Unstructured 5-Minute Break Restores Attention

The University of Sydney researchers set out to investigate which famous attention techniques actually work. They discovered that a 5-minute break from thinking is all that is required to regain attention. There’s no need for a river walk or a long movie of bamboo woods waving in the wind (though they would be wonderful). A five-minute overall rest will enough.

According to new research, a simple, unstructured five-minute break from a hard work is all you need to regain concentration or recover attention.

Rest is being increasingly acknowledged as critical to performance, well-being, and learning. Rest breaks come in all forms and sizes, whether it’s a two-week vacation, one decent night’s sleep, an hour-long walk in the park, or a few minutes spent getting up from your desk for a coffee. Methods such as the Pomodoro Technique—setting a timer to take a short 5-minute break after 25 minutes of hard work—are gaining favor in workplaces and study environments as reminders to recharge.

Spending time in nature has been shown in numerous studies since the 1980s to improve attention. However, few of us can go “forest bathing” to take a vacation from essay writing or acquiring a new skill at work. According to other research, even watching a video of a natural landscape had the same restorative effect.

“If you want your work or study to be more productive, you need to build in simple 5-minute breaks of doing nothing,” said Associate Professor Paul Ginns, an expert in educational psychology at University of Sydney. “You need to be doing something different for five minutes. Move away from your computer or device, do some breathing or just sit quietly to rest your brain from the task. Scrolling through social media does not count as rest—you need to take a break from devices.”

According to Associate Professor Ginns, we must use our brain to generate attention in order to learn or solve problems, yet attention is limited and can be quickly depleted.

“Our attentions spans differ individually, and we can be influenced by the time of day or by blood sugar levels or caffeine intake, so it is complicated,” he said. “But we wanted to test how we can restore attention and it’s delightful that it can be as simple as a five-minute rest break. It’s an easy productivity hack that is accessible to everyone.”

How the research was carried out
In the study, 72 Australian university students initially performed a tough mental maths pre-test under accelerated testing conditions, in order to exhaust the students’ attentional resources. This portion of the experiment was scheduled to take around 20 minutes.

Students in the control (no rest) group then proceeded to study a brief lesson on mentally multiplying two two-digit integers (e.g., 34 x 67). The second group of students took a 5-minute unstructured rest break, with a simple count-down on a computer screen indicating how much time was remaining on the break.

For five minutes, the third group watched a first-person film of a tour through an Australian rainforest. The study referred to this as “nature-based rest,” despite the fact that it was simply watching a movie.

All students then completed a “directed attention” short survey on the extent to which they experienced distracting thoughts during the mental mathematics lesson, responding to questions such as “My attention was directed towards things other than the lesson” and “I found it hard to maintain my concentration for more than a short time.” Lastly, students completed a 20-question problem-solving test to see how well they could apply the mental mathematics strategy.

When the three groups’ results were compared, students in the unstructured rest group reported higher average levels of directed attention than those in the no rest control group. Both the unstructured rest group and the nature-based rest group outperformed the control group on the problem-solving test.

While the nature-based rest group solved more questions than the unstructured rest group on average (60% vs. 53% accurate), the difference was not statistically significant.

Rest Promotes Learning

“Many skills—including cognitive skills like mathematics—take a lot of concentration to master, but our cognitive resources become depleted when we use our minds to solve problems or study,” said Associate Professor Paul Ginns, the academic supervisor and co-author of the paper. “It may seem counter-intuitive to interrupt a study break to help learning, but short rest breaks—whether they’re unstructured or watching ‘virtual’ nature videos—seem to be well-worth the time, helping students to concentrate better and learn more effectively. This could also be applied for workers learning a new skill or concentrating on a complex task.”

What you can do to regain focus
After 20 minutes of complex cognitive work, schedule five-minute breaks. This could happen in a classroom or at a university. It could also be used in a variety of professions or at home when performing hard cognitive tasks like tax returns.

“The Pomodoro Technique method—where people work for 25 minutes and then break for five minutes—is a popular life hack and we may have just found the first evidence for it working,” said Associate Professor Ginns. “Other hacks, such as deep breathing or finding a sense of stillness are centuries old. Whatever you choose to do, offer your brain a total break for just five minutes and see how your attention improves.”

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