The Art of Rest

How to Find Respite in the Modern Age

Claudia Hammond

• Editorial: Canongate Books
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786892812
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Storia africana

Shortlisted for the British Psychological Society Book Award for Popular ScienceMuch of value has been written about sleep, but rest is different; it is how we unwind, calm our minds and recharge our bodies. The Art of Rest draws on ground-breaking research Claudia Hammond collaborated on: 'The Rest Test', the largest global survey into rest ever undertaken, completed by 18, 000 people across 135 different countries. The survey revealed how people get rest and how it is directly linked to your sense of wellbeing.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.

1

READING

I bet you remember playing this game when you were a child. You wait until someone – hopefully an adult – is sitting on a chair with one leg crossed over the other and then, quick as a flash, you slice your hand sharply into the soft part at the front of their knee. Cue childish delight and adult protest, as their foot kicks out involuntarily.

Great fun, but why am I mentioning this at the beginning of a chapter about the restfulness of reading? Well, although it might seem obvious that it is relaxing to sit and read a book, surprisingly few experiments have looked into it. One notable study dates all the way back to 1928 and was conducted by a doctor we have already met: Edmund Jacobson from the University of Chicago. He was to become famous as the man who invented progressive relaxation (which was discussed in the chapter on Doing Nothing in Particular). This, if you recall, involves systematically clenching and relaxing each muscle in your body from your toes all the way up to your forehead as a way of calming yourself down.

You might also remember that Jacobson entitled his book on the subject You Must Relax!, suggesting he didn’t really understand how relaxation worked. In fact, he knew very well that when a doctor instructs their patient to relax, the patient tends to do the opposite and tense up. And in the context of measuring the knee reflex, which was the point of his 1928 study, the magnitude of the jerk increases if a person is tense to start with. Jacobson wanted to know which kind of activity might best allow patients to relax, blunting this involuntary reflex response.

The answer, of course, is reading.

Jacobson reached this conclusion via elaborate means. The description of the complex mechanical apparatus used in his experiment takes up more than a page of his scientific paper. Each participant sat in a Morris chair with one thigh attached to a board by leather straps. An automatic electromagnetic hammer set to administer gentle blows to the knee was held in a clamp, while a string and pulley system measured precisely the extent of the reflex reaction as the foot shot up into the air, a measurement Jacobson calls ‘the amplitude of the jerk’. Meanwhile, a set of levers and rods were in place to measure whether the knee itself moved.

In his paper, Jacobson mentions drily that at the start of the experiment five of the forty participants were ‘markedly nervous’, which is hardly surprising given they must have thought they’d entered a torture chamber. If all the straps, hammers and pulleys weren’t enough, the special sound-proofed boards fixed to the walls might have added to the anxiety of the volunteers, though in fact these boards were there to prevent any distraction from outside noise, rather than to muffle the screams of participants.

The whole set-up might seem rather ludicrous, yet Jacobson’s experiment yielded some interesting results. What he found was that if the hammer blows were too regular – every thirty seconds or so – the participants were not relaxed sufficiently by their reading to soften the knee jerk, but if the blows came at greater intervals, reading worked its magic and people did become calmer and calmer, as proved by progressively gentler knee reflex actions.

The study was far from perfect. For a start, the participants were instructed to read out loud, which isn’t how most people generally read to themselves. More importantly, there doesn’t appear to have been a control condition in which half the participants did no reading, so we can’t rule out the possibility that the volunteers simply grew accustomed to the banging on their knee and became more relaxed irrespective of their reading. However the experiment did show that most of the participants found reading relaxing, apart from three people diagnosed with ‘neuroticism’ and an unlucky volunteer called J.C. who ‘failed to relax’ due to ‘unusually tight strapping’.

But for all his study’s weaknesses, Jacobson was clearly on to something. Almost ninety years later, reading emerges in the Rest Test as the activity which is more restful than any other. An impressive 58 per cent of respondents selected it. And these people also seem to have cracked how to live the good life, as they were especially likely to score high on a scale which measures whether a person is flourishing, a concept which combines self-esteem, purpose, meaning and optimism.¹

Of course, those of a cynical disposition might wonder whether so many people ticked reading in our survey in order to appear cultured and intelligent, rather in the way sixth formers list reading as an interest on their application forms for university. The counter to this charge is that all the responses were anonymous and if respondents’ chief concern had been to appear studious, then it seems unlikely that ‘doing nothing’ would have appeared in the top five. I’m taking people at their word when they say they find reading relaxing.

