Claudia Hammond, award-winning broadcaster, author and psychology lecturer, will be speaking at this year’s Cheltenham Science Festival about her new book, Overwhelmed. Katie Jarvis got some tips on how to cope with a world that seems determined to break us
Want to hear an astonishing fact from Claudia Hammond’s book, Overwhelmed: Ways to Take the Pressure Off? I can oblige. Multiple times.
It’s a book about mental health as you might have guessed from the title. About how our mental health is worsening – particularly in the UK; particularly amongst younger people (as if we hadn’t guessed).
About – crucially – tricks (and I use that word advisedly) we can employ to improve our own.
And also – and this is one of the amazing bits – about how counterintuitively our brains can work.
So. Let’s go back to April 2013: that horrific day when almost 27,000 runners are stretching, jogging on the spot, mentally preparing themselves for the Boston Marathon. The weather is perfect – cool, sunny, dry – as colourful crowds gather behind railings.
Just after noon, Ethiopian runner Lelisa Desisa romps home in the men’s race in a time of two hours, 10 minutes and 22 seconds.
Some 15 minutes later, the women’s prize has been claimed by Kenyan Rita Jeptoo.
As clocks tick towards 3pm, thousands are still on the course. You can see an image online, taken from a mobile phone, capturing a moment outside the Forum restaurant in Boylston Street: a white baseball cap turned trendily backwards; designer sunglasses catching the camera’s eye; a woman in red-and-blue check, arms raised in encouragement; children at the front, standing on bottom rung for maximum view.
The next moment just doesn’t bear thinking about.
‘Suddenly, close to the finishing line, there was what sounded like a blast from a cannon,’ Claudia writes. ‘Then, 20 seconds later, there was another boom.’
Panic. Screaming. Competitors, spectators, all running pell-mell.
Bombs packed with ball bearings for maximum damage: the second one right outside the Forum.
Three people died; more than 100 were injured, some losing limbs.
It was, for those there, a desperately traumatic event. That goes without saying.
But this is the surprising part. A team led by Roxane Cohen Silver from the University of California – expert on conducting interviews after shootings and bombings in the US – studied a representative sample of people from Boston and across the United States who’d watched the coverage of the terrorist attack on television or online. Those who’d viewed six hours’ coverage a day or more in the week following were nine times more likely to report high levels of acute stress than those who watched less than an hour-and-a-half each day: ‘early evidence of the detrimental impact of what we’d now call doomscrolling – in other words, the obsessive consumption of negative news’.
Maybe not too surprising.
But what did amaze the team was this: those same viewers had achieved higher acute stress scores than people who were either present at the marathon, or whose loved ones were there.
Really?
More than actually being there?
More than having a family member, a friend, there?
Even the university team was flabbergasted by the findings. Not to mention Claudia when she uncovered it as part of her research.
‘It was a really well-done study: and it’s extraordinary that watching large amounts of a traumatic event can have more impact than actually being there,’ she says.
The conclusion the team reached is that media exposure is a continuous loop of horror.
Whereas being present on the ground gives people a conclusion: a beginning, middle and end.
‘You keep seeing the worst bits again and again, if you’re watching it on the news,’ she says. ‘And you don’t see it did then end; and you did survive; get out; somebody helped you; you helped somebody else; there was an ending to it and things resolved.
‘If you’re just watching it, you’re stuck in the middle of it all the time.’
While completely avoiding the news is not the answer, as Claudia points out – we need to stay informed; to be responsible and responsive – here’s a good, solid reason for switching off alerts; for choosing when and for how long to watch.
It’s one of the pragmatic, evidence-based suggestions that she brilliantly offers to her readers in Overwhelmed.
‘I completely see why so many people are avoiding the news. I suggest in the book that I don’t think that is the answer for everyone. People may feel they have to and that’s absolutely fine. But we need to know what’s going on and I think there are ways of absorbing it.’
