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Take a Break
28 July 2015
Allison listened to The End of The Lunch Hour on Boston’s NPR News Station WBUR 90.9 and rode the recumbent bike in her office. (In the phrase, "lunch break," the break matters more than lunch.)
Tags: allison read, balance
When you’re feeling busy and overwhelmed I bet the last thing you do is take a break. Instead you think to yourself, “I don’t have time to go out for lunch. Let me just knock out a few more emails and eat at my desk.” In many cases, you may not even eat at your desk and find yourself so hungry by mid-afternoon that you go on a mindless hunt for salt, sugar, fat, carbs, and caffeine.
You’re not alone. As you’ll hear in the Boston NPR segment, The End of the Lunch Hour, “only one in five people take a break and leave their desks to eat.” When NPR posted this segment, they included links to research explaining how taking breaks (at lunch or any other time of day) increases creativity and how getting out into nature can boost productivity, too.
If you want to take the break theory even further, check out this post I wrote in 2013 about Tony Schwartz’s recommendation based on medical research that you take a break every 90-minutes. The good news is that the breaks don’t have to be long. They just need to happen a lot more often and ideally should not involve your computer.
picture from www.horizonfitness.com/vision-fitness
If you want your break to be a short video you saw on Facebook the day before, take your phone outside, sit on the steps and enjoy those dancing animals with the sun shining on your face. Then take a brisk walk around the building. This time of year it’s a little too humid for me to walk around our building, but I find that even a five-minute ride on the recumbent bike in our office helps restore my energy.
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