Claudia Hammond is an award-winning author and psychology lecturer. She’s also a presenter for podcasts and radio shows such as BBC Radio 4’s All in the Mind and the Health Check on BBC World Service. Her other books include Mind Over Money, Time Warped, and Emotional Rollercoaster.
Claudia Hammond is a researcher who collaborated on ‘The Rest Test’, the world’s largest ever study into rest that explored people’s subjective experiences of rest. It was completed by 18,000 people across 135 different countries. The Art of Rest draws on these findings and the idea that rest is directly linked to well-being.
Today busyness has become a badge of honour. We want to say we're busy, yet at the same time we feel exhausted. Instead, we should start taking rest seriously as a method of self-care and this book can help us to work out how.
Counting down through the top ten activities which people find most restful, Hammond explains why rest matters, examines the science behind the results to establish what really works, and offers a roadmap for a new, more restful and balanced life.
The Art of Rest reveals that rest is not simple. We start to see that the subject is complicated partly because most of us are no good at resting. We are restless about rest. We feel guilty about it. We live in a culture obsessed with being busy – and this boasting about being busy is, Hammond argues, caught up with status. She summons Socrates to her side to warn us: “Beware the barrenness of a busy life.”
