Attention Can Be Improved by Taking Breaks

A new investigation suggests that people who listen to their inner instincts telling them to take a break from a strenuous activity every once in a while are much better at concentrating than their peers who choose to remain focused on the task at hand.

Most people experienced this situation at least once – when choosing to concentrate harder on a task rather than take a break, only to find themselves losing focus faster than before. In retrospect, listening to your inner self might have been the best way to go about finishing the task.

These discoveries – which seem like common-sense to a point – go against established theories on the nature of attention. They also demonstrate in an empirical manner that turning your attention from an activity just for a little bit can help you get better at focusing on it once the break is finished.

Scientists are conducting investigations into this issue because workers have often reported the same problem – their performance/efficiency at doing a task declines if they do the same thing over and over again. This happens primarily because they lose focus.

In scientific terms, this is called a vigilance decrement. The phenomenon occurs when attention resources begin to get depleted, explains the leader of the new study, University of Illinois psychology professor Dr. Alejandro Lleras.

“For 40 or 50 years, most papers published on the vigilance decrement treated attention as a limited resource that would get used up over time, and I believe that to be wrong,” the expert argues.

“You start performing poorly on a task because you’ve stopped paying attention to it. But you are always paying attention to something. Attention is not the problem,” he goes on to say.

According to Lleras, the human brain may be wired in this manner. Previous studies have demonstrated that, if exposed to the same sound, image, or feeling for a long time, the mind starts to ignore it.

“Constant stimulation is registered by our brains as unimportant, to the point that the brain erases it from our awareness,” Lleras explains, quoted by PsychCentral.

“So I thought, well, if there’s some kind of analogy about the ways the brain fundamentally processes information, things that are true for sensations ought to be true for thoughts,” he adds.

“If sustained attention to a sensation makes that sensation vanish from our awareness, sustained attention to a thought should also lead to that thought’s disappearance from our mind!” the expert says.

The main conclusion of the new investigation is really quite simple – deactivating and reactivating your objectives helps the mind perceive them as new every time you return to work. This in turn prevents the brain from considering the stimuli a background “noise” and ignoring it.

“From a practical standpoint, our research suggests that, when faced with long tasks, it is best to impose brief breaks on yourself. Brief mental breaks will actually help you stay focused on your task!” Lleras concludes.