Take restorative breaks

You have to recover. You wouldn’t expect your muscles to perform at 100% for eight hours straight, but we expect our brains to be on almost non-stop during the workday. It’s understood that our muscles need nutrients and rest to operate at their full capacity, but we don’t always think of brains the same way. Yet, while our brain is 2% of our body weight, it uses about 20% of our energy. Our brain, just like other parts of the body, requires rest to recover physically.

Yet, there’s a pervasive belief that we should be able to get a full eight hours (or more) of work completed each day, but that’s a remnant of an industrial workday. The research around work that requires deliberate focus simply doesn’t support that. The famous research about deliberate practice by Anders Ericsson in 1993, found that our brains can perform about four hours per day of focused work, and even then, only in about 90-minute bursts. When we focus deliberately for extended periods of time, our brains need relief in order to resume with full focus.

Breaks need to be restorative

Breaks aren’t just about fifteen minutes of downtime here and there. They’re just as much about weekends and vacations. However, there’s one critical aspect that most of us overlook: breaks must be restorative. That means they have to be good breaks. If you’re checking email and spending time with directed thinking about work, breaks won’t be restorative. You have to shut off and check out. Let the work go.

In his book, Deep Work, Cal Newport refers to this as “systematic idleness.” That is, this isn’t about procrastinating or otherwise avoiding work. It’s about embracing periods of idleness in a structured way to provide some relief for our brains. There’s some extra upside to this kind of idleness because our minds have a way of continuing to work through problems even when they’re not actively engaged. The bigger question is how this works, and the unfortunate answer is that we don’t really know.

When breaks are planned, structured, and sacred, they work with your productivity instead of hurting it. For instance, going on a 15-minute walk in nature can have significant restorative effects. There’s even a name for it: attention restoration theory. With attention restoration theory, the idea is there are two main kinds of attention: directed attention and effortless attention. With directed attention that is required when doing deep work, we can experience fatigue at which point we need to work towards restoring that attention.

As it turns out, going for a walk in nature is great at this. This takes care of two things. First, nature is engaging in its own perfect way. It’s just interesting enough to get our attention, but it’s not so overwhelming that exhausts us. Walking around in an urban environment needs more directed attention to avoid cars and other pedestrians, so it’s not quite relaxing enough. Getting outside for a hike works wonders on our attention, but, assuming you’re taking a walk, it’s also giving you some much-needed exercise which has shown to have its own positive effects.

This kind of systematic idleness works as a great counter-balance to our directed efforts at thinking. By letting our minds wander, our subconscious can work through all of the information we’ve loaded into our brain during our more directed thinking. We don’t fully understand how this happens, but we’re beginning to developer a clearer picture of how the various parts of our brain handle different types of thinking and processing.

Breaks enable our brains to use a different approach

Several models have been used to try and explain how our subconscious works and how these ideas fit together, but our brains are complicated, so there’s no perfect analogy. Right and left brain. Self-conscious and unselfconscious mind. Rich mode and Linear mode. Regardless of the analogy, the important thing to understand is that our brains seem to have two ways of processing things. The primary way is our logical and linear processing. The other is the half of our brain that connects the dots and comes up with our higher order ideas.

Tasks like math and programming lean heavily on linear, self-conscious processing. They require directed thinking and work well when there’s a black and white problem that requires focused willpower. It’s also great for caution and safety as our linear thought processes tend to be very conservative. That caution can, unfortunately, serve as a check against some more outside-the-box ideas. But then there’s the generative side of thinking where ideas come from. Those happen less frequently from purely sitting at desk. They occur to us when we least expect it precisely because we aren’t relying on that linear mode of thinking.

Tony Schwartz said it best in his book “The Way We’re Working isn’t Working.” He relies on the right/left hemisphere model, and while more recent research gets away from talking about the left/right side of the brain, his core concept of conflicting thought processes is right on.

Where are you when you get your best ideas? In the shower? Working out? Driving? Walking in nature? In your dreams? Here’s where you’re likely not: at your desk, in front of your computer. We rarely get our best ideas when we’re actively trying to get them, using our logic and our will. More commonly, they come to us when we’re not consciously seeking them. This is the right hemisphere at work. The best ideas occur to us, paradoxically, when we let go of conscious control, something that our left hemisphere is reluctant to do. The left hemisphere not only chafes at threats to its power but also sees itself as in charge of our safety. Letting go makes it (and therefore us) feel vulnerable. The right hemisphere, by contrast, has no self-consciousness and, as a result, no sense of self to protect.

