Taking a break can improve your vision, and your posture, and boost your mood and your concentration too.
Some people think that taking a break can make you less productive, but actually, it’s one of the best things you can do when you are busy.
Going outside for your break is even better for your mental health and wellbeing. Focus is increased and stress levels lower and attention increases.
Having a break can also increase your creativity. Three ten-minute breaks a day is enough to make a difference.
Does taking a break work?
Research carried out in America in the late 1980s showed that employees who took short micro-breaks of just three minutes produced more accurate work and had lower heart rates. Short breaks at work have a disproportionate benefit.
While it can be easier to take breaks at the office with its natural attentions and interactions such as colleagues, coffee machines, walks to other departments and printers etc, those who work from home can often be glued to a task or even a screen with no distractions at all.
Standing up and moving around can stabilise your blood sugars and makes you more engaged and productive. They just make your enjoyment of work go up.
A study of stress in surgeons taking regular breaks, or not, showed that those who did had lower levels of cortisol and made fewer mistakes.
As well as psychological benefits, a separate study of surgeons taking breaks showed a reduction in joint pain and levels of fatigue halved.
Even looking away from your screen for short periods can improve eye strain. It’s one of the things we recommend in our one-to-one display screen equipment assessments.
Letting your mind wander can boost mood, increase creativity and effective decision-making. It plays a vital role in our mental and physical lives. It helps with mental resilience too.
To improve your creativity, you must remember that a lot of thinking happened in both our conscious and unconscious minds.
How to be more creative at work
Creative thinking involves a stage psychologists call incubation. Divergent thinking involves coming up with as many ideas as possible. Then incubation happens when we evaluate them. The process ends with convergent thinking when we narrow it down to a solution. Incubation happens during breaks and downtime.
Studies show that being happy makes you more creative and just as important, being creative makes you happier.
One of the most recent discoveries in cognitive neuroscience in the last few decades was the default mode network. When we rest, rather than assuming our mind activity reduces, it actually engages this huge neural network.
Keeping your thoughts positive and able to wander is good. Avoid overloading it with social media or worries is not something you should do to make your break at work effective. Take yourself to a good space or memory and wander from there.