It may not be long enough to pop to the shops or head out for a run, but taking a work break of less than 10 minutes could still boost wellbeing, research suggests.
The team behind the analysis say “micro-breaks” appear to reduce fatigue and help workers feel more vigorous.
Patricia Albulescu, the lead author of the research from the West University of Timişoara in Romania, said that when we power through daily tasks and ignore our needs there can be consequences, including a lack of attention and mistakes.
“When taking a short break when we feel the need to, we can notice that new ideas start to flow easily again, or effortlessly can pay attention to what we do,” she said.
In the journal PLOS One, Albulescu and her team described how they analysed data from 19 articles, involving 22 separate studies and a total of 2,335 participants, with some studies involving students and others, employees.
In the studies, participants were asked to carry out a task – ranging from typing to memory tests – broken up by a short break of between 8 seconds and 10 minutes. This was used in various ways, from undertaking physical activity to watching movie clips.
Participants also completed self-reported assessments, which varied between studies, investigating how tired or full of energy and enthusiasm they felt. In some cases productivity was also measured. The results were then compared against participants who either had no break or, in some cases, simply followed their usual routine.
The results revealed that micro-breaks had a small but positive effect on participants, suggesting about 64% of the group taking micro-breaks would score above the mean of the control group both for vigour and fatigue.
The results were less clear cut for performance, with benefits only seen for clerical work or creative exercises but not for cognitively demanding tasks. The team add the longer the break, the greater the boost to performance was.
However, the research has limitations. It is not clear whether the studies are unbiased, while other aspects of wellbeing such as anxiety were not examined.
It is also unclear how many sub-10-minute breaks people should take, or what they should do in them.
Albulescu said an “always on” culture could make people feeling pressured to keep working, but there were solutions, such as fostering autonomy in work tasks and focusing on the quality of one’s work rather than the speed at which it is done.
“Managers can encourage such environments where taking a short break to gaze out of the window for a couple of seconds does not mean being lazy and skipping work,” she said.
Dr Ben Waber, a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab and co-founder and president of Humanyze, a people analytics company, said a number of studies had looked at micro-breaks over the years, generally finding positive relationships at the individual level with reduced stress and improved performance in some cases.
But he said it was important for such breaks to be planned very strategically.
“If they interrupt your work it will have an extremely negative effect on performance, since it takes at least 15 minutes to get back to high levels of performance for most tasks,” Waber said. “For people who are working on very long tasks, it’s much more likely that taking fewer long breaks will be more effective.”
Brendan Burchell, a professor in social sciences at the University of Cambridge, also urged caution, noting that results from students in laboratories may not apply to employees in workplaces, while the effect of micro-breaks is likely to vary between types of work.
Burchell added it was also important to look at the wider impact of different jobs, pointing to eye problems and muscular-skeletal illnesses as among the issues that could affect people who sit at a computer all day without breaks.
“The short term effects are that picked up [in this study] are, I think, trivial compared to the longer term effects of people’s working lives on their wellbeing,” he said.