That’s systematic idleness at work. We can prime our brain with context and information, but sometimes, we can’t force think our way through problems. Think about those times where you’re working on something challenging and just can’t figure it out. You go home for the day, and almost the exact moment that you sit down to work the next day, the solution comes to you. Or just as you’re about to fall asleep for the evening, your brain nudges you with the answers for your perplexing problems from the day.

A good tactic around breaks, regardless of length, is to jot down what’s on your mind before stopping work. The notes serve as breadcrumbs so you can resume working more quickly, and it primes your brain so that your unconscious can continue chewing on any problems while you’re taking a break.

Our unconscious does a great job connecting the dots when we let it, but taking breaks isn’t just about letting your unconscious work. Like muscles, if you use your brain heavily for any meaningful amount of time, it becomes fatigued, and it’s increasingly difficult to focus. Since our brains work best for about 90-minute stretches, taking breaks and letting our unconscious do some work is a natural part of focused work.

Structure can improve the benefits of taking breaks

Everybody is different, so one size won’t fit all, but some structure can help with these cycles. Let’s go with the idea that 90 minutes is a reasonable upper limit of how long we can focus successfully before we start to wear out. If you set aside 15 to 30 minutes every 90 minutes, you’ll have an opportunity to handle other work that doesn’t require deep thought. For example, after your first 90 minutes, you can spend that break responding to email and other less urgent communication that doesn’t require deep focus. Doing something with a low cognitive load that’s not related to your task at hand will often be more restorative, but that’s not always possible. Alternatively, you could grab some water or a snack or even go on a short walk.

Combine these 90-minute cycles with related research that shows our brains can handle somewhere between one and four hours of deep work each day depending on experience and other factors, and you have a rough formula. Four focused 90-minute sessions per day with 30-minute breaks in between gives you about 6 hours per day for deep work. (And the science says we’re only capable of about four hours of deep work per day.) If you’re thinking in terms of eight-hour days, that leaves you with four 30-minute breaks to process lower urgency stuff that requires less focus, and you can spend that last 1.5-hour block each day processing tasks that require less focus.

You can then spread that time around based on what works for you. Maybe you take longer breaks to process email or attend meetings. Either way, scheduling three 90-minute blocks per day is both easier and more effective than trying to block off a dedicated four hours for focus work. It allows for natural breaks where you can surface to help others, answer questions, and work through tasks that don’t ask as much of you.

Of course, checking email is one way to use the breaks, but that’s not quite as restorative as it could be. It’s not the type of break that can really help your brain rest and recover. For that, it needs to really disengage, and that requires a different kind of break.

One of the best ways to use those breaks is by taking a nap—especially in the afternoon. While naps aren’t as effective as deep sleep, a short power-nap can help with an afternoon boost. If you work at home or work for a progressive company, you might want to try squeezing in a 20-minute power nap. Short naps have shown to have refreshing effects. Just make sure to set an alarm. Studies have shown that sleeping over 20-30 minutes can lead to a slightly deeper sleep where you’ll wake up drowsy.

In addition to your daily cadence of work and breaks, your larger cadence of vacation and restorative time is just as important. If daily breaks are your micro-recovery, vacation is your macro-recovery. The key is to make vacation or recovery time sacred so that it can’t be interrupted by work. If, when on vacation, you’re still expected to be available and make time for work, your brain can never fully disengage, and the restorative effects will be minimal. Both kinds of breaks are key to maximizing productivity.

While you can’t log vacation, long walks in nature, or time in the shower in a time tracker per se, that doesn’t mean those times aren’t critical for contributing to your work. Making time for these kinds of restorative breaks works to ensure your working hours will be higher quality. Don’t take breaks as a manner of procrastinating, but build in just enough downtime for your brain to do its thing and recover.

Your next steps

1. Make time for daily restorative breaks.
2. Put off lower-cognitive tasks like email for the end of the day.
3. Go on walks, ideally out in nature.
4. Jot down what you’re working on before each break to prime your brain and help resume your work more quickly when you return.
5. Try substituting a 20-minute nap for afternoon caffeine.
6. Avoid directed work after hours and while on vacation (it’s ok to jot down notes when inspiration strikes).