on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica and really loved the place, although we didn't get to spend enough time there. So we're going to go back with some friends of ours, the Strausses. We love this family. They've got a kid who's exactly our son's age. So the parents have a great time hanging out and the kids get along really well.

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Claudia Hammond, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Looking forward to it. Me too. This is such an important subject, something I think about a lot and oddly kind of beat myself up about a little bit because I know the importance of rest and sometimes I feel I'm not getting enough of it. Let's start here. You note in your book, and I see this in the world around me,

That these days people use busyness as a kind of badge of honor. How you doing? Busy, busy. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on why and how this came about.

Yeah, I think it's so interesting that, you know, and I do it all the time. People will say to me, how are you? And I'll say, oh, how's work? And they'll say, oh, it's fine. It's fine. I'm really busy, a bit too busy. And in a sense, yes, that's true because people ask me to do all sorts of interesting things. And I say, yes, so I am busy. But how much is that also a claim to status of saying, you know, to be honest, oh, look how important I am. All these people want to talk to me. Isn't this great? And people want me to do things.

I think it's really interesting how this has changed over time, because if you think back, you know, I'm here in London in the UK. And if I think back to 19th century gentlemen of leisure, and they usually were gentlemen, then they would show off about how much time and we can see this in literature, they'll show off about their time off.

So they will go to their country estate and do shooting and fishing and all those kinds of things they did. And then they'll come back to their London club. And part of their status is that they have all this leisure time and that they're so rich that they haven't got to work hard like other people. And yet that really seems to have changed round. And now our claim to busyness has become a claim of status and a way of saying, look

look how important I am, look how busy I am. And I think even if you look on social media at celebrities' Instagram feeds, sometimes they're on holiday and having a fun time, but often they're showing what they're doing work-wise. They're showing how busy they are. They're showing how successful they are. And it is as if busyness has become a proxy for success. And people don't really like admitting that they didn't have much to do. If you ask

People, what they did at the weekend, if they had a quiet weekend where they were doing a lot of resting, then they tend to make excuses for that. It tends to be, well, I've been really, really snowed under, so I thought what I'd do is I'd take it easy. But people don't want to look as if they didn't have loads to do or if they chose to rest. There is this real status that we accord to being busy. You've mentioned the weekend, and I laugh not infrequently about that great scene from Downton Abbey where the dowager...

hears a conversation at the dinner table where somebody mentions the weekend and she says, what is that? Yeah, exactly. If life's all the weekend, then yeah, what's the difference? But, you know, it strikes me that people have been worried about

overtaxing the human animal for a while. I've read some history that there was a lot of concern in the 1800s about the advent of both the bicycle and the pocket watch as we entered the Industrial Revolution and people started to live by

actual day parts. I have a meeting at three o'clock instead of the sun goes down and so my day ends. There was all of this public hand-wringing about whether humans could keep up with this seemingly unnatural way of life. And then all the way back to Socrates, and you use this quote in the book, and I love this quote, and I

feel guilty about this quote every time I read it, but Socrates said, beware the barrenness of a busy life. So again, it doesn't seem like a totally new concern. Yeah. And I think particularly when say electric light was invented as well, and people could carry on working for longer. And as you say, it didn't have to go to bed when the sun went down, then people worried that people would do too much. And I think also there's been a sense for a long time that people think they haven't got enough time to do things.

And I think that sometimes we think we are uniquely busy now. But if you look at time use surveys in the 1950s, people were also very busy. And in fact, we have, if you look at those time use surveys where people keep diaries day by day of how busy they are, on average, people have a little more leisure time now than they had, say, in the 1950s. But yet it's something that people, I think we like to think this is uniquely modern, but we are so busy.

What may be more unusual is that more people are now worrying about it, maybe in a good way and realizing we should appreciate why rest matters. And so sleep, I think, has been taken much more seriously in recent years.

And I would like the same to happen for rest. You know, people used to show off about how little sleep they got. And famously, you know, the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, would say she got four hours sleep a night and people would say this was really great. And wouldn't it be brilliant to be able to do that? And then look how successful you could be. But now people are much more appreciating why sleep really matters, particularly health wise in the long term and for your mental health as well. And I wonder if the same is gradually starting to happen more with rest.

So on a definitional tip here, what is the difference? I mean, this may seem like an obvious question, but what is the difference between sleep and rest? Yeah, so when I'm talking about rest, what I'm interested in is wakeful rest rather than having a nap or being asleep because these are different mental states.

And so I'm talking about an activity which could be very different for very different people, an activity after which you feel restored and revitalized. It doesn't have to necessarily mean sitting down or lying down, doing nothing at all. It can very much mean doing something if it's an activity you find restful. And that does vary a lot from individual to individual.

I'll actually read a quote from you back to you in terms of helping us get a better understanding of what rest actually is. You've written, I'd say the essential ingredient for true rest is an activity that distracts you from everyday concerns, allows your mind to slow down, gives you a break from other people and is guilt free.

Yeah. And I think the guilt is really important there because in the big piece of research that I was involved with called the rest test that 18,000 people from around the world took part in, 9% of those people told us they felt guilty whenever they rested. And it has come up such a lot when I'm talking to people about rest and when I'm talking at science festivals and other sorts of events that lots of people will say, oh, but I feel guilty if I rest.

and that they feel they should be doing something because there is always something left to do. You know, we all have more things on our to-do list that we could be doing. And so many people do feel guilty when they rest.

But there are some activities which will make some people feel guiltier than others. And so I think one of the reasons why some people pick some activities as being restful, like, for example, having a bath, is that you have got to get clean. So having a bath or a shower, it may be a nice restful thing to do, but it is also an important job because you've got to wash.

