The Practical Guide to Taking Intentional Breaks at Work

You can easily improve your productivity and your happiness by taking intentional breaks during your workday.

We don’t know how to stop.

“It is about the commas and full stops. On their own, they are not at all sexy. Yet, it is the commas and full stops, the pause and the breath, that transforms something unintelligible and exhausting, into something enjoyable and meaningful .” — Caroline Purkhardt, Stillness in Action

The thing with breaks is that we don’t really see them as an intrinsic part of working. Most people I know seem to approach breaks in their work day as a necessity to enable such actions as eating or smoking a cigarette.

Not many of us fully acknowledge that high quality breaks are needed to perform at our best in whatever it is we are working on. And even fewer choose to be intentional as to why, when, and how to spend their breaks.

It is also very common that we don’t know when to stop. We often realize that we needed more breaks after we have already surpassed a critical threshold of fatigue — for example, we face a professional burnout. These neglected breaks encompass a wide range of behaviors — from not taking enough short breaks during individual work days, to consistently skipping opportunities to go on holidays over the course of seasons and years.

So why are regular and conscious breaks from work so important? The answer can be complex, but it can also be brought down to one crucial concept — psychological detachment from work (a term coined by Sabine Sonnentag).

This is the state when you manage to “switch off” from thinking about your working tasks and give your brain and body a chance to reset. This psychological detachment is exactly the state we are looking for while taking an intentional break.

“Employees who feel more detached from work during off-hours are more satisfied with their lives and experience less emotional exhaustion and…