Science of Break-Taking
And Strategies for Doing It Often
I hope everybody is taking a break this week. I hope everybody but me is taking a break. Shelf Life never sleeps. I’m actually taking a break most of the time, all the time, except when I’m doing this. This is the main time I’m not taking a break. I get plenty of sleep. Anyway if you live in a culture that celebrates Christian holidays as the default, you might be mid-break right now. I hope you are having a pleasant break.
It’s a good time to talk about taking a break during the other fifty some weeks of the year. I don’t mean scheduling time off work if you’re able to do that but taking a break on a regular basis from the stuff you do all the time so you can come back at it stronger.
I mentioned recently I tried a few times to pick up jogging as a healthy habit, then gave up only to try again a few years later. This went on all through my twenties and into my early thirties before I eventually admitted that jogging/running is not for me. “If you keep at it, eventually running will feel great and you’ll love doing it” is one of the many bold lies I have been told in my life and one of the ones I really resent, alongside “you need a college degree for a successful career” and “winners never quit.”
The person I lived with during my thirties was really good at running and was very encouraging of my attempts to get good at it, though I was never successful. At one point, having jogged about three miles a day every day for a couple of months I said I couldn’t imagine ever running a distance longer than the three miles I was already doing every day because even for just three miles I felt like death during every single second I was running. I could not imagine doing a marathon and feeling like death for 9 times the amount of time I already spent feeling like death.
“Keep doing it and eventually it’ll be great”: Listen, it turns out if you have have untreated exercise-induced asthma—probably since childhood—running will never, ever be great, nor will any other exercise, but what are you going to do? I am an old dog and I refuse to learn any more tricks. My doctor said, “we’ll give you this inhaler and then you’ll be able to run and it will be great” but no thanks! Fool me thrice, shame on me again.
Anyway I didn’t know about the asthma back then and I asked them, “how can anyone do this for hours on end?” and they said, “well once you get good at it you can just slow down like 10 percent from your comfortable pace and have a break while you’re still running.” That sounded like the most insane thing in the world to me and still does when I apply that thought to the concept of running, an activity for which I have no comfortable pace.
It’s a very American attitude to tell someone to continue doing the same things as usual but with slightly less intensity and that’s “taking a break.” Capitalism makes money from people being productive; culturally we value people’s productivity above most everything else and believe we should try to be as productive as possible all the time and feel guilty for taking breaks.
First of all, I disagree that productivity is or should be valued for itself. I reject capitalism culture, it’s terrible. But I’m among the idiots who live under it and so probably are you. Again: What are you going to do? Yes, topple the system; in the meantime, take breaks.
I’m not an expert on the psychology or neurology of taking breaks but I am an expert in reading scientific and medical articles for sense. I know how I use breaks to help with fatigue, frustration, writer’s block, and other stuff, but I wanted to understand the science of taking a break—or waking rest—so I read up. I’ll link some of the content below so you can read them too if you enjoy being a big nerd.
The important information distilled from the research I read is this: When you use your brain it gets tired and when you rest your brain it recovers from being tired, just like with your body. When you use your brain to execute cognitive skills (thinking, reading, learning, remembering, reasoning, and concentrating), you accumulate cognitive fatigue (also called mental fatigue). Taking a break from using your brain for cognition dissipates some of that fatigue. Importantly, the accumulation and dissipation don’t happen at the same speed. Meaning, a 20- or 30-minute break can undo the effect of an hour or more of fatigue.
I did a lot of reading to come up with that one paragraph. It was inefficient.
When you are experiencing cognitive fatigue, you are more likely to make mistakes if what you’re doing requires concentration. You’re less able to come up with creative solutions to problems. You’re less likely to be creative overall. Executive functioning is diminished. It’s harder to make decisions. Emotional regulation is impaired, so you’re more likely to get frustrated or angry if you make mistakes or or hit a creative wall. It’s all-around not great.
I’m a person who does my job with my brain and since I hate exercise as noted above none of my hobbies are physical things. I don’t hike or ride a bicycle or jog (never again) or wall-climb; you need to twist my arm hard to even get me to roller skate. I don’t like nature; I like being inside. All my leisure activities are inside activities that also use my brain, like writing, reading, and doing mad science experiments. As a result, I’ve adapted to resting my brain to reduce that mental fatigue so I can get back to doing stuff I enjoy, or being productive at work, or whatever I think I need to be doing.
Know When to Break
If you can pinpoint the moment you need to step away from what you’re doing and let your brain rest, you’re already ahead of the game. In my experience, identifying that moment is hands-down the hardest part.
If you don’t already know how to identify when you need to take a break, that’s okay. You can still start effective break-taking immediately by just scheduling them: Set an alarm to go off 10 minutes before each hour, block off a few breaks on your work calendar, or something like that. Until you get effective at noticing when you need a break and then actually taking the break once you know you need it, just schedule them at regular intervals and set up some kind of system that reminds you to take a break (and then actually take the break).
Cognitive fatigue has different symptoms for different people and learning to recognize yours is the key. When I’ve been focusing on something too long and need a break, I can tell because I get irritable, I have trouble paying attention to the task, and I get the feeling of being completely overwhelmed by whatever it is I’m working on. Other common symptoms are things like a tension headache or neck and shoulder pain, feeling anxious when you try to concentrate, or catching yourself staring at your screen (or whatever you’re working on) instead of working on it.
By the time any of those things happens, it’s past time to take a break. I know I’m overdue for a break when I curse at my computer. Once you know what your symptoms are, you can actively work on catching them earlier—for instance, instead of waiting until I have actively said a four-letter word to my computer, I can try to detach and take a break as soon as I notice a rising sense of frustration.