And so you don't need to feel as guilty about that, say. And you can say to other people, oh, but I've got to go and have a shower now. And it's an excuse to say, lock the kids out of the bathroom for that moment because you're doing this thing that's an important thing. And you can do that without feeling guilty. But I think that, yeah, all of those things are important. If it's distracting, then it distracts us from the

worries that are whirring on going around in our heads all the time. It allows us to slow down and stop rushing for a while. One thing I think might be really important is this idea of it being a thing where you have permission not to achieve for a while. It hasn't got to have an end of its own. I mean, it might have. Painting might be the thing you find restful. So you may create this lovely painting by the end of it, but that doesn't have to be the point of it. You don't have to do that.

And it is quite hard to give yourself permission not to achieve something for a while, not to fulfill something, not to get another thing done on those lists. Just go back to guilt for a second. Is it true that

If you feel guilty about your break, it is actually less restful? Yeah, this is really interesting. So this is a German study published in an academic journal that they actually called the guilty couch potato. What they found was that they asked people how guilty they felt about watching TV and how they felt afterwards. And they found that those who felt more guilty about it

didn't see the same restful, relaxing benefits as those who felt less guilty about it did. So I think the lesson from that is if TV is something you find relaxing and this is what you want to do, then don't feel guilty about doing it. See it as this is my relaxing treat now and I'm going to watch this great drama and see how I feel afterwards. I'm allowed to do this. I'm having my break. It's interesting. I'm just thinking back to yesterday. So I'm not casting back into deep time here, but

My schedule is I wake up at around seven. Sometimes I'll set an alarm for seven, but often I'll just wake up at that time anyway. And I usually go right to work because that's when I'm the clearest. And I work from home, so I can do that. And then at around 8.30 or so, I will meditate for a little bit, anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes. Then I'll work again. Then I'll exercise. Then I'll have lunch. And then I'll go back to work for the afternoon. And yesterday I...

At around 4.30 or 5, I just felt completely sapped of all energy, which is unusual for me, but I just was dead. I'd had a

For me, a successful day, for the first time in a long time, I felt some optimism about a book I've been working on for nearly seven years now. But around five o'clock, I just like hit a wall. And historically, I would keep pushing. But at five o'clock, I was like, you know what? Fuck it. I'm just going to watch TV. I like to watch TV. And I think I did that with some breaks.

With my family, my kid joined me and then we had dinner and whatever. But on and off, I watched TV. We watched a playoff game and blah, blah, blah until 930 or nine or something like that. So long period of time. And I did have some moments of feeling guilty about it. But generally, I felt pretty good about it. And at the end of it, I was able to fall asleep and I felt rested.

Yeah, and you're not doing it every single day. And I think it's interesting watching TV, whether it's streaming things, I'm counting TV as anything you're watching on your screen, doesn't come in for that good a rap really from psychologists. But when you actually look at the research...

It is true that the people on average who watch more hours of TV are more likely to experience depression, say. We can't say that those things are definitely linked. It could be that the people who already are experiencing depression maybe are not able to work.

don't feel motivated to do various other things and end up watching lots of TV. There is some evidence that if people watch more than five hours of TV every single day, then they may be more prone to developing depression or at least having lower levels of well-being. But that is like doing the amount that you did yesterday, but every single day. And so that is quite a lot. But for many, many people, watching some TV is the

leisure pastime that they really like to do. And there are some real gains from doing it. I think if you think about it, people have forever told stories around fireplaces. People love stories in all sorts of different ways. And now we're lucky enough to have

stories that appear on front of us filmed by the best directors in the world, the best actors in the world, written by the best scriptwriters there are. And we can watch, say, amazing dramas of other people's stories or true life documentaries or films under the ocean. We can see all these amazing things now. And they're restful because they take us out of ourselves. They distract us.

Sometimes they can be a good jumping off point like novels can. They can be a good jumping off point for daydreaming, say, which if you're not ruminating about negative things can be a really good thing.

And also, I think they're a really interesting thing that you do in parallel. It's interesting you said you were doing it with your family as well, that you can watch TV. You're not required to speak. You can sit beside each other. So you're not monitoring each other's facial expressions all the time, which is hard work. You can speak if you want to. So we know from research a fifth of the time people are talking while they watch TV.

But it's a nice communal activity. You can comment on it afterwards. You share in this experience together, like going to the cinema and sharing it with a whole theatre full of people. I think people can be quite down on TV and I think it has its benefits. There's a reason why so many of us have it as a kind of default way of resting.

Yeah, just to jump in, say a bunch of things, because you got me thinking. I mean that as a compliment. I do think the quality of TV has really changed to state the obvious. And I've done at least one episode about the health benefits, psychological and physiological of beholding art.

And I'll drop a link in the show notes to that episode we did on a book called Your Brain on Art. I loved season three of The White Lotus, which I know was controversial, but I loved it so much that I've gone back and started rewatching the earlier seasons. And I think that qualifies as genuine art. And so there's there's a real power to that. The second thing I wanted to say is just five hours of TV is a lot. And so obviously, I think on those studies about the links to depression, you

There are some causation correlation things I'd be curious about. Are you depressed therefore you're watching five hours of TV or does the TV, is that the mechanism for instigating the depression? But I'll say even for me yesterday, I had to break it up and I was watching a playoff game with my son and I was actually reading a book during most of that. But there was a social aspect that we're watching game together and I would put the book down and

cheer. And sometimes I'll take a walk around the house or go get some other stuff done. So I don't know that I could do it if I wasn't sick for five hours straight. And then just the other thing about the parallel social aspect to it, I can see that there's positive to that. And then also I've heard this great term by isolation, which I love. And so I think there's a way in which if all you're doing with your family is watching TV, you can be living in different worlds.