Relaxing and Arousing

In fact, there are people who find they can’t relax unless they have a book with them.

BOOKWORMS REQUIRED

IF YOU READ A LOT OF LIGHT FICTION AND ENJOY IT VERY MUCH, PLEASE VOLUNTEER TO ADVANCE THE CAUSE OF SCIENCE

This advert was placed in South African newspapers in the 1980s by Victor Nell, a Zimbabwean clinical psychologist keen to recruit readers for a series of studies on people’s reading habits. Anyone who read at least one novel a week could take part. The average volunteer in fact read four books a week, while one family of four claimed that between them they read 101 books a month.² As a result of attracting all these voracious readers, Nell was able to carry out one of the most detailed studies of reading that we have, so it’s a study I’ll refer to a lot. My favourite question in it asked people how they would cope if they arrived at a strange hotel at their favourite time of day for reading and then realised they had nothing to read. The answers were aggregated into a ‘Frustration Index’ in which those who scored highest went as far as to say they would feel ‘desperate’, ‘desolate’ or ‘dispossessed’. So striking were the reactions that Nell suggests that these people could almost be said to be addicted to having a novel with them.

For most people, of course, the immediate absence of the latest Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling isn’t going to leave them in a cold sweat or subject to a panic attack, but still, books are a big thing in most of our lives. In the UK alone book sales totalled more than £1.6 billion in 2018. This gives us some sense of the important place of books in our world.

I was surprised that reading came top in the Rest Test because remember, people weren’t voting for the activity they find most enjoyable, but the most restful. And reading is not a passive pastime – it requires quite a bit of effort. True, unlike running, you can lie on a sofa or in a hammock while you do it, but it does demand cognitive work on many different levels.

We read the letters. We form words from them. We take meaning from those words. We relate that meaning to what we’ve read before. We reach into our own memories. We create images in our minds. We mentally simulate the action, the sights and the sounds of the scenes. Meanwhile we use what psychologists refer to as ‘theory of mind’ to inhabit the characters’ minds in order to understand their motivations, to imagine their thoughts, to feel their feelings.

Curiously, reading is not only effortful cognitively, but also physically, in a way that you might not expect. One of the things Victor Nell wanted to investigate when he recruited his bookworms back in 1988 was what happens physiologically while people read. This involved another complicated experiment.

First, Nell induced boredom in his volunteers by fitting them with translucent goggles and playing ten minutes of white noise into their ears. Then he got the volunteers to take part in a series of activities: reading for thirty minutes, relaxing for five minutes with their eyes shut, looking at photographs, doing mental arithmetic, or completing puzzles like this one:

When a red apple is cut in half and halved again, how many sides will be red and how many will be white?³

Meanwhile Nell took numerous measurements. He placed electrodes on the faces, heads and necks of the participants to assess their muscular activity. He timed the intervals between their heartbeats. He measured their rates of breathing. All these measures helped him to gauge how the bodies of the volunteers were responding to the different activities.

So which of these sessions do you think their bodies would reveal to be the more restful: the boredom, the relaxation, the mental arithmetic and puzzles, or the reading? Bearing in mind that these bookworms had already rated the effort they had to put into reading for pleasure as close to zero, you might expect their physiology to reflect this. Reading would surely be physically effortless. In fact, the volunteers were notably more physiologically aroused during reading than when they were bored or relaxing with their eyes shut. What’s more, reading was more arousing than doing tricky puzzles and on some measures more so even than doing the maths.

The conclusion we can draw from Nell’s study is that, although it is relaxing, particularly for keen readers, reading is yet another restful activity which has nothing to do with switching off the brain or shutting down the body. Which invites the question: should we read before going to sleep?

A Book at Bedtime

Many people do, as they find reading helps to quieten the mind. But it is not obvious from a psychological or physiological perspective that a book before bed is a good idea.

Sleep experts often advise adopting ‘sleep hygiene’, which doesn’t mean changing your sheets every couple of days but keeping the bedroom strictly for sleep and nothing else (in case you’re wondering, they make an exception for sex). The idea is that you come to associate the bedroom solely with restful sleep. And in time this association becomes so strong that you fall asleep more easily.

