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Photo Source: Pixabay, did you paddle or fish today? No?! It seems that your work efficiency is not very high.

On October 17, the Guinness Book of World Records (Guinness World Records) certified Monday as the worst day of the week.

In the new week, Monday is the "worst" reason, mainly because it is the first day to start work, which means that people have to break away from the comfortable, free weekend. However, the emotion of "do not want to go to work", or the "love and hate" with work has been engraved into the genes of workers. In order to work calmly, people need to add another activity to work, that is, fishing. The working time is usually in pieces, and if you want to have a rest during this period, you can only "touch the fish". After all, the work is very tiring, and I have to paddle occasionally.

Touch the fish for a while, but is it really pure laziness to "touch the fish"? does it have no positive meaning? Some special workers, such as sociologists and psychologists, may not agree with this view. A very common situation, also known as "micro-breaks" (which is not exactly equivalent to fishing, can be understood as a cross relationship), is to take tens of seconds to a few minutes to take a break at work. Decades of research has shown that "taking a break" may be the key to balancing mental health and productivity, and some scientists believe that "taking a break" is part of the job.

"rest" has two important characteristics: the time to rest is relatively short, and it is entirely voluntary (it can be understood as taking a rest if you want to). During this period of time away from the busy, you can look at the beautiful scenery outside the window, make a refreshing cup of tea, flip through all kinds of small things on the table, or have a chat with friendly colleagues and close friends.

Photo Source: Pixabay can say that the idea of wanting to rest is accompanied by work. After all, when you are tired, you want to rest. This is the instinct of the body. As early as the 1980s, scientists from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health and Purdue University conducted an experiment to understand the positive impact of "rest" on productivity. The scientists artificially set up an office environment and invited 20 participants to work for two days in a highly repetitive, boring data entry task. However, every 40 minutes of work, they ask participants to pause, work at hand, and take a short break in the workplace, about tens of seconds.

They measured the heart rate of the participants before and after rest and recorded their productivity. The results show that rest may not be so beneficial to productivity, etc., as some employees seem to perform worse after the break, with fewer keystrokes per minute. A good sign, however, is that people who take longer breaks tend to have a lower heart rate, feel calmer and make fewer mistakes at work. In other words, taking a break can help reduce the rate of mistakes at work (and, to some extent, improve efficiency) and make employees less stressed and in a better mindset.

Get some rest every day, okay? In 1998, two Dutch scientists, Thea F. Meijman and Gijsbertus Mulder, put forward a theory about work and rest-the effort-recovery theory (Effort-Recovery Theory). This theory holds that when you work hard, the stress system in the human body will be activated, and as work will continue to consume resources in the human body, people's negative emotions and fatigue will increase rapidly.

After work, if there is free time to get enough rest, people's bad mood and fatigue will disappear and return to a good state. However, from the current situation, long-term lack of rest may be more common, in the long run, people's psychological and physiological system may be abnormal, there may be more chronic physical and mental health problems. The best way to avoid the cumulative harmful effects of not getting enough rest for a long time is to have a proper rest every day, even at work.

Photo Source: Pixabay at work, people's cognitive ability is limited, including directed attention, psychological resilience and so on. When a job requires too much cognitive input, the activity and metabolism of neurons in the brain will increase, and over time, cognitive overload may occur, such as mind shaking or absent-mindedness, and taking a break at this time can well prevent these situations.

In addition, when we realize that we are tired, we are faced with two choices: go back to work and take a break before trying. Now it seems that the second is better. With a few minutes of short rest, a few minutes of stretching and simple exercise will make you feel more positive and feel less tired, and your limbs and muscles will not be in the same position all the time. Proper activity can avoid the accumulation of injuries and soreness; if you choose friends and family to chat, it will also increase your vitality. In addition, taking the time to watch a small movie clip will also restore people's energy and improve their work performance.

A recent meta-study published in the journal Public Library of Science (PLoS ONE) shows that these short "breaks" enrich work, allowing people to escape from work stress briefly, regain energy and attention, and then better devote themselves to work. However, there is no definite value for the specific time of "rest".

One study suggests that taking a 40-second break is enough to improve a person's attention and cognitive performance, while other studies suggest that taking a break should be generous, even for a few minutes. In fact, as long as people take no more than 12% of their working hours, they don't seem to affect productivity and have a more positive mindset at work. Take 8 hours of work as an example, the rest time can reach 57.6 minutes.

The more boring you are and the more you need a break, of course, the impact of a break varies significantly in different types of work. For jobs with high cognitive requirements (need to analyze information, draw conclusions, etc.), the positive impact of rest is not significant. As for the reason, the researchers believe that a short break may not fully supplement the resources consumed in the cognitive process. However, for jobs that require creativity, or some boring clerical types, the role of a break will be further enhanced, and the rest time needs to be extended, for example, about 10 minutes at a time, to ensure a recovery of energy and vitality. to better finish the work that follows.

Those high-intensity physical work, work that requires a high degree of concentration, but also need such a rest. According to a survey by the British government agency HSE, more than 460000 workers suffered musculoskeletal injuries due to work in 2017 and 2018. When these workers don't have time to take a break, their muscles stay in a state for a long time, which accelerates muscle damage. When the muscles really start to ache, they will realize the problem, and by then it may be too late. Taking a proper rest at work and adjusting the state of the body can alleviate these problems.

Photo Source: Pixabay in addition, some scientists have studied surgeons who have been under high pressure for a long time at work. In one experiment, 16 doctors were asked to take a break before and after the operation (they can briefly leave the work area and stretch for 20 seconds every 20 minutes) and without rest after the operation. draw a star outline with surgical scissors and lift a weight of 5 jin with one hand for as long as possible. They found that after a break, doctors were seven times more accurate in star drawing (judging by the number of mistakes made in star drawing) and significantly reduced physical tiredness. in addition, they felt less pain in their back, neck, shoulders and wrists.

For more ordinary people, working all day seems to be extremely hard, but the rate of mistakes at work may continue to rise, and individuals may not feel comfortable physically. Regular "breaks" may seem lazy, but they can help improve work efficiency, happiness and personal performance after a short break. At present, there is no evidence that "rest" harms job performance.

If you don't have to meet the deadline, relax for a while.

Reference link:

Https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190312-the-tiny-breaks-that-ease-your-body-and-reboot-your-brain

Https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/micro-breaks-work-productivity-mental-health

Article link:

Https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0272460

Https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08959285.2018.1466889

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: global Science (ID:huanqiukexue), written by: clefable, revised by Liu Mingyang

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