There is a mindset – the “work yourself to the bone and you’ll succeed” mindset. While this mindset does highlight the fact that hard work is integral to living a happy life, it completely disregards that taking breaks sometimes is important too.
The first reason this mindset doesn’t work is something you’ve likely experienced yourself. When working for a long period of time, productivity continues to diminish and begin to space off and get sidetracked. It doesn’t matter if the work is physical or mental, burnout is inevitable, and pushing through this burnout only worsens the effects. Working with no breaks brings other issues, making someone feel ineffective, cynical and exhausted. The body can’t handle overworking for extended periods of time, and your risk for health problems such as strokes and heart issues goes up dramatically. Statistically, people who work over 55 hours per week have a 13% higher risk for heart attacks and a 35% higher risk for strokes, with higher susceptibility to infections, injuries, diabetes, and musculoskeletal disorders. With this in mind, taking a ten minute break at work doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.
Overworking applies to everyone as well, not just adults. Students regularly become overworked due to their jammed schedules, extracurriculars and lack of sleep. This causes students to sacrifice social skills and hobbies they actually enjoy just to finish schoolwork, leading to reduced satisfaction and motivation. After a certain point, the extra work stops building skills and ends up only doing more harm to the student. A study done on top high school students by NYU in 2015 showed that 49% of students feel a great deal of stress on a daily basis and nearly one quarter of the students in the study showed and described symptoms of clinical depression. Another study done by the NIH on student burnout found that students who use maladaptive coping methods like drugs, emotional avoidance and self criticism experienced higher burnout rates than those who had healthy ways of coping. Sleep deprivation was also strongly linked to burnout.
Taking a break doesn’t mean a full day off either; a study published by the NIH showed that taking short microbreaks in between work strongly increased vigor and reduced fatigue. Just spending 10 minutes walking around, listening to music or meditating can be enough for your brain to reset and be fresh for the next chunk of time. In conclusion, working yourself to the bone is counterproductive. Taking a short break occasionally can boost not only how much you get done but also the quality of work by a significant amount.
