The Benefits of Taking Breaks: Why Overworked Researchers Struggle to See the Obvious
When Talia started her postdoc, she had a plan: work hard, but sustainably. But six months in, she was skipping meals, replying to emails at midnight, and measuring success by the number of to-dos crossed off instead of the completed research. She couldn’t focus for more than 15 minutes without her attention being drawn to another task on her list. Worse, she didn’t think she deserved a break. After all, she hadn’t “earned” one.
Then there’s Lena, a second-year PhD student. Her spreadsheet of goals resembled a grant proposal condensed into a week. She’d squeeze multiple wet lab experiments, figure annotations, paper writing, and courses to improve her coding skills into each day, then berate herself when half of it slid undone. Her issue wasn’t meetings or distractions. It was that she was trying to plan a month’s worth of work into five days and blaming herself for failing. She had fallen into a trap that many researchers unknowingly walk into: not knowing what a task truly requires.
This post is for Talia. For Lena. For every researcher operating in survival mode. Because the benefits of taking breaks aren’t just anecdotal, they’re essential. And understanding why we avoid them is the first step toward working smarter andhealthier.
Table Of Contents:
- The Benefits of Taking Breaks: Why Overworked Researchers Struggle to See the Obvious
- The Neuroscience of Focus and Fatigue
- Breaks in Practice: What They Look Like and Why They Work
- How to Incorporate Breaks into Your Day
- Helping Your Researchers Work More Sustainably
The Neuroscience of Focus and Fatigue
Understanding the benefits of taking breaks starts with understanding how the brain works.
Our cognitive functioning follows what are known as ultradian cycles, natural rhythms that last about 90 minutes. During each cycle, our alertness peaks and then drops. It’s why a burst of writing or reading can feel so productive at first, only to dissolve into fuzzy thinking a few hours in.
These cycles aren’t arbitrary. They’re wired into our biology. Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist at Stanford, explains that the brain consumes a disproportionate share of the body’s energy. After a focused session, even one that lasts 45 minutes, the brain needs time to restore. He calls this process deliberate defocus, a period of low-cognitive activity that allows for mental recovery.
Similarly, Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University, known for his work on productivity, refers to what happens when we switch tasks too quickly as attention residue. Our attention doesn’t fully transfer. Instead, a fragment of our focus stays stuck on the last task, reducing the clarity and quality of our work.
When researchers push through fatigue, skip rest, or context-switch endlessly, they’re not being productive. They’re undermining their ability to think deeply. Recognising these rhythms is a game-changer. It shifts the mindset from “pushing through” to pacing. From squeezing more in to working with the brain, not against it.
Why Researchers Avoid Breaks: The Hidden Pressures
There are three big reasons why early-career researchers struggle to take breaks, and all of them are deeply human.
1. Over-Planning and the Time Fallacy
Lena didn’t suffer from a reactive calendar full of meetings. Her week was self-imposed chaos: a tightly packed puzzle of tasks with no room to breathe. She’d plan a week’s worth of work that would take a month to complete. Then beat herself up when it didn’t happen.
This is what cognitive science refers to as the planning fallacy, i.e., the tendency to underestimate how long a task will take. Researchers often don’t know how long deep thinking, writing, or data analysis truly takes, especially when feedback cycles or emotional labour are involved. As a result, their to-do lists fill with an overwhelming volume of work, leaving no room for rest.
This is where the technique of multiscale planning comes in. It reframes productivity not as stuffing more in, but as pacing projects realistically and aligning them across different time horizons, such as days, weeks, quarters and years. It’s not just a better approach to planning. It’s a better story about what success looks like.
2. Impostor Syndrome
Talia’s hesitancy to take a break wasn’t about her calendar. It was about her inner critic.
Impostor syndrome, the persistent feeling of being a fraud despite evidence of competence, runs rampant in academia. Researchers may believe that if they pause, they’ll fall behind. That others will outwork them. That if they’re not constantly producing, they don’t belong.
This internal pressure creates a punishing dynamic. Breaks feel like indulgences instead of investments. Taking time off isn’t framed as a strategic move; it’s something to be earned by burning out first. And so, even when the body is tired and the brain is foggy, the grind continues.
Talia only began to shift when she tracked how much better her thinking was after taking a walk, or after spending an hour doing nothing. She didn’t magically stop feeling like an impostor. But she began to trust the data of her own experience.
3. Misunderstanding Recovery
Lena used to believe that rest was about doing nothing. But like many researchers, she had never learned that recovery is an active part of the performance cycle.
Our brains run on cycles of focus and fatigue. Neurologically (as I described earlier), we operate in ultradian rhythms, characterised by these roughly 90-minute cycles during which alertness and attention peak, then decline. Trying to push through the valleys of these cycles is like trying to sprint with lactic acid building in your legs. You can do it, but you’ll pay later.
