Trish Wicklow, a tour guide from Bath, is a very busy woman. Organising walking tours around her home town alongside caring for her granddaughter and keeping up with social plans means there’s always a lot on her plate. But there’s one plate that’s often left empty. “Looking after myself is usually the first thing to fall by the wayside when things get full-on, and I rarely have a proper lunch. I’m not proud of how many weekdays I’ve survived on hot tea and biscuits,” she says.
We’ve all done it. Whether it’s work, caring responsibilities or just zipping between errands until a loud gurgle reminds us we haven’t eaten since breakfast, lunchtimes can easily get crunched by all the to-dos. It’s a common symptom of our non-stop modern lives, says Dr Sula Windgassen, a leading health psychologist and author of It’s All In Your Body. “Over the past couple of decades, a rise in hustle culture has made many of us feel like we need to be optimising every hour of our day, eroding our meal times and even our evenings,” she says. “Lots of us harbour this inbuilt belief that we have to earn our rest; that if we can only get everything done, then we’ll have time to recharge.”
