Work Smart, Not Hard: 8 Reasons to Reap the Rewards of Rest
Rewards of Rest
Overworking describes the act of working beyond one’s capacity that can cause both physical and mental distress. According to ADP Research Institute Study, unpaid overtime increased to an average of over nine hours per week in 2021 from seven hours in 2020. Moreover, in another study, more than 70% of respondents worked overtime at least once a week, 29% three times a week, and more than 15% on all days.
Therefore, to help lower these increasing rates, you must learn the benefits of taking a break. In this blog post, you will explore eight significant benefits of taking breaks from work and how AI coaching can assist.
Culture of Overwork
Overworking has been part of most people’s lives for years. With this continuous practice, employees will likely make more mistakes and have uninformed, rash decisions that will soon lead to poor performance and even health-related issues. Also, this has become a culture that results in widespread burnout, disengagement, and an increased turnover rate. There are other risks of not taking a break. These risks include chronic stress, frequent headaches, gastrointestinal issues, high blood pressure, and increased risk of heart disease and stroke.
One of the signs you need a break from work includes burnout. Burnout is a state of exhaustion due to excessive work and stress.
Based on statistics, the burnout rate as of 2022 is nearly 60%, up from 13.5 in 2021. In addition, almost 90% of workers have experienced burnout within the past year, and over 70% have also experienced burnout in their current job.
All kinds of workers in different industries and fields can experience cases of overworking. One particular example of this are physicians. As presented by the 2019 National Physician Burnout, Depression, and Suicide Report, there are over 40% of physicians who felt burned out due to overworking.
Importance of Taking Breaks
With the statistics shown, you must practice and prioritize taking a break from work. Whether it’s micro, lunchtime, or even longer, the important thing is you take one.
Research has found that giving yourself a break can benefit your health. Breaks can be beneficial for your physical and mental aspects. For physical benefits, you can improve your productivity, reduce your stress, and enhance your physical health. And for mental benefits, you can better your creativity, decision-making abilities, and overall mental being. Let’s talk about all of these one by one.
Benefit 1: Increased Productivity
Productivity is essential in every industry and field to gain better results. Therefore, employee productivity must be maintained or consistently improved. But the question is, how?
It would help if you learned the importance of taking a break to improve productivity.
According to a 2018 study, taking micro-breaks can help you to increase your productivity. It is because you can allow your mind and body to rest momentarily and gain more energy to accomplish more tasks.
One technique to do this is by using the Pomodoro technique. The Pomodoro technique is a time management method based on 25-minute stretches of focused work but broken down into five-minute breaks. For longer breaks, this can typically be 15 to 30 minutes after four consecutive work intervals.
Aside from this, you can practice other productivity-enhancing strategies to spur your work performance like decluttering your working space if you take a few minutes break. That way, you can reduce distractions and make yourself more organized before returning to work. Also, it’s best to minimize interruptions to be more focused on your tasks and responsibilities.
Benefit 2: Reduced Stress Levels
Stress is part of everyone’s lives, especially those running their businesses and working at their jobs. If you’re working eight hours a day without breaks, it can result in higher stress levels. With breaks, your brain can rest for a while and recharge. That way, it can function again and help you to think more effectively and critically.
However, aside from a break from work, you must practice doing mindfulness exercises during your breaks. You can meditate where you can only sit quietly and focus on your breathing, thoughts, and sensations. If you want, you can also use an AI coach intervention.
An AI life coach is a digital coach that can use AI algorithms to provide necessary and only personalized recommendations for managing stress effectively.
Artificial intelligence coaching uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) algorithms to understand your needs, preferences, and stress triggers. With Noa Coach, it can help you identify stressors and determine your coping mechanisms.
Benefit 3: Enhanced Creativity
Breaks allow your brain to develop and formulate better ideas. Furthermore, it helps you to form innovative and effective problem solutions that you can use. By taking a break from working, you can detach yourself from everything to let yourself gain new and fresh perspectives.
Based on a 2017 study, breaks can help you to create creative solutions to problems. This can be done by switching between tasks because you can reduce cognitive fixation and enhance divergent and convergent thinking.