Effective recovery, what some call “deliberate defocus“, isn’t just passive rest. It’s a way to reset your attention, reduce cognitive load, and preserve your ability to focus later in the day. And it’s essential if we want to avoid what Cal Newport calls attention residue: the mental clutter that sticks when you jump from one task to the next without recovery.
Understanding these rhythms changes the question. It’s no longer, “Do I have time for a break?” It’s, “How do I plan my work around the natural limits of my focus?”
Breaks in Practice: What They Look Like and Why They Work
Not all breaks are created equal. To truly harness the benefits of taking breaks, we need to understand which type of break best meets the objective.
Microbreaks
- How long: 30 seconds to 2 minutes
- What it looks like: Standing up, stretching, looking out the window, shaking out your hands.
- Why they work: These quick resets counteract physical tension and eye strain. They interrupt prolonged stillness and screen exposure, giving your nervous system a pause.
- How to use them: Talia, for instance, sets a visual timer. When it dings, she walks to the lab window and watches the trees for a minute. It’s simple, but it resets her posture and breath.
Tactical Breaks
- How long: 5 to 10 minutes
- What it looks like: Refilling water, tidying a desk, folding laundry while working from home.
- Why they work: They shift your attention to an automatic task, allowing deeper brain systems to process what you were working on quietly.
- How to use them: Use them as natural transitions between sections of a paper, or after 20–30 minutes of screen work. Consider a “Pomodoro-style” rhythm: 25 minutes of work, followed by a 5-minute break. For Talia this rhythm was a great way of slowly building up to longer bouts of uninterrupted focused work.
Restorative Breaks
- How long: 15 to 30 minutes
- What it looks like: A walk, a nap, a non-work conversation.
- Why they work: These breaks refill your mental energy. They allow the brain to shift into default mode, which is essential for creativity, problem-solving, and memory consolidation.
- How to use them: Great between 45–90 minute focus bouts. Lena found that loading the dishwasher helped her “shake off” a stats problem and return with a clearer mind. No phone, no scrolling, just movement and mild distraction.
Deep Breaks
- How long: 1+ hours
- What it looks like: An afternoon off, reading fiction, cooking, attending a yoga class.
- Why they work: They let your cognitive and emotional systems fully reset. When done regularly, they prevent burnout.
- How to use them: Especially after completing a big task or in the afternoon slump. Lena now protects one afternoon a week when she does no research-related tasks. Her advisor doesn’t even notice as long as her work does not suffer, but her motivation does. Plus, she found it’s exactly during these afternoons that she has her best ideas.
These aren’t luxuries. They’re performance strategies. Done well, breaks extend your focus, improve your decision-making, and boost your long-term productivity.
How to Incorporate Breaks into Your Day
Knowing about break types is one thing. Actually, using them is another.
Talia began by working in 25-minute Pomodoro blocks, separated by short intentional breaks. She started small: two blocks in the morning, one in the afternoon. She used timers to track focus and set calendar holds for recovery. Over time, this rhythm made her day more spacious, not less.
Lena took a different route. She built in “no task” zones, i.e. brief periods between projects where she’d do something simple: load laundry, refill coffee, sit quietly. These became reset points that prevented one task from bleeding into the next. She also identified her energy peaks in the day and blocked off two 90-minute sessions during these times to focus on deep work. It helped her work avoid the time of the day when her energy naturally dipped and protected those times when she is best poised to push forward.
More than anything, both realised they had to reframe breaks not as interruptions, but as enablers vital for creative work, clear thinking, and sustained output. Their days didn’t get shorter. They got smarter.
Helping Your Researchers Work More Sustainably
The issue isn’t that researchers don’t want to work better or resist seeing the benefits of taking breaks. It’s that the systems around them haven’t shown them how.
Our training programs address both pieces of the puzzle:
- Fast Forward is our 7-week Project Management and Personal Productivity Training for early-stage researchers. It focuses on planning, prioritisation, and energy-aware project management so researchers stop overloading themselves and start designing workflows that make sense.
- Resilience Training is a 9-week program that addresses the human side of research, including stress, recovery, focus, and mindset. It gives researchers tools to build stamina, protect their well-being, and perform without burning out.
Since 2018, more than 1,000 researchers from over 30 institutions have gone through these trainings. They leave not just with insights but with a system that sticks.
If you’re ready to build a culture where sustainable performance is the norm, let’s talk.
Dr. Nadine Sinclair
Nadine is a trusted advisor to corporate and academic leaders and one of the Managing Directors of Mind Matters. Before embarking on her entrepreneurial journey, she was a project manager with McKinsey & Company. A scientist by training and at heart, she conducted her doctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. Nadine brings close to 30,000 hours of experience in managing projects for research institutions, research foundations, pharmaceutical and biotech companies (including many Fortune 500) and governments. She continues to build her expertise with over 1,000 hours of project management each year. As a neuro leadership expert, she bridges the gap between science and business practices, leveraging the latest insights from neuroscience and behavioural economics to create breakthroughs for her clients.