It’s not just everyday punters, either.
When I interviewed Lyse Doucet – I tell Claudia – famed for reporting from conflict zones around the world, she told me there were times even she turned off BBC Radios 4 and 5, the World Service, to listen to classical music instead she said: ‘Because it is gloomy; it is depressing’.
‘That’s totally true. I know lots of journalists doing that. Who are deciding, at certain times, they can’t cope.’
Our mental health is deteriorating. In 2024, Claudia quotes, a survey of 31,000 people in 31 countries highlighted that nearly half felt burned out by work.
And, according to a study of the mental health of children and young people, more than a fifth of 20-25-year-olds has a probable mental health problem.
Covid, for sure, has accelerated (or added to) that stress: ‘But it was already happening,’ Claudia points out.
‘It was also starting to happen before social media. Obviously, there some are huge problems with social media – the bullying and abuse.
‘But it’s not the whole picture: there is more going on there.
‘It’s complex and it’s nuanced and can’t just be blamed on one thing.’
What’s more, we, on this sceptered isle, are amongst the most distressed.
‘There’s new research out this week that compares various countries, and the UK fares pretty poorly; it’s often about two-thirds down,’ she says.
As in ‘bad’ two-thirds down?
‘Bad, yes. And if you look at different surveys of teenage mental health, there’s one that’s done of 44 European countries each year: the UK is always in the bottom third.
‘Often everyone says: “Oh, you know, it’s mobile phones to blame; social media is to blame for everything to do with teenage mental health”.
‘But all of those other countries have social media; a lot have mobile phones.’
There’s something else going on.
But what is it?
‘I’ve just got back from New Zealand where everyone’s talking about younger people not being able to get on the housing ladder; how few graduate jobs there are; how much people are worried about climate change.’
In other words, these are similar global issues felt by people thousands of miles apart; yet the UK still comes low in terms of happiness and mental wellbeing.
‘And I don’t know why that is. When it comes to teenagers, some of the services – things that would have been there for them – such as many youth clubs have closed. People are able to get less support from places they might have been able to get it before.’
So, yes…
But added to that, for example, this country seems to place particular pressure on school and exam results.
‘In European studies, it’s really interesting: they ask 11-year-olds and 15-year-olds whether they like school or not.
‘At 11, the UK does OK – but, by 15, they’re really hating school compared with other countries,’ she says.
So that’s worrying.
And not only do we not know why; but government doesn’t seem to prioritise finding out why.
One aspect of psychology that never fails to impress me is how cleverly experiments are devised.
Especially nowadays, when ethics would prevent some of the most seminal and oft-quoted from being carried out. Such as Milgram’s attempt, in the early 1960s, to understand the brutal acts of the Holocaust by conducting authority/obedience experiments; or the Stanford Prison study, led by psychologist Philip Zimbardo in the early 1970s, where students were assigned roles as ‘prisoners’ and ‘guards’, which quickly became frighteningly realistic.
Chapter-headings of Overwhelmed (such as The search for perfection is futile; Not all stress is bad for you; Nobody else knows what they’re doing either) are reassuring in their own right.
But particularly valuable are evidence-based ways of counteracting these damaging spirals that Claudia quotes. Take making lists, as an example.
Michael Scullin, director of the Sleep Neuroscience and Cognition Laboratory at Baylor University in the States asked volunteers to write a list at bedtime of everything they’d achieved that day.
A second group was asked to write a to-do list of tasks for the next few days.
Intriguingly – and would you have guessed this? I wouldn’t – the second group making to-do lists fell asleep a full nine minutes more quickly than the first.
So why would that be?
Enter Professor Sam Gilbert who comes from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London.
He and his team devised a nothing-less-than-brilliant study showing why making lists – as basic as ‘on phones and scraps of paper’ – is so useful.
Firstly, volunteers were asked to memorise pictures of faces and architectural scenes; their brains were then scanned to see where exactly they were holding these different pieces of information.
