With so much to juggle in our lives it can be easy to put rest on the back burner. Even when we think we're switching off, very often that means scrolling on our phones, overthinking something or not putting the work into making sure our night's sleep is a good one.
One solution is "micro breaking", taking short, guilt-free mini rest during our day. Claudia Hammond, Author of The Art of Rest, joined Drivetime to talk about the importance of rest and how to know if you're properly resting.
While many of us set aside time for rest, be it a holiday or waiting until the next bank holiday to shore up those hours of sleep, Hammond suggests making time every day for a mini reset, which improves memory, makes people feel more relaxed, aids concentration and more.
"What we need to do is almost look in a way at the rhythms of rest and activity that we have so that we're not just going absolutely full pelt all the time all week, and then absolutely exhausted by the time we get to the weekend, if you do even get to stop at the weekend.
"They can be small breaks, they can be two minute breaks or 15 minutes or other short breaks", she said. "And to choose the things that are really, really restful but make us feel restored and fresh, because resting really does make a difference to our mental health."
She added that research that she took part in at Durham University showed that "people who get more rest on average and don't feel the need of more rest have wellbeing scores that are twice as high, so it really is good for us and something that is simple to do if you can find a way of fitting it in".
Choosing how you rest is the key thing, Hammond said.
"What's interesting is we asked people, and 18,000 responded to this big study called The Rest Test, and we looked at the activities that came up as the most restful, and anything to do with social media, being online, computers and stuff like that didn't even make it into the top 30 activities that people found restful.
"At number one was reading, which is interesting because reading involves some effort, you've got to think about it while you do it."
In the second spot was spending time in nature, while number three was being on your own, which was a common theme among the answers: "Almost as if what we slightly need is a little break from other people, however much you love them. With other people you've got to think about what they're feeling and what they're thinking."
However, being on your own doesn't have to mean sitting and doing nothing. "Lots of people find doing nothing quite hard", Hammond added.
Exercise was a strong contender, coming in at 15% of answers, which helped people to calm their minds. "It will be different things for different people", Hammond said.
Hammond says she encourages people to find two or three activities that they find restful and try and fit in 15 minutes of them a day. "It's really key to give yourself permission to do it, to say this is protecting your mental health."
However, if you're very short on time, she suggests reframing "any wasted time as rest". "If you've got to queue somewhere for something, that's really annoying but maybe you can try and think of that as 'I've been gifted a 10 minute rest here, I've got a 10 minute break where I haven't got to do anything but stare at the world going by.'"
To listen to the full interview, click above.
