Hi there, it's Lucas Miller here, your guest host for the week.

Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Wednesday.

This week is all about using neuroscience to optimize your energy so you can perform

better at work and get more out of life.

And a big part of that is actually taking breaks.

Breaks may seem counterintuitive to productivity, but taking even a few minutes to ourselves

can help us regain the energy to take on our most important work.

So today I'll share how to optimize your breaks so you can take on whatever life brings.

If you think back to the Industrial Revolution, everybody break at the same time and otherwise

you're working and we basically started to treat and assume that people are like machines.

Breaks have a purpose, breaks help us regain energy to be productive.

Now it's critical over time as we move into a world that is more about creativity, that

we acknowledge that breaks are important, that we acknowledge that humans are not machines.

I love sharing stories that highlight different myths or mistakes that many of us are

sometimes making, but we're not trying to make them.

I was working a couple years back in San Francisco with an executive there and something she

shared with me is she said, every single day in the afternoon, I make a point to pull

out a favorite book of mine, it's a fiction book that I like to read and I read it and

I do this because I want to communicate to other people that it's okay to take breaks.

When I told her I said, that's great, I'm glad that you're encouraging people to have

hobbies, do things that are not work specific, but let's actually talk about the break piece

because you actually have it wrong.

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