This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing? There's a tendency to think about overwhelm as a

distinctly modern problem. But people have been worrying about this issue for millennia. Socrates

said, beware the barrenness of a busy life. And more recently, Sorin Kierkegaard said, of all ridiculous things, the most

ridiculous seems to me to be a man who's brisk about his food and his work. Both of those quotes

haunt me, because I think I am a little too busy. So anyway, what I'm trying to get at here

is if you're overwhelmed and oversch over scheduled, you come by it honestly.

Not only as a member of Homo sapiens, who, as we've just established, have been worrying about this for millennia, but also because we now live in what many people believe is an age of overwhelm, where even though we actually have more spare time, many of us feel like we have

too much to do and not enough time in which to do it. The pressures seem relentless,

pressures from the outside and pressures from the inside, pressures that we put on ourselves

in an era of rising perfectionism. Okay, so that's all the bad news. The good news is that there are things you can do

about overwhelmed. There are evidence-based strategies from psychology and neuroscience, and my guest

today has written a whole book about both the problem and the solutions, and that book is called

overwhelmed. My guest is Claudia Hammond. This is her second time on the show.

She is many things.

She's a visiting professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Sussex.

She's the host of BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind.

And she's written many, many books, including, as I said, her latest, which is called Overwhelmed.

In this conversation,

we talk about how to define overwhelm. We talk about the modern causes of overwhelm, why the search for perfection is futile. Claudia's three-part recipe for handling overwhelm, antidotes for the

comparing mind, what we should all know about procrastination, what we can learn from regret and how to stop beating up your past self,

the interesting case for nostalgia,

...