In our busy-loving modern society, too many of us have had the experience of eating lunch at our desks—or even working straight through the noon hour without sustenance, all in the name of tackling the items on our to-do lists. Unfortunately, powering through without a pause can do more harm than good, psychologists say.
Breaks can improve our moods, overall well-being and performance capacity, says Charlotte Fritz, PhD, an associate professor in industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology at Portland State University in Oregon.
While it might seem obvious that breaks are refreshing, it’s less clear how to maximize their benefit. How frequently you should break from work, how long breaks should last and what activities you should engage in will differ from person to person and job to job. But research is giving us a deeper understanding of breaks, revealing that regularly detaching from your work tasks—both during the workday and in your off-hours—can help restore energy in the short term and prevent burnout in the long term.
Much like regular exercise and sleep, work breaks function both as prevention and intervention, Fritz says. “Taking regular breaks helps us to be more resilient when stressors arise, and they function as an intervention to help us deal with the daily grind.”
Exhausting the mental fuel
Even short breaks can help us perform at our best. In one example, William S. Helton, PhD, a professor of human factors and applied cognition at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and colleagues showed that short breaks can improve attention. They gave university students a test that required them to monitor maps of railway lines on a screen, a task that involved sustained attention as they tracked the planned train routes. One group received no break during the 45-minute task. The other participants took a five-minute break halfway through the task and were randomly assigned to one of five activities: sitting quietly, listening to music, watching a music video, choosing between the music or the video, or spending the break however they wished without leaving the room. No matter which type of break they were given, all of the students in the break groups performed better on the attention task than those who kept slogging away without an intermission (Applied Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 31, No. 3, 2017).
The study is one of many that finds focusing our attention for too long can wear us out. Prolonged work seems to be depleting. You start to fade out and there’s a decline in performance, Helton says. Scientists are still sorting out whether that decline is due to neural fatigue, buildup of waste matter in the brain, impaired executive function or something else—but the outcome is clear. “We don’t know exactly what in the brain gets depleted, but when you do a cognitively demanding task, it operates as though there’s a ‘mental fuel’ that gets burned up,” he says.
Running low on mental fuel can be particularly dangerous in some jobs, of course. Pilots and air traffic controllers, whose work requires intense sustained attention, are two examples. Cognitive depletion can also have a notable impact on academic performance. Hans Henrik Sievertsen, PhD, of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom and the Danish Centre of Applied Social Science, and colleagues studied standardized test data from public schoolchildren in Denmark. They found that when tests were given right after a 20- to 30-minute break, scores improved to a degree equivalent to 19 extra days of school. The effects were largest for low-performing students (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 113, No. 10, 2016).
Take five for dog videos
Perhaps not surprisingly, breakscan also improve mood. YoungAh Park, PhD, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and colleagues studied the effect that informal “microbreaks” of a few minutes had on telemarketers at call centers in Korea. The researchers categorized these breaks as relaxation (such as stretching or daydreaming), social (chatting with co-workers or texting friends), cognitive (reading the news or watching a video clip) or nutritional (having a snack or drink). Participants who took more microbreaks to relax, socialize or engage in cognitive activities had increased positive affect at work, the researchers found. (Snack breaks, alas, didn’t provide the same lift.) Among employees who were less engaged in work in general, that mood boost also predicted better sales performance—but performance didn’t increase among employees who already reported greater engagement with their jobs (Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 103, No. 7, 2018).
Indeed, the link between mood and performance is not clear-cut. Helton and his colleagues tested how various types of breaks affected people’s performance on a computerized attention task. Some participants took a quick break to watch either dog or robot videos, while some watched a digital countdown on the screen and others got no break at all. Overall, those who took a break performed better than those who didn’t. But while people who watched dog videos reported feeling less stress than those in the other groups, they didn’t perform any better on the task (Consciousness and Cognition, Vol. 42, No. 1, 2016).
“A lot of people think that because a break makes them feel better it will make them perform better, but that’s not necessarily true,” Helton says.
Other work suggests that people aren’t always good judges of the types of breaks that are most helpful. Marjaana Sianoja, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher at the Oregon Institute of Occuptional Health Sciences at Oregon Health and Science University, studied teachers, public administration workers and IT professionals in Finland. The researchers randomly assigned the participants to spend 15 minutes of their lunch breaks taking a leisurely walk in the park or performing relaxation exercises (for which they received instruction). Twice a week in the afternoon, participants were asked to report on their levels of stress, fatigue and ability to concentrate. They also filled out a survey each night, reporting on how much they enjoyed their break and how much they were able to detach from work.
