Taking Breaks

The Benefits of Breaks

Taking breaks helps rejuvenate you mind and body. It’ll help you understand what you’re trying to learn and most important of all, breaks help you relax.

It has been shown that our brains can process on average 7+-2 things at one time (George Miller, 1956). This isn’t very much, so anything extra can substantially lower our ability to process what we’re working on.

Things like stress or having too much to do will only make our efforts less efficient. They take your focus away and instead of putting 100% of your focus on studying you have stress taking up 50%. Now you’re more stressed so studying will take you twice as long. This can only result in more stress and further loss of efficiency. If you see a 300 pound snowball full of candy rolling fast down a hill, at first it might seem like a good idea to get a piece, but after some thinking you'll see..........

Working harder when your stressed may seem like a good idea at the time but it’s not worth it. There’s a better way.

Breaks slow thinking down so you can refocuses your attention on the present. In the moment thinking will increase your ability to retain and understand information. This will decrease the time needed to study because you’ll be able to focus all of your attention on understanding.

It’s a good to take breaks every hour. Staying focused on any one thing for more than that will give you diminishing returns. But, by taking a break you relax, get extra stuff out of your mind and can focus so your time counts.

Take at least ten minutes for each break to get everything off your mind. Each break will take a little time; don’t cut it short. The benefits will always outweigh the ten minutes you could have stayed studying. If you’re really stressed or can’t seem to retain what you’re reading take a longer break or shorten the time between them. If you can’t understand what your doing there's no sense continuing. Relax, your grades will thank you.

Practice. This may seem crazy but if your stressed you’ll need the practice to be able to relax. Start by sitting alone for 10 minutes and trying to put everything out of your mind. This will be harder than you think. Every once in a while things will come up. Forcing them out will just keep you stressed so just try not to pay attention to them and they’ll go away. Keep trying this throughout your day and with a little practice it'll be easy.

Your practice will pay off when you need it the most.

-Brett