Yeah, I think absolutely people don't want to be doing it all the time. And I think there is some amazing TV now and it does depend what you watch. And if you watch something memorable, then that will stay with you. If you watch something that's not...

brilliant and not very memorable, then it can sometimes feel as if that time has just disappeared, kind of taken away from you. And then it's kind of always time gone when I could be doing something different. Yes. I just want to go back to your definition of rest, essential ingredients being distraction from your everyday concerns, allowing your mind to slow down, giving you a break from other people and being guilt free. Just picking up on the break from other people. So I personally find it very restful to socialize.

You know, I'm constantly, I've literally, you and I had some tech difficulties as we were preparing to do this interview. And while all the tech was being figured out, I got up and I was just finalizing some plans for dinner tomorrow night. I am very frequently either with my wife or since she's an introvert without my wife going out to dinner or lunch. And I really love seeing my friends and I find that to be quite restful and get real twitchy when I don't have it. So I'm curious why getting a break from other people is so important to you.

Yeah, so this came from the research that I was part of that was done by psychologists from Durham University. And so in this study, the rest test, we asked them all sorts of things. It was an online study. And it's the biggest study now that's been done about rest. And one of the things we asked people was which three activities they found the most restful. And people could choose any of these. And then we kind of looked at what the top 10 was. And I based my book around that top 10. And we were a bit surprised by some of those findings because

For example, socializing wasn't in the top 10. It was at 13. Chatting with friends was number 19. Drinking socially, 20. Eating, 21. They didn't come in that top 10. But when we looked at the top five activities...

One of them, number three, was being on your own. And the others were things that people often do do on their own. And we were really struck by that. And we thought, well, maybe this is all to do with the individual personalities of the people. But we'd used the personality scale as well. And so we thought, well, what if we just take the quarter of the people who are the most extroverted? Surely we know that those people get energy from socializing and that they will find that restful.

But even when we only took the most extroverted people as an activity that's restful, socializing still didn't come high up. And I think this is because we were asking them what was restful, not what was enjoyable. So I think if we'd asked people what was enjoyable, then we would have found socializing was really high up there. But we found that even the extroverts wanted some time when they were on

on their own. And of course, there's a real difference between choosing to be on your own and loneliness and feeling lonely. Choosing some alone time is very different. And we also know from lots of different psychological studies that all the time while you're with somebody else, then you are slightly concentrating on them, on their needs, whether they're all right, what they're thinking, what did they think about what you just said? Are they okay? What else do they want to do next?

Are they happy with you? Are they annoyed with you? What's going on? You're slightly monitoring that all the time. That is, in a way, taxing and tiring. And so I think having some time where you haven't got to do these things, you haven't got to worry about somebody else at all, can be restful for most people. I mean, it wasn't that everyone was choosing this. So 52% of people put down being on your own as one of their three ways, top ways of resting.

Which doesn't mean that every single person thought that. But it was interesting that it didn't have that much of a relationship with personality as we expected. But I think that is all to do with whether it's what you enjoy or what you find restful, per se. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I'm curious, I probably should have asked this earlier, the survey that you've referenced a couple of times that forms the spine of your book. Why did you do this in the first place?

A group of us had a residency at a place in London called the Wellcome Collection. The Wellcome Trust is one of the biggest biomedical funders in the world and funds all sorts of stuff all around the world to do with malaria and all sorts of different diseases and also loads of work on mental health now as well. And there was an opportunity for a million pound grant, which we applied for to look at one particular subject and groups of you could apply and you needed to be an interdisciplinary group from all sorts of different disciplines. And so all

A group of five of us applied to be directors of this and on the topic of rest was the topic we chose.

And we had a geographer on the team, a neuroscientist, a poet. It was really mixed up. And to our surprise and amazement, we got the grant. And it was amazing. And then after that, we had a group of 40 collaborators. And we had artists. We had composers. And everybody looked at rest in a different way according to their speciality and how they might approach it. And we did lots of things with the public. And what I really wanted to do was to do lots of things with small numbers of people. And I really wanted to know, well, what do lots of people think about this?

And through the BBC podcast that I do, I'm really lucky to have access to audiences of millions. And so we can ask people to take part in things like this. And one is the World Service Programme with a global audience. And so we collaborated with the BBC and asked people to take part because we couldn't find any research that was looking at what lots of people think about rest, partly because rest isn't very well defined. You know, your doctor might say to you,

oh, you need to make sure you get some rest now. But it's not clear, does that mean stay in bed all the time? Does that mean stay at home, don't go to work, but don't go out? Or don't work, but you can do other stuff? It's not really very well defined what rest means. We kind of think we know what it means. And so we wanted to know, well, how much rest are people getting? Does it vary in different places? Do people want more rest? And in fact, we found two thirds of people say that they want more rest. I often ask big audiences this in halls and theatres. It's

it's always two-thirds of people, roughly, who say that they want more rest, which I think is really interesting. And we found that the people who got more rest, they believed they got more rest than average and didn't feel in need of more rest, had well-being scores twice as high as those who felt in need of more rest. Now, obviously, that's a cross-sectional data. That's a snapshot in time. We can't know one caused the other, but I thought that was really instructive.

Coming up, Claudia talks about the 10 most popular forms of rest based on some polling she did, the health risks of fatigue, why a resting state in your brain is actually quite active, the restful act of daydreaming, heat therapies for reduced cortisol levels, and much more.

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We're going to get into some of the specific forms of rest and what we can learn. But the science, I believe, is pretty strong on the benefits of rest. On the flip side here, the science shows that fatigue is associated with memory lapses, blunted emotions, difficulty concentrating, accidents, arguments, misjudgments. While rest can lower our blood pressure and heart rate and boost concentration and increase resilience. Can you just say a little bit more about this?

Yeah, so it's really interesting. So obviously sleep is important for all these things too. But I think that often we think that what we need to do is plow on and that particularly if we're, say, up against a deadline, that what we need to do is carry on going and not take a break and that just sticking at it is how we will get through something. And it's actually, the evidence just shows that's not the case. I mean, there's German research showing that people often

delay having a break. They think they'll do it when they've finished. They'll finish this bit of work or this project, and then they'll go and make a cup of tea or whatever. And this will be their reward. And that actually, even micro breaks of two minutes make a difference. And so even if you go and get that cup of tea or drink and come back to your desk, then this kind of resets you and allows you to concentrate better.

