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Burnt out? Here’s how to refresh your mind in five minutes

Short exercise breaks in the office are good for your heart.

Short exercise breaks in the office are good for your heart. Photo: Getty

Aside from eating lunch and visiting the bathroom, the working body needs regular short breaks from sitting down and not moving.

Sitting (or lying) down for hours at a time increases your risk of heart disease, diabetes and some cancers.

As the Victorian government health advice website calls it: “Sitting is the new smoking.”

Moving about a couple of times an hour helps reduce that risk.

What about the brain?

The other break that we require, in order to boost productivity and maintain focus – especially when dealing with complex problems – is a brain break.

We’ve previously reported on the phenomenon of ‘micro-breaks’, where workers periodically take their minds off the job for literally seconds at a time, in order to refresh the mind.

There’s a whole class of research that looks at how to keep these breaks as short as possible for the sake of the economy.

But what works best?

New research from University of Sydney has found “a simple, unstructured five-minute break from a complex task is all you need to get your concentration back or restore attention”.

“If you want your work or study to be more productive, you need to build in simple five-minute breaks of doing nothing,” said Associate Professor Paul Ginns, an educational psychology researcher.

“You need to be doing something different for five minutes. Move away from your computer or device, do some breathing or just sit quietly to rest your brain from the task. Scrolling through social media does not count as rest – you need to take a break from devices.”

What happened in the study

According to a statement from Sydney University:

The study involved 72 participants (university students).

In the first phase, they were assigned a difficult mental mathematics test “under speeded testing conditions”. This part of the experiment, which lasted about 20 minutes, was designed to exhaust their “attentional resources”.

In other words, burnout their attention spans.

Participants were then divided into three groups:

  • A control (no rest) group that continued straight on to study a short lesson on how to mentally multiply two two-digit numbers such as , 34 x 67.
  • The second group took a five-minute unstructured rest break. There was a count-down on a computer screen showing how much of the break time was left.
  • The third group watched a “first-person perspective video of a walk in an Australian rainforest for five minutes”. The study called this “nature-based rest” even though it was simply watching a video.

All students then completed a short survey on the extent to which they experienced distracting thoughts during the mental mathematics lesson.

This was designed to see which group performed better at what’s known as “directed attention“.

Finally, students completed a 20-question problem-solving test to see how well they could apply the mental mathematics strategy.

The findings

Students in the unstructured rest group reported higher average levels of directed attention than those in the no rest control group.

On the problem-solving test, both the unstructured rest group and the nature-based rest group outperformed the control group.

The nature-based rest group solved more problems on average than the unstructured rest group (60 percent versus. 53 percent) but the researchers say that this difference between the two rest groups “was not statistically significant”.

Taking a rest break in nature has previously been found to be an effective way of re-charging one’s brain. But it’s not a universally practical method.

Just sitting and resting for five minutes is more easily accessed.

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