Steph Lee was sitting in the 02 preparing to get on stage to dance in Ed Sheeran’s opening performance at the Brit awards, when she had a moment.

“I had Adele literally two metres to my left and Olivia Rodrigo two metres to my right, knowing I was about to go on stage for Ed Sheeran, and I thought to myself, ‘wow, I’ve made it’,” she says.

Steph describes the three days of rehearsing earlier this year, leading up to the event itself; a spectacle involving pyrotechnics, flying dancers and a surprise appearance from British rock group Bring Me the Horizon, as “epic”.

“That was the first time that I actually felt like I had made it in the industry,” she says. “I was just trying to soak it all in.”

Having moved to London in June of 2019, Alice had six months on the ground before the pandemic hit. It was what could be described as either the best or worst timing, but regardless, she’s not looked back.

With a passion for journalism from a young age, Alice studied Media and English Literature at Victoria University in Wellington and then Journalism at Canterbury University. It was while she was studying at Victoria and writing for the Salient – the university's student magazine – that she made her writing debut. This was an opinion piece on how we are spending too much time on our phones – she now jokes that her screen time has definitely doubled since those days! It was off the back of this feature that she was offered a position in their news team. As she became what she describes as ‘somewhat obsessed’, her path forward suddenly became obvious.

The Art of Rest: How to find respite in the modern age, by Claudia Hammond

Busyness used to be a badge of honour but nowadays it is becoming less so. We need rest! And rest means different things to different people. It’s not just sleep, but restful activities we do whilst awake. Not getting enough rest affects all age groups and manifests itself in higher rates of depression, more colds, worse memories, and poor decision making.

Claudia and her counterparts set up a survey called the Rest Test which asked 18,000 people in 135 countries about rest. The findings make up the 10 chapters in the book.

Each chapter of the book is dedicated to one of the top ten things people considered restful and the studies around it. Claudia is upfront about the fact that there isn’t as much research around rest and its benefits so some of the studies are very small. Saying that, all the papers are in the back of the book if you wanted to access them.