And the opposite of that is, as you say, you know, we just get, if we're fatigued, people end up having more arguments and are much more likely to misunderstand what other people say. We know that when we're tired, there's, you know, plenty of research showing that we take shortcuts cognitively. If we're really tired, we just can't take into account everything going on. We're more likely to think that somebody has said something when somebody said something that it's about us and that they are, you know, cross with us. And we might take something personally rather than think, oh, well, maybe they're tired.

And we don't take as many different factors into account if we're tired, which is why it can lead to all of those things. And actually, we concentrate better. Even if we've just stopped for two minutes, we can then concentrate again. Many, many jobs and tasks now aren't about pure graft in a way. They're about doing it well. And so they're about concentration.

creativity or relationships with people and saying things in the right way. Wording things in the right way in emails is really important now for many people's work. And you're more likely to do all of these things better if you've just had a break, even if it's that really short break.

And there's been lots of research on micro breaks. One study I'm thinking of in an office, they got people to take micro breaks throughout the day and they just, you know, lent their eyes back in their chair and perhaps shut their eyes for a couple of minutes or they could stare out of the window or doodle or go and get a drink, come back to their desk. And at the end of the day, they had a wellbeing levels that were higher than other people. And they felt that their day hadn't been as taxing. It is tempting to just not even take short breaks. Whereas, you know, there's so much evidence that it's good for us. So,

One of the many things I believe I should take from everything you just said is we shouldn't look at breaks purely as a reward. Taking breaks should be part of the process.

Yes, certainly. Yeah. Some people suggest doing things like putting breaks in your diary. And if it's a shared diary online, you know, that other people can see and call it something else. If you don't want it to look like it's a break, sometimes people are worried about looking like people will just take no notice of it and book something into it if it's the break. So you may need to look like something else. But yeah, we should build that into the process.

And that is a thing that since looking at all the research on this and doing the research myself, that is one thing I have really taken on board in my own life. And so I love gardening the most. It's the most thing I find is the most restful. I have a little garden.

and a tiny greenhouse. And if I was working from home, I did used to every so often, you know, go out to my garden and muck about five minutes because I can't resist a bit of deadheading and things. But I used to feel guilty about it and think that I shouldn't. Since doing this work, I never feel guilty about doing that now. I think, well, this is protecting my mental health. I wouldn't feel guilty if I went for a run, which protects your physical health and your mental health. So I shouldn't feel guilty about this either. This is what's allowing me to continue and work at the, say, the pace that I'm working at. Let me pick up on that though, because

When I pitch rest on this show and in giving speeches, I generally make an optimizer's case for it, that it's good for your productivity. And yet I know and I believe you would agree with this or I suspect you would agree with this, that we shouldn't have to make that case. No, no, I think we absolutely shouldn't have to make that case. But I think it's often what really convinces people if we do. So, yes, it shouldn't all be about making us all more productive because is that the entire point of life?

that's not where we're necessarily going to find meaning. I mean, it might be because the thing you're doing might be the thing that gives you meaning and you need some effort and concentration to be able to do that. But yeah, I think it shouldn't have to be that. But it's interesting that lots of organizations and companies ask, will I come and talk to staff about rest? And they're very interested in me talking about how this could lead to better productivity. But in a way, I'm more interested in the fact that it can lead to better mental health.

And that if it leads to us having fewer arguments and feeling better and having higher levels of well-being, that really matters just as much as being productive. But I think it's still difficult to get away from increased or at least not decreased productivity being a very persuasive argument to some people. Yeah. I don't know if this is helpful, but I do think we're moving into an era where

where there will be a more capacious understanding of what productivity means. Just as you hinted at earlier that it's not just about the quantity of work you're producing, it's about the quality of the relationships.

with the people with whom you are working. And I think this is particularly important as we move into an era of AI where we will need actual intelligence, not just artificial intelligence, emotional intelligence, because so many of the jobs that are just pure work where we're just like, it's commodifiable work that you just get the shit done. Robots and AI will do it. So what we're going to need are people who know how to work with other people to do the things that machines can't do.

And so in that sense, rest will become, I think, even more significant part of productivity because it will allow you to function better with other humans. Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. I think it's going to become more and more important and more and more appreciated because those human qualities are going to be what's going to matter most of all. And it's not going to be the daily grind of how long can you keep going with this? It's how well can you do it and how creatively and differently and differently from what artificial intelligence can do, can you do it?

Let's go through the 10 most popular forms of rest according to the survey that you ran. I'll read them out and then maybe we'll just talk about some of them. Number 10 was mindfulness. Nine, watching TV. Eight, daydreaming. Seven, a nice hot bath. Six, a good walk. Five, doing nothing in particular. Four, listening to music. Three, I want to be alone. Two, spending time in nature. And one...

So let's go back to the bottom of the list, or I guess it's the top, if we're going in descending order. Mindfulness. What did you learn about mindfulness? Yeah, so people put for this, we counted if people put mindfulness or meditation or praying. We counted all of those within this. And it was interesting, again, that this was more popular than people, say, spending time with their friends. And I know, of course, you're so familiar with all the research on mindfulness and the differences that it can make to people. And it's...

In a sense, it's interesting, I think, to think about the relationship between mindfulness and meditation and restfulness, because particularly when people are learning, people will say, well, it's really hard. It's not restful. It's really hard.

Maybe it's something about the fact that it forces you to set time aside. It forces you to not be doing something else for a while. So does that make it inherently restful that you can't be being busy with something else while you're doing it? Or is it that the actual process itself obviously is calming down those thoughts and that you're observing your thoughts come and go and changing your state of awareness? I'd be interested to know what you think, actually. What I think about the relationship between mindfulness and rest? Yeah. Yeah.