As you might expect, these sleep experts tend to be very negative about the idea of watching TV in bed, let alone playing with your phone, for fear of overstimulation. But books on the whole escape their wrath. Is this just cultural snobbery at work or are they right to treat reading differently? Survey evidence seems to back up the idea that reading in bed is preferable to watching TV if your aim is a good night’s sleep. A poll of 5,000 people living in Britain found that 38 per cent of those who watched TV in bed said they sleep very poorly most nights, while 39 per cent of those who read before they go to sleep said they sleep very well.⁴ Many psychologists researching sleep also recommend that if you find yourself awake for a lengthy period in the middle of the night, rather than fretting about how terrible you are going to feel the following day or worrying about all the things you need to get done, you should get out of bed, sit in a chair (even if it’s cold) and read a book until you feel sleepy again. If you’re lucky, when you return to bed with your mind distracted and your body yearning for the cosy warmth of your duvet, you fall straight to sleep.

Yet we’ve seen that reading can activate the body, not just the mind – in which case, how come it allows us to relax enough to drift off to sleep? Victor Nell argues that, first, reading activates us mentally and physically. But then, when we put the book down and there is a fall in our arousal levels, it is this fall which helps to induce sleep, similar to the fall in the temperature after a hot bath that makes us doze off. It’s an interesting hypothesis, but I’m not completely convinced. For a start it doesn’t explain why, for instance, so many of us fall asleep while reading? And why doesn’t the same thing happen when you read a bunch of annoying emails instead of a book just before turning out the light? There should be a drop in activation when you snap the laptop shut, but in this instance dropping straight off to sleep is rarely the result.

So it remains a bit of a mystery as to why reading, restful as it is, should be for so many of us the perfect preparation for a night’s sleep. Perhaps it is something to do with memories of childhood when before lights out we were all read to, something that still makes me drop off, as I will explain later in this chapter.

A Lazy Pastime?

An intriguing aspect of the research on the restfulness of reading is that much of the best evidence for it has emerged almost by accident. Surprisingly few studies have specifically tested reading as a way to relax, but some have included it as a neutral task in research on other activities only to find that reading came out as equally or indeed more restful than the activity under investigation.

For example, there was an American study published in 2009 investigating yoga. I guess that the authors hoped to prove that yoga was the ultimate form of relaxation. Unfortunately for them, they chose something unusually restful to compare it with. While blood pressure and stress levels did drop after thirty minutes of yoga, these levels fell by the same amount after half an hour spent reading Newsweek articles.⁵

In another experiment in Australia people who regularly practised tai chi were put under stress by doing an hour of tricky mental arithmetic in a noisy room complete with insistent reminders that the time for the task was running out. At the same time another group spent an even more unpleasant hour watching a sixty-minute video about people having horrible experiences. As you’d expect, by the end of the viewing session everyone was feeling quite stressed. For the next hour they were assigned to meditate, walk briskly, read a book or practise tai chi. Again, the set-up of the experiment suggests to me the researchers were hoping to show tai chi was the ideal way to de-stress and relax. But physiological measurements revealed that the reading session and indeed the other activities were just as effective as the tai chi at reducing levels of the stress hormone cortisol and inducing a more restful mood.⁶

Of course, most readers know what researchers sometimes struggle to grasp: that reading is among the most restful activities in life. When researchers in Chicago asked adults to keep diaries listing everything they did and their motivation for doing these things, 34 per cent of those adults read books with the specific aim of relaxation in mind. On 89 per cent of the occasions when people read, they confirmed that reading involved low or no effort.⁷

In earlier centuries the idea that reading might be restful wouldn’t have been a surprise. Indeed, reading was seen as lazy and self-indulgent. In eighteenth-century England, sitting down with a novel was considered ‘as to drink wine’. It was a wicked vice. As well as promoting indolence and laxity, the reading of novels was thought to damage your posture and present a fire risk because, of course, at that time you needed candles in order to read on dark evenings. Libraries were compared with brothels and gin shops. ‘Reading sofas’ – which sound mild enough to us – were excoriated by moralisers and social reformers.

Writing in 2008, the academic Ana Vogrincˇicˇ compares eighteenth-century attitudes to the novel with the moral panic around watching TV today. ‘If novel-readers were seen as smearing books with candle-wax and causing fire, television viewers are associated with eating junk food and spilling ketchup on the carpet,’ she writes.⁸

Today you could replace the novel and indeed the TV with the smartphone or tablet, of course. It seems we fear anything that is all enveloping, time consuming and fun, especially when it’s new.

Even when Victor Nell conducted his research in 1988, he detected a hangover of the disap...