PERMISSION TO DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING AT ALL!

Busyness has become a badge of honour but it comes with a cost, says broadcaster and psychology lecturer Claudia Hammond, who tells us we should make rest part of our daily lives

Why we should make rest a daily part of our lives

What’s your reply when someone asks you how your life is going? The chances are it’s something like mine: ‘Busy. Too busy.’ With many of us juggling demanding jobs, the needs of family and a social life, the answer may well be true. But saying you’re busy is also a claim to status. It makes you feel important, in demand. Busyness has become a badge of honour. It’s a badge we may aspire to, but wearing it comes at a cost.

Too many of us are overwhelmed by the amount we need to do – or feel we

should do. We are trying to manage full-time jobs, while looking after children and sometimes ageing parents, too. Even leisure time puts us under pressure, with many of us adopting strenuous fitness regimes or doing voluntary work instead of just relaxing.

We need to reframe rest as a positive activity

In a typical week, I juggle presenting my show All In The Mind on BBC Radio 4 with lecturing, writing articles and trying to make time for family and friends as well as staying fit and doing my share of chores at home. When I missed the deadline for completing my book The Art Of Rest, I worked every weekend between Christmas and Easter, all the while writing about the evidence for why taking a break is good for us!

The irony wasn’t lost on me and I realised that I needed to start practising what I was preaching and take rest more seriously myself. I’m still not very good at sitting down and doing nothing at all, but I do give myself permission to rest. I make time for gardening and running and have decided that, when I’m on a train, I won’t always work. Sometimes I stare out of the window and take a moment to pause, or even nap.

Modern work practices, technology and our 24/7 lifestyles have combined to make life today feel ceaselessly demanding. Thanks to our smartphones, we feel forever on call, knowing that when we are supposedly on a break, enjoying downtime, we can be interrupted by anyone at any moment. Even if we’re left in peace, the possibility that we might be interrupted can leave us unable to fully rest.

Small wonder, then, that the evidence shows we would like to get more rest. I got an insight into this when, as part of a two-year research project, I helped organise The Rest Test, the world’s largest survey on rest. There were more than 18,000 responses from 135 countries, and 68% of respondents from the UK said they had a rest deficit. It’s clear that rest matters.

We found that the more hours of rest people had the previous day, the higher their levels of wellbeing, until this reached five or six hours. We need to start taking ‘waking rest’ seriously in the same way that we value sleep.

The problem is that, despite the benefits, we don’t always find resting easy. When we asked people in our survey what words they would use to describe rest, they said things like ‘serene’ and ‘restorative’, but some also used words like ‘selfish’, ‘fidgety’ and ‘guilty’. The urge to be ‘doing something useful’ is very strong in our culture. We can’t resist being busy. We are back to the idea of busyness making us feel important, but we should try to embrace the rhythms of rest and busyness.

We need to reframe rest as a positive activity, rather than just seeing it as lazing around or doing nothing. We should allow ourselves to rest without feeling guilty about it, especially when we feel overwhelmed by life. We shouldn’t apologise for wanting a rest. We need to remember that it is beneficial for our mental health.

In The Rest Test, we asked people which activities they considered the most restful and it’s instructive that the top five were all activities that people tend to do alone, such as reading or listening to music. Perhaps the key to rest is to escape from other people for a while. The most restful pastimes allow us to lose the pressure to achieve, to forget our worries for a while and to let our minds wander.

So embrace rest. It’s good for you.  The Art Of Rest (Canongate) by Claudia Hammond is out now