In both groups, participants reported better concentration in the afternoon when they walked or relaxed compared with days they spent their lunch break as usual. But when it came to stress, there was a disconnect between what they enjoyed and what provided the most stress relief. “Employees enjoyed the park walks more, but the relaxation exercises were actually better for lessening stress in the afternoon,” Sianoja says (Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, Vol. 23, No. 3, 2018). The relaxation techniques appeared to work better at helping people detach from the demands of their work, and that detachment, in turn, predicted less strain, less fatigue and greater concentration.
Sianoja’s study assigned participants to the different break conditions, but she hypothesizes that having a choice of break might boost its beneficial effects, too. Other research suggests, for example, that breaking for an activity that you take pleasure in can improve well-being. At Baylor University, I/O psychologist and associate professor of management Emily Hunter, PhD, and her colleague Cindy Wu, PhD, surveyed administrative workers about their break habits, both formal and informal. The researchers found that workers who took breaks to do something they enjoyed reported fewer health symptoms such as headaches, eye strain and lower back pain. They also reported higher job satisfaction and lower rates of burnout (Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 101, No. 2, 2016.) “Having a choice and doing something they preferred seemed to be critical,” Hunter says.
Surprisingly, those breaks were much more effective when taken in the morning, Hunter and Wu also found. Though people commonly save their breaks for the midafternoon slump, taking five (or 10 or 15) minutes in the morning seemed to better restore energy and reduce afternoon health symptoms than taking breaks later in the day.
“We believe that’s because your resources aren’t as drained early in the day, so it’s easier to return to your prework levels of energy and concentration,” Hunter says.
Available nights and weekends
These days it’s common for professionals to bring work home with them, catching up on paperwork or responding to emails long after the lights go out at the office. Yet just as detachment helps people make the most of workday breaks, it’s also important to take nights, weekends and vacations to disconnect from the demands of the job, research finds.
In a recent study of U.S. Forest Service workers, Fritz and colleagues found that when the employees had to deal with disrespectful behavior at work, they ruminated about it and experienced more insomnia. But when they were able to detach after work or engage in relaxing activities such as yoga, walking or listening to music, they reported fewer sleep problems (Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, published online, 2018).
Other research has shown that employees who experience more psychological detachment from work during their off-hours report higher life satisfaction and experience less psychological strain than those who don’t disconnect from the job during nonwork hours, according to a review by Sabine Sonnentag, PhD, an organizational psychologist at the University of Mannheim in Germany. Importantly, she found, workers who were more detached after work were no less engaged while at work (Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 21, No. 2, 2012).
Sonnentag has also explored the effects of vacations. In a meta-analysis of the research, she and her colleagues found that vacations have small positive effects on people’s health and well-being, with people reporting less exhaustion, fewer health complaints and greater life satisfaction after time away. However, those benefits declined within a few weeks after returning (Journal of Occupational Health, Vol. 51, No. 1, 2009).
In a follow-up, Sonnentag studied teachers and found that after coming back from a two-week vacation, their engagement with work increased and their levels of burnout decreased. Again, though, those effects faded within a month (Journal of Organizational Behavior, Vol. 32, No. 1, 2011).
That doesn’t mean vacations aren’t worthwhile. But just as sleeping in on weekends isn’t a cure for chronic sleep deprivation, taking one week off a year won’t counteract the effects of an overscheduled workday. “Especially if employees feel burnout, they need a longer break,” Sianoja says. “But it’s also important to have free weekends and free time after work to relieve stress and increase well-being.”
Make breaks a priority
While there’s good evidence that breaks are beneficial, it’s less clear how to build the perfect break—in fact, it depends on the person, the type of work and the situation.
Take socializing, for instance. Lunching with colleagues can feel like a fun way to disconnect from work and has the added benefit of increasing social support and improving workers’ moods. But it can have a dark side. Say your supervisor is at the lunch table. If you have to monitor what you say and do and regulate your emotions, you’re drawing heavily on your cognitive resources.
While it might not always be possible to design an ideal break, there are some helpful rules of thumb to optimize your time away from your desk. Helton suggests choosing activities that aren’t too similar to the work you’re doing. “If you take a break from doing your taxes to do some calculus problems, it probably won’t help much,” he says.
For most people who work in jobs that require mental effort, breaks that involve exercise and spending time in natural settings are probably good bets, Helton adds. Physical activity has all sorts of benefits, including stress relief. And a study led by Sharon Toker, PhD, an associate professor at Tel Aviv University, found that employees with depression are more likely to develop job burnout, while those with job burnout are more likely to develop depression. But in both cases, that progression was much less likely among employees who engaged in regular physical activity (Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 97, No. 3, 2012).
Spending time in (or viewing scenes of) natural environments also reduces stress and can replenish the cognitive performance deficits associated with increased stress, as described in a literature review by Rita Berto, PhD, at the University of Verona in Italy (Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 4, No. 4, 2014).
However you choose to spend your breaks, the most important thing is to make them a priority, Hunter says. “People know breaks are helpful, but we don’t always take them.”