Overwhelmed with Claudia Hammond

Claudia Hammond is an award-winning author and broadcaster. 

Listeners may recognise her name and voice from her Radio Four programme All in the Mind, or Health Check on the BBC’s World Service. Claudia is Radio’s Four ‘voice of psychology’ and Visiting Professor Of The Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Sussex.

Claudia’s sixth book is Overwhelmed, Ways to Take The Pressure Off which came out in January 2026. Side note that there’s also an audio book narrated by Claudia which is beautiful to listen to.

So what’s the book, and this podcast, about? It’s for those of us who have too many browser windows open in our heads, a feeling I’m sure many of us will identify with. Are To-Do lists a good idea? Why is rest important? How much doom-scrolling is permissible is okay? What can you do if you feel overwhelmed (isn’t that all of us at some point?).

Claudia brings lots of (fascinating) evidence based research to help us develop very practical strategies on how to maybe close some of those browser windows, or at least ignore them for a bit.

This is the last episode in Series 11. Series 12 will come out in the spring and we’ve already started recording and I’m very excited about it!

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Produced by Hester Cant. Art work by Lo Cole. Music by Toby Dunham.

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