Go with the flow
In her latest book, All in the Mind’s Claudia Hammond explains how to deal with the stresses of modern life
Rob Parfitt
- Simon O'Hagan
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Claudia Hammond was a radio prodigy. Growing up in Bedfordshire, she was so enamoured of the medium that at the age of 14 she was presenting a request show on hospital radio. “I’d go round the wards,” she recalls, “and chat to patients and ask them what they wanted me to play, but it would end up with them telling me things that they wouldn’t tell the doctors.”
From that experience, it’s possible to see a direct line to where, 40 years later, Hammond is today – the presenter of All in the Mind, the Radio 4 programme about mental health, psychology and neuroscience.
It was meeting those patients that got her interested in psychology, she says. Those encounters were also an early demonstration of her gift for getting people to open up, which is what makes All in the Mind – in which Hammond often finds herself talking to people who have mental health issues – such a fascinating and empathetic programme.
Hammond says it’s amazing the way her interviewees will welcome her, but given their awareness of her approach, it’s not really surprising. In fact, more often it seems meeting Claudia Hammond is positively therapeutic for people. An edition in the most recent series was devoted to the topic of hoarding, and for the woman with a hoarding issue who Hammond went to meet at her home in Surrey, talking about it clearly eased the burden.
Now, Hammond is ready to offer a helping hand through the latest of six books she has published, and which she reads in Radio 4’s Book of the Week slot. Overwhelmed is her guide to combating the plethora of pressures that modern life brings, its 16 chapters dealing with topics ranging from the search for perfection to feeling overwhelmed by the news, via procrastination and the neverending to-do list.
It's a psychological toolkit – a series of strategies to adopt
“Overwhelmed came out of a previous book I wrote called The Art of Rest, after which I was really struck by how many people came up to me having gained an insight into how resting was so good for one’s mental health,” she says. “It was all backed up by scientific evidence, and everything in Overwhelmed is entirely evidence-based, too. It’s a psychological toolkit – a series of strategies one can adopt when it feels like everything is getting to be too much.”
She goes on to explain how the concept of “flow” (being so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter) is one of the most important counters to feeling overwhelmed. Hammond finds flow in gardening at her home in south-east London. She also finds it in doing the online word puzzle Wordle every day: “I guess that’s a form of microflow. I’m completely absorbed in it.”
It’s 20 years since Hammond first presented All in the Mind – a route she’s travelled alongside wider work in psychology and science. There are World Service programmes Health Check and The Evidence, plus she’s a visiting professor at Sussex University, which is where she did her degree in psychology back in the 1990s, before making her way into radio.
Hammond has done some TV work, but radio remains her first love. An Archers devotee, she’s presented the show’s podcast when regular presenter Emma Freud has been on holiday. She’s also a big fan of the podcasts Sweet Bobby and West Cork, which have accompanied her while she’s been out jogging.
“I can’t deny that I have the loveliest combination of things,” she says. “Everything I do feeds into everything else. When I look at my life in reverse, it looks like it was all planned this way, but I’d no idea how it would work out. It’s completely unbelievable that the time has gone by just like that. But I’m always very busy. My friends laughed when I published The Art of Rest.”
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Making things happen, or going with the flow? Perhaps we can all learn from the balance Claudia Hammond seems to have achieved.
Authors
Simon O'Hagan
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