For me, it's rest in that I'm not trying to do anything, to go anywhere, to be anything, to get anything completed. I'm just throwing open the doors to whatever's happening in the mind and the body. I think it takes a while to get there. It can feel very much like doing in the beginning, and that's fine. And yet I still would pitch it as a form of rest in the cultish early stages because you are...

Stopping the forward momentum. You're taking yourself out of the traffic, out of the never ending stream of forward momentum and toppling forward momentum.

to just sit and see what it's like to be you for a little while. And I think that's what's so interesting about rest is that it's really hard to discuss rest without discussing what it's in opposition to. And that, you know, you immediately said you're ceasing doing those other things. And it's almost as if rest only exists in opposition to the doing. And I think that's,

Rest really is about the rhythms of rest and activity in your life. My message isn't a kind of charter for laziness of we must all do nothing all the time. It's about getting those rhythms of rest and activity to work well for us.

Yes. I mean, just to harken back to my daily schedule, which I crafted upon interviewing people like you who know a lot about rest, it is about a rhythm. I know what time of day I'm the sharpest and I structure my most intense work around that. It's the morning, but I don't push. I've seen some data to show that more than like 90 minutes of intense focus is very hard for a human being to keep up. So I generally stop. Maybe I'll go a little longer or a little shorter based on what

what signals I'm getting from my body. Then I'll sit for a while. Then I'll go back to it. Usually the second round is shorter and then I'll exercise. It really is this ebb and flow, which is,

makes a lot of sense to me. Definitely, definitely. Just to note, not everybody's in control of their own schedule. So I recognize how lucky I am. Yeah. And so sometimes, yeah, people have got to do a really long stretch and they have no alternative for that. And I think that's also interesting when people aren't in control of their own breaks at all. There are many workplaces that will give people exact moments when they can have their break and they can't choose at all. And I think that's more difficult.

because you can't then decide the time when you need it and when it would be best for you. And there are also, of course, many workplaces where people, I assume this is also the case in the US, but tell me if I'm wrong, where people used to take lunch breaks and have lunch hours. And now it almost has to be kind of your birthday for there to be an excuse to take a whole lunch hour. Or it's kind of, well, where are you going? What do you mean? What are you doing? Because everyone's got so much to do. And it's very common to see people maybe going, getting some food or heating up some food, but bringing it

back to their desk or wherever it is they're working. And that actually the hour-long lunch break seems to kind of be a thing of the past. So what do you recommend for people who don't have control of their own schedule and, you know, aren't as lucky as me? What do you recommend? Then I think what they need to do is to choose really carefully what activity to do in the break that they do get.

As you know, certainly here, legally, people do have to have certain breaks. And assuming the employer is following that law and is giving people the breaks, then I think it's deciding what are you going to do with that break time? Sometimes it's quite tempting to do something else that feels a bit like work, which might be looking at your emails or sorting out admin, which you may have to do because that may be your only opportunity to do it, particularly if you're not working somewhere flexible where you're allowed to do the odd bit of other thing that you need to do.

But it may be choosing which activity is it that even after 15 minutes of it makes you feel refreshed and restored. And I talk about creating your own prescription for rest, your perfect prescription for rest. And it means choosing that activity depending on where you're allowed to be for your break. You may be able to go for a walk around the block and go outside, which definitely makes a difference if you can do that. Maybe you're...

working right next to a motorway and you can't do that. In which case, is there some music you could listen to? Is it socializing with friends and maybe not talking about work that might make a difference at that time? Is there a way of being out in nature? Is it reading? Is there a book that you can read in that time? But to try to make sure 15 minutes of that time is spent doing something that you find restful and refreshing. Many of us revert to our phones and just scroll whenever we get a break. What are your thoughts on the wisdom of that?

Yeah, I think it really depends. I mean, I think it's easy to kind of blame phones for everything. And people will say, oh, look on the train, everyone's staring at their phones. People used to read books. Now, some people will be reading books on their phones. Some people are trying to book a doctor's appointment or say happy birthday to their mother, arranging social events. People

People talk about mindless scrolling. People are not necessarily doing that. There's so many different things they might be doing on that. I think the trouble is that it can feel a bit like work, but it may not feel like work if you're deliberately watching, I don't know, an entertaining video. If you want to watch penguins going down slides and find that takes you away from yourself for a moment, then I try really hard not to be too kind of judgmental about what people think.

want to do with their break time, if they feel it's something that is refreshing them, that's distracting them from what they were doing, that makes them feel better afterwards when they've stopped. If it doesn't, if you're feeling just as tired after your break and you've just been looking at your phone all the time, then maybe that isn't the thing that's the best thing for you to be doing. I just want to echo that. I've mentioned this on the show before, so I apologize for the repetition to the loyal and attentive listener. I completely agree with

your reluctance to mindlessly and reflexively blame the phone for every social ill and all the problems with our mental health. I think the phone is a culprit in many ways, but not every way. And I personally will sometimes take a break and go on TikTok.

I have taught the algorithm to only feed me animal videos and comedy. So it is genuinely a break for me. I would also say that I've learned over time to listen to my body, get a sense of, you know, how tired am I, what's actually restorative. And there are times when I know having more tech in my face is not going to be the rest I need. In fact, it's to go see which cat is up for socializing with me or taking a walk or whatever it is. And

And this is, again, echoing what you said. It's about getting in touch with what works for you. Yeah. And I think it's about making an active decision about that and what you're going to do, which might be, say, doing Wordle on your phone, you know, and that is...

It makes you concentrate on something that's different and is fun to see how fast you can do it and how many goes you can do it and how other people do it as well. And again, it's something different from what you were doing before. But I think it's a question of doing it purposefully, you know, deciding what you're going to do with that time, because breaks are precious in a way, particularly if someone else is in charge of your schedule, then breaks are even more precious.

