Editorial assistant Moya Lothian-McLean embraces Me Time.

I have only recently started to crack the concept of Me Time. Don’t misunderstand me, I’ve always been good at doing very little – especially after rolling in at some ungodly hour the night before. Give me a day to waste and I will run with it. Be idle, you say? Buddy, I can polish off a series of The Handmaid’s Tale in one weekend. You want laziness? I give you an entire day without visiting the bathroom. A tub of Ben & Jerry’s ordered from Uber Eats.

But briefly morphing into  a slug is not Me Time. As a 2015 study by Birkbeck University found, to effectively recharge your batteries Me Time must be “high-quality”, meaning the participant has to feel as if they’ve been enriched by the experience. Quantity, the researchers discovered, doesn’t matter. The magic of Me Time is in the calibre.

And there is magic in it. When I do Me Time correctly – without the twin distractions of my phone and laptop – it knits together the frayed edges of my nerves in a way nothing else, bar a financially irresponsible mini-break, manages. Me Time doesn’t  have to be a solo endeavour but that’s what works best in my case: total disconnection from the digital (difficult when grappling with a tech addiction). It is tough, especially when living in a city, to snatch a sliver of time that is fully your own.

Experts say we need “me time” – but is that really the case?