My psychiatrist once helpfully suggested I visualize “anger” on a scale of one to ten where one is “not at all angry,” three is “kind of annoyed,” five is “definitely frustrated,” and ten is “furious.” The goal of the visualization is to intervene as early as I can effectively do so—between three and five—instead of getting to ten and screaming at somebody. Unfortunately, you cannot take a Xanax for cognitive fatigue but you can take a break.
Whatever you identify as the sign that you have reached a critical load of mental fatigue, try to visualize the build up to that on a one-to-ten scale and then locate the signs you are in the three-to-five range on that scale. Three, four, or five may not always be the exact time to stop what you’re doing and take a break, but they are probably a good indicator that you need to look for a stopping point so you can.
It’s also helpful for me to visualize the natural stopping points in a task when I begin it. I won’t need to take a break at every opportune stopping point but I will know where the good stopping points are if I start to get fatigued and I won’t have to waste additional cognitive function figuring out what they are right when I’m in short supply of it.
Effective Break Strategies
This is the fun part to write, the part about actually taking breaks and which breaks I enjoy for which purposes. Not all breaks are created equal. I’ve ordered them here from least to most in terms of how completely they refresh my brain and reset it for more of the same type of task.
Stretch and Move Around
If you are penciling in a break to take once an hour or several times throughout your work on a task, this one is great. It doesn’t take too much time, it doesn’t reengage your brain with a different thing entirely, it doesn’t wipe your mental load back to a clean slate (so you don’t have to ramp back up to your task from zero when you go back to it). Get up from where you are sitting and physically move away from the place where you are working on your task. That’s literally it.
The longer you work between breaks, the longer this break should last. If you’ve worked thirty minutes, you can stand up, stretch, walk to another room and look out the window for a minute or two, then come right back and get back to it. If you’ve been working for an hour or a couple hours, spend five or ten minutes away from your task doing something that is relaxing for your brain. Stare out the window. Pet the dog. Put a skincare mask on your face. Make a cup of tea.
This kind of break has a lot of benefits packed into a brief amount of time. If you’ve been engaged in a task that involves a lot of concentration like reading, writing, or anything that means looking at a computer screen, then your eyes probably have been focused on the same distance for all that time. Focusing your eyes to a different distance for a few minutes is great for them and for your brain. (The 20-20-20 rule my eye doctor told me is every twenty minutes, look at something twenty feet away for twenty seconds.) If you’ve been sitting all that time, then standing up, stretching, and moving around increases blood flow and sends more oxygen to your brain.
Physically disengaging from the task you were doing mentally (moving to another room, for example) and doing something else that does not require a lot of cognitive function gives your brain a little break from thinking but doesn’t switch it to an entirely different track—so when you go back after two minutes, five minutes, or ten minutes, you’ll have an easier time getting back into the task than if you fully disengaged.
When I feel “stuck” in a cognitive task, this strategy works most of the time to get me past whatever I was stuck on.
Do Something Else
If you’re like me and many of your leisure activities involve concentration and paying attention, it can be really frustrating to need a brain break because it’s like all the stuff I wanted to do is off the table until I reset my brain.
However, I’ve come to recognize that not all of my brain-focused hobbies and activities use the same cognitive abilities. Writing (generating text) doesn’t use exactly the same part of my brain as reading (absorbing text). Knitting doesn’t use exactly the same part of my brain as mixing up a perfume from a formula. All those things require concentration but some of them are verbal tasks and some of them are more math-oriented tasks and some of them are hand-eye coordination tasks. Some of them are more active and some of them are more passive. If I need to disengage from a leisure activity because my brain is tired of it and I’m starting to experience signs like frustration or lack of motivation, sometimes I can engage successfully with another activity that still uses my brain, but in another way.
If I need more of a break, “doing something else” can mean hopping in the car to run an errand or spending some time tidying up around the house. Driving my car is yet another activity that requires paying attention, but it somehow completely resets my brain from whatever I was doing in the house. Probably a combination of a different activity plus a change of scenery (plus fresh air). Tidying the house, likewise, is a complete reset because it makes my brain play a completely elementary matching game for a while (what object goes in what place?). But running an errand or tidying up, while they give my brain a break, are still super productive.
Sleep
Sleep is the ultimate reset button. Sleep is when your brain deals with all the knowledge and memories you’ve accumulated since last time you slept so if you’ve done a lot of information acquisition and that tired your brain out, sleep is the natural remedy. Sleeping will completely disengage your brain from whatever you were doing to accumulate cognitive fatigue and, hopefully, send you right back to baseline.
I realize that not everybody can just go to sleep to reset their brain. There are social barriers (like “it’s the middle of the work day and I have to take meetings”) and physiological barriers (like “I can only sleep at night or if I’m physically tired”). I hope that with more knowledge workers working-from-home for now or even permanently, people are more able to sneak off in the middle of the workday and reset their brain with a nap. I think siesta culture is great for people and I wish we had that here but I understand that we don’t.
If you have the ability to take a nap, even a brief one, that’s the gold standard for reducing brain fatigue (and body fatigue too, it’s the best fatigue-reducer). If physiological resistance to sleeping outside your usual bedtime routine is the issue, try laying down in a dark room and listening to a sedate podcast or an audiobook for a bit. If you have access to apps like Headspace or Calm you can listen to “sleepcasts” or “sleep stories” to help.
I’m a huge fan of daytime sleeping. If you aren’t a natural at day sleeping, I heartily encourage you to teach yourself this amazing skill. It’s the opposite of jogging. It’s literally the best.
References
Cognitive Fatigue Influences Students’ Performance on Standardized Tests
Comparison of Rest-Break Interventions During a Mentally Demanding Task
Mental Fatigue Impairs Emotion Regulation
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.
After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.