How to have a mindful lunch hour in London

Stressed-out Londoners are discovering that the humble lunch hour can be so much more than an opportunity to grab a salad pot in Eat. Utilised to its utmost, your midday break can be enough time to revive and reboot, to achieve spa-like unwinding in the length of time it usually takes to eat your sandwich. So if you have 60 minutes (and counting) in which to calm the mind and soothe the soul, where should you start? Here are our top tips to de-stress in an instant.

Turn off your tech

Or, at the very least, turn off your smartphone for an hour. Psychologist Richard Balding from the University of Worcester reported a direct link between stress levels and the amount of times a phone was checked, with the most tense office workers so anxious that they were experiencing “phantom” vibrations when in fact there have been no alerts. “Employers should encourage people to switch their phones off; cut the number of work emails sent out of hours and reduce people’s temptation to check their devices,” Balding advises.

Eat avocado

Among the best foods to have at lunchtime, either in a salad or chucked in a smoothie, according to the nutritionist Ian Marber, they are not only packed with beneficial fats but also the stress-relieving B vitamins vital for healthy nerves and brain cells. They’re also high in potassium, important for maintaining healthy blood pressure.

Take a nap

If you can find somewhere to sit back and close your eyes during the lunch hour, then you will almost certainly return rejuvenated for the afternoon. Having a 30-minute power nap can help relieve stress and bolster the immune system by restoring hormones and proteins to normal levels, a recent study found. “Our data suggests a 30-minute nap can reverse the hormonal impact of a night of poor sleep,” says Dr Brice Faraut, of the Université Paris Descartes-Sorbonne Paris Cité.

Colour in

Waterstones has reported a 300 per cent rise in the sales of adult colouring books this year as thousands rediscover the relaxing benefits of putting coloured pencil to paper. “Being ‘in flow’ or immersed in a task like colouring seems to help soothe many people, from investment bankers to busy mums,” says UK colouring book artist Johanna Basford.