Yes. Getting back to your list. So 10 was mindfulness. Nine was watching TV, which we've, I think, fully litigated. Number eight is daydreaming. And I was interested in this because you said before, daydreaming is good if you're not ruminating.

I believe I've seen some data. It's about 15 years old now, but there was a study, quite a famous study done at Harvard where I think the title of it was a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. They pinged people throughout the day and said, what are you doing right now? How happy are you? And when people were mind wandering, generally speaking, they were unhappy because our default mode is to, you know, self-criticize or compare ourselves to other people or want stuff or whatever.

So say more about how daydreaming actually can be restful. So it does all depend. So lots of research since then has looked more specifically at what it is people are daydreaming about at that moment. And that, yes, if you're ruminating and you're thinking about

your own flaws and your own faults and how you said something stupid and you shouldn't have said that and you're running over and over it in your mind and then thinking this means you're always going to be stupid and that everyone thinks that and that you'll always be this like this in the future and then you're worrying about the future if you're worrying then you might not be able to help it but it's not a form of daydreaming that's going to be increasing your well-being but if what you're doing is thinking about what shall I do tonight and what shall I do at the weekend and

And, you know, I wonder what would happen if you tried to, you know, would it be possible to climb that building or just looking at things like, you know, how many people would need to stand on each other's shoulders to get to the top of that tree? If you're doing that kind of thing where you're just kind of wondering about the world or when you're on the train and you see the train seats, what was the meeting like where they chose this exact pattern for the train seats? Did they have loads of patterns in mind and then they chose that? That's the kind of thing I sit and think about on trains.

And that this is a nice break from the things you really do need to be thinking about. In a sense that we know that now, and we didn't know this in the 90s, it wasn't realized that there was such a thing as the resting state in the brain. And that if you put people in a brain scanner and you want to know which parts of the brain are responsible for when people do arithmetic and you're getting them to do mental arithmetic.

Or you're getting them to do word games and looking at that. In between of those, they get people to stare at a cross. It's like a black and white cross on a background. And you just stare at that cross for a couple of minutes. And the idea was it resets your brain ready for the next bit and that you will rest in that time. It's called the resting state.

And what they discovered in the 90s was that the brain doesn't rest during this moment at all. What it does is it goes absolutely haywire. It thinks of everything. But in a very organized way, there's certain different parts of the brain. You mentioned the default mode networks. Certain different parts of the brain are recruited to do this and that this seems to happen every time. And when one of the earliest papers was put in to be published and went for peer review, the other academics actually thought they must have got the data the wrong way around and that this was a mistake because it's

The brain couldn't possibly be more active when you weren't doing a task than when you had to do some maths. And so now there've been thousands of studies done on the resting state. And we know that what the brain wants to do whenever it's left for a moment is to go off daydreaming and think about all sorts of things. And there's been all sorts of

speculation about why this might be and that this might be part of us organizing our thoughts and organizing our memories, similar to the hypotheses about dreaming and how the reason that we dream might be to get your memories all sorted and kind of consolidated in your brain and make connections between things, which is why dreams can be so bizarre. But the daydreaming might be doing something a bit similar that, yeah, maybe you are thinking about a conversation you had, not necessarily a bad one, but just thinking, what did they really mean by that?

And that there's nothing wrong with these thinking. If you get people to daydream for a while and then give them a creative problem-solving task, they actually do that better when they've been allowed to daydream for a while. And we might be trying out future scenarios and trying them out in our mind in case something happens to try to work out, well, what would we do in that situation? And could possibly even use that if a situation arose.

So I think daydreaming is not all bad at all. And I think it's really interesting that so many people put that down as something that they did find restful, as something that they like doing, you know, which is why people like, you know, staring out of the window. You're not always just thinking about, say, the fields you're passing on the train. Right. So I guess the question practically becomes, you know, how do you...

draw the line? How do you make sure you're doing the right kind of daydreaming if you want a little bit more rest? Yeah. So I think then it becomes a question of how to, if what you find is that you're worrying a lot, then there are all sorts of different strategies for how people can worry less. And one of them, I really liked the work by a Dutch clinical psychologist called Ad Kerkhoff,

And he looks a lot at how you can worry less by doing things like, and he's done lots of studies on this, setting aside a particular time each day to worry. And so you sit down at the table and write down all your worries. And if you start worrying at a different time of day when you're daydreaming and those thoughts will come into your head that you think, no, I'll save that for later. And that this really is effective for people. So I think it's a question of, you don't want another thing to worry about, which is are you daydreaming about the wrong thing? But that if you find you're worrying a lot,

than to start to use the strategies for worrying less. That's great. Okay, so eight was daydreaming. Number seven on your list that was produced after having done this large survey of people and what are their favorite modalities for rest. Number seven is a nice hot bath, which, you know, first can sound okay, fine, but actually there's quite a bit of research around

Heat as a healthy way to rest the body. And, you know, I sit in a sauna now pretty regularly. It's hard, but it is a form of rest. I mean, so it's not as relaxing as a as a bath, but it is very good for the body.

Yeah, yeah. And seems to be good for the mind as well. So there was an interesting study that was done in 2018. It's a randomized controlled trial, so the best kind, where they used, I mean, they called them hypothermic baths, but you know, hot baths, in fact, very hot baths, they were 40 degrees, and they kept them hot, they kept them topped up. And they looked at students with depression, and they had baths in the afternoons.

twice a week for eight weeks. And then another group did aerobics lessons at the same time. They were equally effective. And most of the hot bath research actually is from Japan. There's lots of hot bath research that's been done in Japan. And sometimes where they prescribe people an hour and a half long hot baths in the afternoon, which people seem to like. Now, again, that could be as they're getting to rest for an hour and a half, which is nice. Or is there something very specific that the heat is doing? There

There's been some studies finding it seems to reduce cortisol levels, levels of the stress hormone. And of course, you know, people have been taking the waters in spas with certain minerals in the water for centuries and have known that they like this, that this seems like a fun, relaxing thing to do. There was even a study I liked where they were trying to help young footballers to sleep well the night before a big match. And because people would be often anxious and not sleep well and then be tired next day. And so they had them having hot showers not long before they went to bed.

