It’s not just about great sleep – we need to perfect the art of deep rest too

As the clocks go back and the evenings draw in, you might feel like hunkering down, staying cosy and doing a little bit less. This is the perfect time to start embracing the art of rest, but don’t be disappointed when I warn that to do so can also involve getting outside and even exercising.

The importance of having enough sleep is now well understood and long gone are the days when we were impressed by Margaret Thatcher getting by on four hours a night. But also important, yet less valued, is getting enough rest.

In 2016, I collaborated on the world’s largest study on rest with a team of psychologists from Durham University. Eighteen thousand people from 135 countries chose to take part. More than two-thirds of them said they felt in need of more rest. It was a finding that reflects the fact that many of us feel constantly busy and under pressure and that being busy is a mark of status and success in the 21st century.

On top of the demands of work, family and our always-connected culture, some of us have added our own social and lifestyle demands to the list. We don’t want to miss out on anything.

We want to excel at everything – getting fitter, looking good, cooking amazing meals when friends come around, learning mindfulness, taking up pottery. All these pastimes can be satisfying, but the quantity of pressures on our time can leave us with a rest deficit. Yet much as we might yearn for it, few of us feel we can prioritise it.

When was the last working day where you stopped for a proper morning tea break, let alone took a whole hour for lunch? Our phones allow us to work on the way to work and on the way home instead of spending the commute disengaging from our day-to-day by watching the world go by. And hybrid working, which undoubtedly has its benefits, has a downside too. The boundaries between work time and downtime are blurred if “going to work” and “leaving for home” only means switching your laptop on or off. There’s always the temptation to get ahead by completing one more task or tackling that backlog of emails.

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A life this busy can bring negative consequences. There’s good evidence that fatigue is associated with lapses in memory, blunted emotions, difficulty concentrating, misunderstandings and arguments with other people, poor judgement and even accidents.

By contrast, taking breaks can lower our blood pressure and heart rate, boost concentration levels and increase resilience against stress. Just a 10-minute break in a darkened room has a demonstrable effect on memory, for example. People with amnesia can find memory tasks such as learning lists of words particularly hard, but in one study a short break improved the percentage of words people could recall from 14 to 49 per cent.

And when it comes to the way we feel, in The Rest Test, people who said they got more rest than the average person and who didn’t feel in need of more rest, had wellbeing scores twice as high as those who had a rest deficit.

Yet despite all this evidence on the benefits of rest for our minds and our bodies, we can fear taking a break. Nearly one in 10 respondents told us they felt guilty whenever they rested. And a German study has found that it’s common for people to postpone breaks as a reward after they’ve finished a task, rather than taking a break to help them while they are still working.

If you want to work efficiently this could be precisely the wrong approach to take. Research from South Korea has shown that taking hourly microbreaks of as little as two minutes can improve concentration and wellbeing. So, rather than staring fixedly at your computer, you might want to start staring out of the window, doodling, or simply closing your eyes for a moment. If your boss queries what you’re doing, you can tell them you’re increasing your productivity based on the best scientific evidence!

A decent rest can leave us feeling refreshed and help us to keep on top of all the demands we face. So how do we get more of it and ensure that rest and relaxation are not squeezed out of our lives? And thinking you can make up for it with a big lie-in at the weekends isn’t the solution you might want it to be.

In The Rest Test, we asked people to tell us which activities they found the most restful. There were a few surprises. For instance, socialising with friends and eating didn’t make it into the top 10, while the top five activities were all things that people often do by themselves like reading or being on their own.

It seems many of us need a break from others in order to feel refreshed and the reason for that is that whenever we have company we put some effort into paying attention to what the other person is thinking and feeling, which can be wearing. In second place was spending time in nature and “a good walk” came sixth.

This points to an important aspect of rest. It doesn’t have to involve loafing about or being sedentary. Eight per cent of our respondents even told us that they found running restful. Some people find that to quieten their minds, to stop the ceaseless whirring of their thoughts, they need to exert their bodies to the max.

However, a long run or a strenuous gym session might not work for you. Maybe you identify with the 58 per cent of respondents of the The Rest Test who listed reading as their favourite restful activity. This is an activity that involves cognitive effort, but through that effort you escape into another world, into someone else’s life, taking you away from your worries and stresses.

Watching TV is another way we can do this, but while reading tends to be seen as worthwhile, TV is sometimes dismissed as a guilty pleasure. We should beware of this idea, though, because a German study entitled The Guilty Couch Potato found that if people felt guilty when they watched TV they felt less refreshed afterwards, which, of course, defeats the object.

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Having examined each of the most popular restful activities for my book, The Art of Rest, I’d say the essential ingredient for true rest is an activity that distracts you from your everyday concerns, allows your mind to slow down, gives you a break from other people, and is guilt-free.

As for how you become more rested, you need to start by permitting yourself to rest, and to truly value it. Remind yourself that this break will bring you both psychological and physical benefits and that just as you exercise to protect your health, taking a break protects it too.

This is not a charter for laziness or never doing anything. What matters are the rhythms of rest and activity. To work out your own personal prescription for rest, think of the two or three activities that make you feel restored and how you might fit 15 minutes a day of something restful.

This isn’t always easy, especially if you are caring for others and/or working long hours. So don’t forget the impact that microbreaks can have. And if you find yourself irritated in the queue at the post office or waiting for a delayed train, reframe that wasted time as an unforeseen chance to rest.

So, as autumn turns to winter in the coming weeks, embrace the opportunities to laze by the fire or enjoy a long, hot bath. But look outside too, because true rest, for the mind as well as for the body can involve exercise and getting out into nature, even when it’s cold.

Claudia Hammond is the author of ‘The Art of Rest’ published by Canongate