Next, when they were told they would, in fact, be given reminders about the faces: ‘Their brains reacted immediately with the areas associated with processing faces becoming noticeably less active compared with the neural areas processing the pictures of buildings,’ Claudia writes.
Here is proof-positive that writing a list at bedtime can free your mind from obsessing about all the tasks ahead of you.
Perhaps many of us have discovered that for ourselves.
More surprising are studies showing that, by taking a break, we can get things done more quickly.
That over-confidence can be a hindrance, not an advantage.
‘We limit our chances of improvement if we fail to recognise when we’re not that good at something.’
Or how – one of my favourites – nostalgia is really good for you.
OK – so not the nostalgia of loss or regret: but how recalling a happy event can boost moods, make us proud of achievements, and add to a sense of identity by connecting us with earlier versions of ourselves.
‘It’s amazing: nostalgia gets a bit of a bad name but, actually, it can be used in a positive way,’ says Claudia.
In fact, crucially, studies show that stress in and of itself isn’t always bad.
It’s a question of trying to reframe feelings into something positive.
‘There’s really good evidence showing how effective stress-reappraisal strategies can be. Where people have to say, “I am excited” versus “I am calm”.’
The actor Dame Judi Dench described it as turning stage fright into petrol: making it work for you instead of against you. ‘You’d think it would be better to say “I am calm”; but, in fact, it’s actually better, if you’re trying to perform well, to think of it as excitement.’
Claudia has personal experience she can add to the mix.
She’d been invited to the opening of an exhibition of paintings by people with brain injuries, which was taking place in the crypt of St Paul’s.
She enjoyed looking round and chatting to the organiser, and was on the verge of leaving when quiet was called for.
The organiser spoke for a while, before announcing that it was now time for everyone to listen to the main speech: ‘by the special guest… Claudia Hammond’.
Which was news to Claudia.
It would be great to say Claudia instantly reframed her shock and stress as an exciting opportunity: ‘But that’s not quite what happened,’ she admits.
‘Even so, the stress I was feeling did make me hyper-focused on the task at hand’.
She can laugh now:
‘It’s really nice to be able to tell that as a funny story that everybody loves.
‘But also: it was terrible… but it did work out. And, in a way, that then gives you confidence for next time.’
I’m amazed Claudia Hammond isn’t more stressed as we speak. She’s just back from a holiday in New Zealand, straight into the clearly frenetic world of work.
But that’s not how she’s seeing it.
‘My best friend lives there: I’ve been three times in 30 years. It’s amazing.’
It was also a chance to put into practice one of her own preferred mental-health strategies: in a dramatic landscape of mountains, volcanoes, fjords and coastlines.
Awe walks.
Walks where you appreciate everything around you: from the beauty of a leaf on a tree, to an incredible piece of architecture.
‘The thing about awe walks is you can’t stop doing them]once you’ve started! In fact, one of the things I’m going to do at Cheltenham Science Festival is to lead an awe walk round Cheltenham, where we’re going to feel awe for things.
‘Everywhere I go, I look for things that strike awe in me, and I think about them all the time.’
Which links into one of the prescriptions from Overwhelmed that I find most healing.
Remember that it’s not all about you.
That you’re not the most important thing in the world.
‘Exactly – not in an unsettling way, but in a good way.
‘Of course, we are the centre of everything to ourselves, and it has to feel like that.
‘But in your local park, the beetles are living and dying; doing whatever they do; they’re not bothered by what you do.’
And that fact is somehow strangely, perversely, comforting..
· At this year’s Cheltenham Science Festival (June 2-7) Claudia Hammond will be exploring the science of awe and overwhelm, including a guided Awe Walk through Cheltenham: cheltenhamfestivals.org/science
· Overwhelmed: Ways to Take the Pressure Off, by Claudia Hammond, is published by Canongate: claudiahammond.com
