Everyday breaks
How micro breaks make you healthier and more productive
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Small breaks during the working day are important so that we remain healthy and productive. Who benefits most from micro-breaks – and how not to spend your little break.
Just take a deep breath, close your eyes, take a few steps. In principle, we have known for a long time how important breaks are for health and performance. A Romanian research team has now analyzed 22 studies on the subject from the past 30 years and has confirmed that people are more energetic and less tired after micro-breaks. Anything that distracts us from the current activity between a few seconds and ten minutes counts as a micro-break.
Who gets the most from micro breaks?
However, the researchers found that what matters is the type of activity in which people allow themselves a little siesta. Because people who carry out a very routine job and those who have a creative task ahead of them benefit in particular from micro-breaks: Anyone who has a job in which they carry out fairly simple activities semi-automatically – such as maintaining tables – also reduces regular breaks the risk of mistakes. And creative work like writing or solving complex problems can also benefit from breaks because, according to the study authors, the breaks can increase flexibility and improve creative output.
However, those who carry out cognitively very demanding work, i.e. solve tasks that require a lot of brain activity, cannot necessarily improve their performance with micro-breaks, according to the study results. But in the end it’s not always about doing as much as possible. After all, being healthy and feeling good and energetic should be more important than our performance.
We all need breaks to stay healthy
In our meritocracy, breaks generally have a bad reputation – because we don’t actively work on anything (apart from our health). That’s why many people, especially employees, still have a bad conscience when they take a little break. However, the meta-analysis of the studies shows that we need such micro-breaks during everyday life to stay fit and healthy.
And even if not all study participants felt more productive afterwards, depending on the type of work they did, they are definitely not more productive when they are sick and exhausted. In the long term, it will definitely have a positive effect on our performance that we take care of ourselves and take breaks when we need them – and not only at the weekend or on our next vacation.
Not all breaks are the same: You should do that – and rather avoid it
According to the study evaluations, it also depends on how we spend our micro-break. Those who do something for a few minutes that has as little to do with their actual task as possible benefit the most. This can be physical exercise like taking a short walk, watching a short video, or doing a mini-meditation. What you should better avoid are work-related activities, such as checking emails. According to the analysis, such breaks don’t really provide a recovery effect and are associated with poorer sleep, lower well-being and negative mood.
The study authors say nothing about how often we should take such micro-breaks to stay fit and productive. But as a rule of thumb, take a break whenever you get tired, when you feel like you can’t concentrate anymore. And what exactly you do during your time off is not that important. The main thing is that you enjoy the activity and have nothing to do with your actual work.
Sources used: cnn.com, spiegel.de, journals.plos.org