Significance of Breaks

Johnny Bang, Reporter

We all have a limit when it comes to doing everyday activities and routines. When we use our brain’s power each day, we slowly start to feel drained, or exhausted. We then resort to taking some time off to let ourselves relax and regenerate. Breaks are crucial to our lives, as it gives us positive outcomes that include our mental and physical health, productivity, and our time.

While taking breaks improves our mental and physical health, doing the opposite can lead to negative consequences. If you were to not take any time off to rewind, you can be psychologically attached to that activity/routine/work. Thus, leading to health problems such as depression, anxiety, and insomnia. Being able to take a break is proven to reduce stress and prevent health issues according to healthline, so why do we do the opposite anyways? Majority of us feel as if we need to get our tasks done quickly, even if it isn’t due soon. Some people may even feel like taking a break is slacking off or a waste of time. Therefore, stating that not taking time off can lead to many issues, while doing the opposite can actually improve your health.

We aren’t all machines who work non-stop, this would lead to a decrease in productivity if we were to ignore taking breaks often. Productivity decreases and stress increases while we are doing important tasks, hence taking breaks is crucial to productivity/stress reduction. We are able to re-focus ourselves when taking an efficient amount of time off from our assignments. Compared to working non-stop, we are more productive with regular breaks in between our work. This also significantly reduces stress, which can also add on to our productivity and make us work less efficiently.

By having breaks, we can find ourselves enjoying the things we do that can include hanging out with the people we love, hobbies, or anything that can drive us off into a different world where we are able to be stress free. With these listed, we can conclude that it all comes down to our mental health. Having the time to reflect on ourselves can also improve our brain’s health, leading to outcomes that we all want to have. When reflecting, we can see a significant boost in our health. We become more confident, creative, and self-aware. So when having the time off, try reflecting on the things you’ve done that you think were positive.

Others may say that breaks are pointless, and provide nothing significant besides wasting time. Breaks may take time away from the important things in life, but are actually crucial to our health. Meaning that this is false and has multiple positive outcomes than negative. We may even find ourselves purposely taking breaks longer than usual. Breaks relieves us from fatigue, which can progress as we work through our tasks. Fatigue can come from the lack of sleep, mental illnesses, etc. Mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, and insomnia can be a consequence of not giving ourselves a break, which can also lead to fatigue. With all of these negative outcomes, the positive outcomes overcomes taking a break. Thus, proving that breaks are significantly beneficial to us than doing the opposite.

On our break, we come up with solutions that relieve us from the negative effects of fatigue and stress. We do activities that are seen as stress free, relaxing, enjoying, anything that can take our stress away. This can include our hobbies such as hanging out with friends/family, giving ourselves time to us, things that aren’t associated with our tasks. Breaks are nothing without

any of these solutions that make our breaks beneficial in our lives. By doing so, we are able to get back on track to do our things that need our attention and be able to feel like ourselves again.

With all of these factors, we can conclude that productivity, health, and our time is significant by breaks as they are beneficial to us. Having the time to be able to do things unrelated to our assignments is something that improves our productivity and health as we continue to do so. As known, fatigue and stress slowly produces as we work. In this case, we take the time off to do things we prefer to reduce our stress. Thus, breaks are such a crucial part of our lives as we work daily and have to be able to cool down from everything life throws at us.