When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing(17)

For example, a 2016 study looked at more than eight hundred workers (mostly in information technology, education, and media) from eleven different organizations, some of whom regularly took lunch breaks away from their desks and some of whom did not. The non–desk lunchers were better able to contend with workplace stress and showed less exhaustion and greater vigor not just during the remainder of the day but also a full one year later.

“Lunch breaks,” the researchers say, “offer an important recovery setting to promote occupational health and well-being”—particularly for “employees in cognitively or emotionally demanding jobs.”35 For groups that require high levels of cooperation—say, firefighters—eating together also enhances team performance.36

Not just any lunch will do, however. The most powerful lunch breaks have two key ingredients—autonomy and detachment. Autonomy—exercising some control over what you do, how you do it, when you do it, and whom you do it with—is critical for high performance, especially on complex tasks. But it’s equally crucial when we take breaks from complex tasks. “The extent to which employees can determine how they utilize their lunch breaks may be just as important as what employees do during their lunch,” says one set of researchers.37

Detachment—both psychological and physical—is also critical. Staying focused on work during lunch, or even using one’s phone for social media, can intensify fatigue, according to multiple studies, but shifting one’s focus away from the office has the opposite effect. Longer lunch breaks and lunch breaks away from the office can be prophylactic against afternoon peril. Some of these researchers suggest that “organizations could promote lunchtime recovery by giving options to spend lunch breaks in different ways that enable detachment, such as spending a break in a non-work environment or offering a space for relaxing activities.”38 Ever so slowly, organizations are responding. For instance, in Toronto, CBRE, the large commercial real estate firm, has banned desk lunches in the hope that employees will take a proper lunch break.39

Given this evidence, as well as the dangers of the trough, it’s becoming ever clearer that we must revise some oft-repeated advice. Say it with me now, brothers and sisters: Lunch is the most important meal of the day.





SLEEPING ON THE JOB


I hate naps. Maybe I enjoyed them when I was a kid. But from the age of five onward, I’ve considered them the behavioral equivalent of sippy cups—fine for toddlers, pathetic for grown-ups. It’s not that I’ve never napped as an adult. I have—sometimes intentionally, most times inadvertently. But when I’ve awoken from these slumbers, I usually feel woozy, wobbly, and befuddled—shrouded in a haze of grogginess and enveloped in a larger cloud of shame. To me, naps are less an element of self-care than a source of self-loathing. They are a sign of personal failure and moral weakness.

But I’ve recently changed my mind. And in response, I’ve changed my ways. Done right, naps can be a shrewd response to the trough and a valuable break. Naps, research shows, confer two key benefits: They improve cognitive performance and they boost mental and physical health.

In many ways, naps are Zambonis for our brains. They smooth out the nicks, scuffs, and scratches a typical day has left on our mental ice. One well-known NASA study, for instance, found that pilots who napped for up to forty minutes subsequently showed a 34 percent improvement in reaction time and a twofold increase in alertness.40 The same benefit redounds to air traffic controllers: After a short nap, their alertness sharpens and their performance climbs.41 Italian police officers who took naps immediately before their afternoon and evening shifts had 48 percent fewer traffic accidents than those who didn’t nap.42

However, the returns from napping extend beyond vigilance. An afternoon nap expands the brain’s capacity to learn, according to a University of California–Berkeley study. Nappers easily outperformed non-nappers on their ability to retain information.43 In another experiment, nappers were twice as likely to solve a complex problem than people who hadn’t napped or who had spent the time in other activities.44 Napping boosts short-term memory as well as associative memory, the type of memory that allows us to match a face to a name.45 The overall benefits of napping to our brainpower are massive, especially the older we get.46 As one academic overview of the napping literature explains, “Even for individuals who generally get the sleep they need on a nightly basis, napping may lead to considerable benefits in terms of mood, alertness and cognitive performance. . . [It] is particularly beneficial to performance on tasks, such as addition, logical reasoning, reaction time, and symbol recognition.”47 Napping even increases “flow,” that profoundly powerful source of engagement and creativity.48

Naps also improve our overall health. A large study in Greece, which followed more than 23,000 people over six years, found that, controlling for other risk factors, people who napped were as much as 37 percent less likely as others to die from heart disease, “an effect of the same order of magnitude as taking an aspirin or exercising every day.”49 Napping strengthens our immune system.50 And one British study found that simply anticipating a nap can reduce blood pressure.51

Yet, even after absorbing this evidence, I remained a nap skeptic. One reason I so disliked naps is that I woke up from them feeling as if someone had injected my bloodstream with oatmeal and replaced my brain with oily rags. Then I discovered something crucial: I was doing it wrong.