Breaks needed to avoid breakdown at home
“You’re on mute” might be the Zoom quote of the year, but on Slack — at least around lunchtime — it seems to be: “Grabbing a quick bite.”
That was the daily refrain I heard from colleagues at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, where I edit the school’s alumni magazine, after we started working remotely in March. And while we were all very busy doing very important jobs, it’s not like we were developing a coronavirus vaccine. Was our work really so urgent that we couldn’t afford to take more than a few minutes for the midday meal? And why were we all “grabbing” our lunches? Were we afraid that if we loosened our grip, someone might snatch them out of our hands?
This is how downtime feels in general these days: snatched away. While working from home has given us the freedom to work in our pajamas, it’s also blurred the lines between work and life — and deprived us of the ability to leave the office behind, physically and mentally. A May survey by the career website Monster found that half of remote workers were experiencing burnout, but roughly the same number weren’t planning to take time off to decompress.
That’s a mistake, says Charlotte Fritz, a professor of industrial and organizational psychology at Portland State University. Even when we’re not in the middle of a deadly pandemic, Fritz says, it’s crucial to our well-being to attain what she and other researchers call “psychological detachment” from work — meaning that we mentally let it go.
Detaching requires us to take breaks, whether they’re vacations or moments of relaxation during the day. But the health crisis itself is making it harder to take the downtime we need to deal with the stress it’s causing. Fewer of us are planning vacations because we don’t feel safe traveling. And the economic uncertainties of the pandemic are adding to a sense of pressure to be a perfect employee: highly productive and always on.
Remote workers tend to take fewer breaks in general, in or out of a pandemic, in part because we can’t demonstrate our work ethic in the same ways from home that we could in an office, explains Minjae Kim, an organizational behavior professor at Rice’s school of business. “Because our interactions are so limited, we have fewer opportunities to prove our commitment and our value,” Kim says. “One way to do that is to show that we’re working overtime, or by staying on Zoom all the time.”
The problem is that changes to our work culture — including the “always on” mentality many of us are feeling — have a tendency to become ingrained even after the crisis that provoked them has passed. That could mean that if we let our lunch breaks slip from our grasp now, we’ll never be able to grab hold of them again.
In fact, lunchtime plays a key role in maintaining our mental stamina, says John P. Trougakos, an organizational behavior professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough. In “Lunch Breaks Unpacked,” Trougakos and his colleagues found that being able to disconnect from work at lunch was linked to a reduction of fatigue at the end of the workday and improved employee performance and well-being.
“We have a fixed amount of mental energy, just like we do physical energy,” he says. “When you don’t have a break, you become less and less efficient, and it becomes more stressful. That stress accumulates throughout the day, and it’s emotionally exhausting. If it accumulates day after day, week after week, that’s how you get burnout.”
Luckily, there are ways to make remote work more workable, Trougakos says. “If remote workers structure their day well, they can find extra time for breaks. They have, in theory, more flexibility to plan out their best productivity windows. That could mean if you’re a night owl, you might schedule a block of work in the evening. But that doesn’t mean work your full workday and work the night shift.”
For their part, managers can encourage employees to take more downtime just by assuring them that they are valued and that their jobs are not in jeopardy, Kim says. Without the pressure to prove themselves, workers not only breathe easier but also perform better. And over time, as the workforce becomes increasingly remote, expectations will adjust and we’ll likely come up with new ways to demonstrate our commitment to our work — while still finding time for a leisurely lunch.