Therefore, to nurture your creativity more, you must understand the role of AI coaching tools. These tools can assist you with idea generation and brainstorming, design, and visualization, and you can focus more on data-driven creativity.
Benefit 4: Improved Decision-Making Abilities
Breaks can contribute to a better decision-making process. When you let your mind detach from everything and let it rest briefly, you can keep your thoughts clear and decide what to do with everything you would like to accomplish. Most importantly, you can avoid the risk of decision fatigue.
Decision fatigue is the idea that after you make many decisions, your ability to make more can worsen because you’re unable to think and decide. However, by having mini-breaks, you can take your mind to recharge and refocus on each decision and choose the right option for you.
To further help you through this, you should use an ai coaching platform. This platform can influence your decision-making by automating specific tasks. To automate task in AI coaching platform, you must ensure that you have a modern data infrastructure that can support data types and process massive amounts of them.
Benefit 5: Better Physical Health
By taking a break, you can improve your range of motion. There is a reduced risk of injury and poor posture. Moreover, you can also work on improving your flexibility by allowing your muscles to be less tense and enhance muscular function.
Therefore, it is best to use an ai coaching app that can encourage you to do simple physical activity during your breaks. Try to incorporate exercises and stretching routines during your breaks. You can reduce your sedentary behavior and promote movement to improve blood circulation.
Benefit 6: Enhanced Mental Well-Being
Your mental well-being is as important as your physical well-being. Your mind can also be tired and may not function properly, needing rest to recover.
Having a mental break from work can calm your central nervous system and allow you to shift your brain state. Aside from this, whenever you’re feeling absent-minded, it’s a perfect way to reboot your brain and regain your focus and attention.
According to the 2022 Health Now Survey, more than 45% of Americans have maintained or improved their mental health by taking multiple breaks for 5 to 10 minutes. It shows that short breaks during the day are helpful. In fact, 70% of Americans believe shorter intervals are better than 30 to 60 minutes.
To practice taking a break daily, consider using AI coaching tools offering mental health support, including guided meditation or breathing exercises.
Benefit 7: Strengthened Work-Life Balance
Having a work-life balance allows you to become more productive at work. You will be less likely to have high absenteeism.
Also, balancing your work and life can make you more committed, motivated, and engaged. You can opt for relaxing social breaks if you have breaks. Social breaks can be beneficial because you can talk to your coworker resulting in a more open communication and bonding. Most importantly, you can improve your relationships at your workplace.
To do this, you can use effective AI coaching to help and guide you on how to set your boundaries and prioritize your personal time.
Benefit 8: Increased Job Satisfaction and Engagement
Employers must now encourage employees to take regular breaks, especially during lunch. Based on a study in 2016, lunch breaks and detaching from work can increase energy and decrease the feeling of exhaustion.
Breaks allow employees to de-stress and recharge for the rest of the day, contributing to improving overall job satisfaction. There are examples of companies with increased employee satisfaction like Google and Microsoft.
Google has its own program called “Googler to Googler” that keeps the employees productive and collaborative. Furthermore, Google has several micro kitchens where their employees can have their chit chat session during break. They also created breakout spaces for their employees during their lunch time. On the other hand, Microsoft is able to increase employees job satisfaction and engagement by ensuring that most of it’s employees are getting great work-life balance.
To increase your job satisfaction and engagement, it’s best to use an AI coaching platform to boost your career and job satisfaction.
It’s Time To Take Your Break
The following benefits clearly show the significance of taking breaks. Remember that it’s ok to take a break because you deserve it. Also, it will allow you to function more effectively and result in better work performance.
As a worker, your job is indeed essential. However, you don’t have to compromise your health to earn money and further your career. You must remember that self-care and work-life balance is just as important.
So, it’s time for you to consider using AI in coaching.
Choose a reliable partner like Noa Coach AI Coaching App. Noa will guide you on how to achieve a healthier lifestyle to ensure the good state of your body and mind. Contact us!
Task Automation and Assistance