There's lots of work on sleep and hot baths as well, where the key is not to do it too late because your falling temperature helps you sleep because falling temperature is what your body naturally does. So you don't want to do it very last thing. But if you do it like half an hour or an hour before you want to go to bed, then your body will be falling already. It's temperature and that might help you. That's a good reminder for me as an insomniac. I've got lots of weapons in my arsenal, but I actually don't use hot showers. Mental note.

Coming up, Claudia talks about why some forms of movement and exercise can be very restful. The number one most restful activity based on her research and practical advice for incorporating more rest into your busy life. I'm not big on trends. I'm not, you know, following the latest from the runways in Paris. But I am big on clothes that feel good and last. That's why I keep going back to Quince. Their lightweight layers and high quality staples have become my everyday essentials.

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You mentioned aerobics. It's interesting to me that nowhere in the top 10 do we find exercise, although we're now on number six and it's a good walk, which is in the neighborhood of exercise. I'd be curious to hear more from you about that. Yeah.

So 38% of people put walking down, but 16% of people did put exercise down. So that's not enough to get into the top 10, but 16% of people did say that. 8% of people said that they found running restful. And I did separate interviews as well. And in some of those interviews, I talked to some people who were really, really into exercise. And they would say that in a way, they felt that their minds couldn't stop

whirring and their minds couldn't rest until they'd exerted their bodies enough. And I think this is quite a lot of people do find with exercise. And so I think it's interesting that exercise can be classed as restful at all. And I would put running as well, and jogging is more what I do, but I'd put that as one of my top three. Along with gardening and hot baths, I would personally have running as one of them.

For a while, I had a sprained ankle and couldn't do it. And I noticed how much I missed it psychologically as well as physically. And I think, again, it's a good one because you don't have to feel guilty while you're doing it because you know it's good for you. And I think that is part of it. I think the walking is interesting because I think there's something about walking in particular that's just the right speed for you not to get bored because there's always something else to look at because you're moving. So it's fast enough to distract us, but slow enough to still let the mind wander a bit. And again, people don't feel guilty while they're doing it.

Tons of research to show that walking is good for you. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to just hit a few of the other entries in this top 10 here because I do want to get to some practical advice on how to get better at rest given that most of us or many of us feel guilty about it. So number five is doing nothing in particular. Four is listening to music. Three is I want to be alone. And as you mentioned earlier,

The key words there are I want to be alone because loneliness is not very healthy. Two is spending time in nature. Tons of research about the benefits of nature. And one is reading. So I'd love to get you to say more about reading. I recently heard this term bibliotherapy, that reading really can be used as a way to boost your mental health. So I'd be curious to hear more from you on that.

Yeah, reading, it's really interesting that this came to happen. We were a bit surprised because obviously reading involves cognitive effort. You've got to read the words, make sense of the words, work out what that means, remember what that means compared with what just happened before and how all that makes sense, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, it involves some effort. 58% of people put down reading and they were more likely to score high on flourishing if they were people who put that down. But I think what's really interesting about a book is you

It allows us to escape because you escape out of your life into either somebody else's or somewhere else's, say, if it's a book maybe about a place or about animals or whatever it's about. It often allows you to empathize and reflect. And we know there's lots of research showing how reading novels in particular can improve people's levels of empathy. But also, I think it allows you to be alone. And we talked about why being alone might be important, but to be alone with company. And

and company that you can just put down whenever you like. You haven't got to worry about what the book thinks, so they haven't got to join in. You can leave it whenever you like. But also, I think it's such a jumping off point for daydreaming. We've all had that experience where psychologists slightly judgmentally call a mindless reading, which is where your eyes go all the way down to the bottom of the page, and then you realize you haven't taken any of it in. You go back, you do it again, you realize you still haven't taken any of it in, and maybe the third time you give up.

Really interesting research by a neuroscientist called Johnny Smallwood has found that by using eye tracking devices, they could actually see whether people were looking at the words and where they were looking. And when people weren't concentrating, their eyes did indeed go across and down, across and down, across and down. But if you're concentrating, you pause if you get to a really unusual word or a really long word. I mean, just for a millisecond.

you pause slightly to take it in. But if people are not concentrating, they do it at an absolutely constant, consistent level all the way down. So you can tell when people are concentrating or not. And they did indeed find that quite a lot of the time, people aren't concentrating on what they're reading. But I think that's fine. Even if it's my book, I think that's fine because you're using it restfully as this jumping off point for daydreaming, maybe thinking about something else.

And it might remind you of things that have happened in your life or something you're thinking of doing. And there've even been studies where it's been used as pain relief. There they found they looked at different types of stories and whether they were complicated or not. And they found that in order to give you some pain relief, a story needed to be quite complex and quite puzzling so that you really had to concentrate on it. And they found that the emotional effect of reading, in particular novels, can stay with people for

for days. And Virginia Woolf used to say, oh, you know, I read a book and I wait for the dust to settle. It will return, but differently. And so you can often carry on mulling over these you've read in your head. So I think it's really interesting that reading came top. And we wondered at first, you know, are people just saying this to try and look good? Do they want to look clever? But many thousands of people were perfectly prepared to admit that doing nothing was what they found restful. So I think we can kind of take people at their word on that. And I think that also the

Reading can help you find meaning in your own life as well. So I think it's because reading is so multifaceted and it didn't seem to matter what people were reading, which I thought was interesting. It's an amazing list. It's really interesting. Okay, so let me ask you in closing here, what kind of advice do you have for the restless, the sheepishly restless? How do we get better at this given all of the impediments psychologically and externally?

