Don’t worry, be lazy Don’t feel guilty about kicking back and relaxing this summer.

It’s tempting to kick back and relax over the warm summer days. Happily, there’s scientific proof that this is exactly the right thing to do

SLOW DOWN AND IMPROVE YOUR HEALTH Taking time out from the daily grind can benefit both body and mind

In a now-famous study carried out in 1999, psychologist Dr Robert Levine analysed the pace of life in cities in 31 countries, measuring things such as the speed at which people walk and the time it takes post office staff to hand out stamps. He found that the fastest pace of life was in Western Europe and Japan, and the fastest-living countries also had the highest rates of coronary heart disease. When British psychologist Prof Richard Wiseman repeated the experiment in 2006 by simply measuring walking speed, he found the pace of life had increased by 10 per cent.

The bigger the city, the faster our pace of life, and we’re living faster than ever before. Dr Stephanie Brown, a psychologist who’s written a book on the topic, describes our hunger for fast-paced living as an addiction. “People can’t stop wanting to go faster,” says Brown. “You begin to need more and more time on the computer. People talk about sleeping with their phones. You start to log on first thing in the morning. You cannot not do it. Your behaviours start looking like that first drink in the morning. You need it.” But there are signs of recognition of the problem. “Society is hitting a tipping point,” says Brown. “I hope it’s going to become embarrassing to have your phone out while you’re eating dinner.”

Brown suggests taking baby steps to overcome our addiction to living fast – perhaps first reducing the amount of time we spend checking email on our phones each day by five minutes, then introducing other steps. She says our gadgets are likely to have in-built limits as culture changes. Apple has already announced that iOS 12 lets users monitor how much time they’re spending on their devices and apps.

As well as our overall pace of life, there’s good reason to slow down a few other things, such as how quickly we eat. A study of nearly 60,000 Japanese people showed that those who ate slowly, or at ‘normal speed’ were less likely to become overweight than those who gobbled. It’s thought that it takes 15 to 20 minutes for our body’s feedback mechanisms to tell us we’re full, so eating more slowly gives more of an opportunity for this to kick in.