The power of taking breaks
There is a kind of fatigue that you can’t sleep away. It comes creeping in after stress and hard work. The kind of fatigue where coffee won’t help and you reread the same sentence three times without it ever becoming understandable. You can call it stress, but often it is something simpler. Your body has not had enough rest.
Pressure vs overstrain
There are people who say that they work best under pressure. Maybe they do, for short periods of time. But pressure is not a sustainable source of energy. It drives people, but it also wears them down. What is sustainable, on the other hand, is taking breaks. Not as an escape, but as a strategy. The break is the space where the body can catch up and where the mind regains its elasticity.
In workplaces, people often talk about focus. But humans are not made to stay focused without interruption for hours. We gradually become less able to discern what is important. We start to read carelessly, write rigidly and make decisions on autopilot. The strange thing is that it often makes us think that we just need to get it together, when in fact we need to stop
There’s an old idea in psychology that attention can become fatigued in the same way as a muscle. Once it’s tired, focusing becomes more and more strenuous. That’s why breaks can feel like they save an afternoon. They give our attention a chance to recover, so we don’t have to fight our own brains. Research on the importance of breaks for learning and focused attention points in the same direction. Interruptions can actually improve your ability to take in and process information, especially when you’ve been deep in a task.
How breaks help us
But what kind of breaks are good for us? The most misunderstood break is the one that just changes the activity but maintains the demand. Going from a demanding Excel sheet to responding to ten messages is not a break, it’s a change of scene.
A restorative break usually has two characteristics: it’s simple and it’s free of performance or pressure. It could be going outside and getting some fresh air, doing something monotonous that doesn’t require decisions, playing a simple game at a casino online that makes you use other parts of your brain or makes you relax during a fun session. Also just sitting down and letting your thoughts wander for a while without trying to control them is a way of relaxing in the moment.
This is also where “micro breaks” have been given a kind of validation. Instead of waiting for the bigger break like lunch, the weekend or a vacation, it’s about taking small breathers where they’re most beneficial. Systematic reviews of micro breaks in work-like situations have shown that short breaks are often associated with reduced fatigue and increased energy.
The physical dimension is also unavoidable. Our bodies are built for variation. When we sit still for long periods of time we not only get stiff, but our bodies also become monotonous. Studies on breaking up sedentary behavior with short periods of movement show positive effects on markers such as blood pressure and blood sugar response. Getting up, taking a few steps, and coming back is a small lifestyle improvement.
Online tools have a somewhat unexpected role in this. It is easy to say that everything online is draining, but the internet can also be a place for profitable breaks. Many people use digital timers, focus rooms where you work quietly with others, or short recovery clips that guide stretching and breathing. It is a kind of low-threshold health: you don’t need to book an appointment, you just need to press start and let the break happen.
There is also something psychologically elegant about the break. It makes life bigger than the task. It creates distance. Many problems look insoluble when you stare at them. After five minutes outside or after a short walk through the house, the same problem might be closer to a solution. Sometimes that’s because you’ve stopped thinking in a linear way.
The power of taking breaks is in taking responsibility for your endurance. The break is not the opposite of ambition. It is the prerequisite for ambition. And it can be a comforting thought in a time that likes to interpret every quiet minute as a waste. It is often during the break that you gather yourself so that you can actually continue.