I think the first thing is to remember what all the benefits are. If you are prone to feeling guilty about resting is to then to remind yourself, but look at all these benefits it's got. Look at these benefits it's going to have for my well-being and my mental health. And in order to protect those and protect those into the future, just as I might exercise, then I'm going to do some resting as well because this will be good for me.

There can be the problem, of course, that what if you've got three jobs and you're caring for kids maybe or adults or family, whoever it is, that you just don't have time at this moment to fit any rest in. And that's when there are two things that people can do. One is to make the most of these micro breaks that even if there's two minutes while you're waiting for the kettle to boil for the tea you've got to make for somebody else.

then at that moment, what can you do in those two minutes? All the things you were told not to do at school, like doodling and staring out of the window, all the fun things that maybe those might make a difference.

Another thing, if you haven't got any time, you can do is to reframe wasted time as restful time. So if you've got to, I don't know, go and queue somewhere to pick up a parcel or whatever it is, then you may think, oh, your train is late. You may think, oh, this is really annoying. I've got so much to do. And now it's going to be another 15 minutes waiting here. You could reframe that as thinking,

I have got loads to do. But if somebody said to me at another point, you know what, you can have 15 minutes doing nothing now if you like. Wouldn't I like that? Here is a break. Here is my 15 minutes. And I'm going to stare and watch the world go by and see it as a break, admittedly an enforced break, rather than as time wasted. So I think that can really help if you're really, really busy.

And then you can add these small restful moments to your life, as well as putting breaks in your diary. Accepting your to-do list will never end, I think, is really important. You may get through your to-do list one day, but it will still be big again the next. There's always going to be things we've got to do. So we need to decide which we really need to do now and which we don't.

I think it's tempting to think, well, I'll just get all this done now because in the future I'll have more spare time. And we have this optimism bias that means we think we'll have more spare time in the future. We may have in the distant future, but we probably won't have more time, say this time next year than we do now, unless we're going to do something very differently.

So it's a question of accepting that, yeah, you can't get through your to-do list. It will already be there. And then I think doing this personal prescription for rest, really thinking and observing yourself for a little while to think, when is it that I feel really good and really refreshed after something? What is the 10 minutes or 15 minute activity I can do that does make me feel really refreshed? And it will be different for everybody. So this is why I'm not saying, oh, what you must do is

meditate and go for a walk and do this and that people need to choose which of these ones they like because as we saw from the research they don't all work for everybody it's about which ones work for you and how you can build those into your life and see them positively without feeling guilty what's the thing that really lets you switch off and that stops those worries whirring around in your mind and if you can find that thing those two or three things and try and build those in then you can build in more rest but the main insight so many people have come up to me after things and

and said, just knowing that rest is good for you has made the biggest difference to them because now they don't feel guilty anymore. I think that's kind of amazing that a single thing can make a difference like that is incredible. I love that. You also say that we should consider improving our capacity to say no to things. Yes, because sometimes what we are saying is yes to everything. And particularly if it's in the future, because we have this

that in the future we'll have more time. We think, oh, well, that's next year or that's a few months' time. Yes, I'll say yes to that, even though it means traveling far away. There's a kind of trick you can play on yourself, which is to think, well, could I do this next week?

how would I feel if I knew that it was next week I had to do this? And if you're thinking, well, there's no way I could do that, that would be a nightmare, then maybe don't do it in three months time either. And are you saying yes to things that you don't have to do or don't particularly want to do, but feel you should do? Now, sometimes you need to help other people and that's lovely. And my next book was about kindness. So I don't want people to stop being kind. But I think

I think it's really important to just work out, well, how much can you realistically fit in? And would it improve your well-being to fit in a little bit less? Would you feel less overwhelmed if you did that? Another thing I believe you recommend is creating a personalized box of rest containing items that facilitate relaxation.

Yeah, I think if you find that you can't sort of make yourself do it, then it's useful to have a box of rest. And that might have in it, I don't know, a bit of knitting or a book or something else you find rest for, you know, I don't know, some bubble bath or something like that. You can then kind of go to your box when you're feeling in need of something. And this will give you some inspiration for what you might do that might help you to feel a little bit more rested. I think that can be a nice thing to do.

Claudia, is there something you were hoping we would get to that we haven't yet gotten to? No, I don't think so. I think we've covered loads, which is great. Final question then. Can you remind everybody of the name of your book on rest, also your book on kindness and anything and your podcast? And just please step into the plug zone and let us know what we should be. If we want more from you, how can we get it? Where can we get it?

Yeah, so my book about rest is called The Art of Rest, which is available all over the place. My next book is called The Keys to Kindness, which is all about the massive benefits that there are for all of us in being kinder, observing more kindness around us, appreciating the kindness we receive from others.

So there's lots about the science of kindness in there. And then also I have two podcasts. One is called Health Check, which is on the BBC World Service, but available wherever you get your podcasts, which is all about global health and well-being. The other one is about psychology and neuroscience and mental health and all the latest research. And that is called All in the Mind. And that's another BBC podcast available wherever you get your podcasts. And the new series of that, the first one of those just dropped today.

So all sorts of new, brand new things we're going to talk about there. Awesome. Claudia Hammond, thanks for your work. Thanks for your time. It was great to talk to you. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks for your questions. Thanks again to Claudia. Don't forget to check out the Bespoke podcast.

companion guided meditation for this episode over at danharris.com. It's from Carl Lai, one of my favorite meditation teachers, and it's all about giving yourself permission to rest. We're doing guided meditations that accompany every episode during the month of June, so you can get a lot more stuff over on danharris.com. Plus, I do twice-monthly live guided meditations where you can ask me questions. We've got a lot going on over there. Come check it out.

Finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.