Why You Need to Stop Skipping Your Lunch Break (E24)

Happiness for Cynics Podcast

Many studies have shown that prolonged sitting is the new smoking. Yet despite it being really bad for our health, so many of us don’t take lunch breaks! Join us as we discuss the importance of taking a lunch break, and how to give your brain a rest, get some sun and exercise and eat more mindfully.

Transcript

M: You’re listening to the podcast happiness for cynics. I’m Marie Skelton, a writer and speaker focused on change and resilience.

P: And I’m Peter Furness, a poster hanger, towel folder and furniture re-arranger each week will bring to you the latest news and research in the field of positive psychology, otherwise known as happiness.

M: You can find us at marieskelton.com, which is a site about how to find balance, happiness and resilience in your life. We talk about a lot of same research we cover here on the podcast, including some really practical tips for bringing joy and happiness into your life.

P: So on today’s episode, which is all about:

M: Taking a lunch break.

[Happy Intro Music]

M: So Pete. We need to take a lunch break.

P: Oh, I’m bad at this.

M: I’m really bad at it too. Well, no, I swing, I swing. I have no what’s the word I’m looking for? Discipline.

P: I don’t believe that for a second. [Laugh]

M: No, I really have no discipline. I could be really good at this I’m a lunch break taker.

P: Hi, my name’s Marie Skelton lunch break taker.

M: I haven’t had a lunch break for seven years.

P: [Laugh] Yay Marie! Can I get a t-shirt?

M: [Laugh]

So, according to NPR [National Public Radio], the majority of Americans don’t take their lunch breaks.

And you’ve got an Australian stat too, don’t you?

P: Yes, I do.

A lot of Australians don’t take them, either.

Almost one in three [Australians], 28% of people habitually eating at their desk and 33% of people are skipping lunch entirely more than once a week.

M: I’ve definitely been there and actually since I’ve started working from home. So since Covid and self-isolation, I’ve become really bad, really, really bad at it.

P: See, I find that interesting because at home I naturally want to hang out in the kitchen. It’s my happy place, so I I’m very good at getting my..

M: I’m the exact opposite, I’m like I have to go to the kitchen, if I don’t cook my husband’s going to divorce me. It’s been too long.

[Laughter]

P: I’m strange, I use cooking to relax me. So the kitchen’s a happy place for me. But yeah, I often will if I am staying home, I’ll often get up go for a cup of tea, get up have lunch, make some lunch or microwave something.

M: Yeah so I’ll look at the clock and it’ll be two o’clock and I’ll be like crap and I’ll go grab something. I’ve been a lot better, actually diet wise lately, so I’m having salads and doing a good job eating well, but I will bring it back to my desk and eat it while I juggle phone calls and everything.

P: I’m guilty of that as well, being a small business owner and working on a client based schedule, so I’m terrible at keeping my clients to a count and I always go overtime with them. I found that I actually for many years didn’t have a lunch break at all. Then I started allocating a lunch break that was 15 minutes.

M: [Laugh]

P: Woah, go Petie! [Laugh]

I’ve recently increased that to 45[minutes], which is much better because there’s 10 minutes at the beginning of that and there’s five minutes at the end where you’re kind of preparing for the next client or the next client turns up early. So you know, you do get chipped away a little bit, so it probably ends up being about 20/25 minutes. But it is really, really important to schedule it in and what we’re probably going to come to in terms of diet and so forth is making sure that you’re prepared so that you can make maximize that time. So I always bring my lunch in from home, that I’ve cooked and it’s in the microwave on the way before I’ve even said goodbye to the last client.

M: Yeah, I found that I ate a lot more healthily when I brought my own food in definitely, but it encouraged me in the office to then eat it at my desk. Yeah, so going out for lunch made me have to leave the office, and while I was out, I might pop past a shop and have a look or pick something up or just go sit in the park to eat it. And I have to say the times where I have felt the happiest and the most satisfied with life are the times where I’ve had a really good balance at work between motivating, challenging work but enough time to take a lunch break.

P: And it’s really important for your work productivity as well.

M: Yep, absolutely. So there’s three things that not taking a lunch break impacts on:

• Firstly, your physical health. For a number of years now, people have been saying prolonged sitting is the new smoking.

P: I’m doing this every day.

M: It’s really bad for your physical health.

• Secondly, your brain needs rest.

P: Absolutely.

M: Particularly for white collar type work. If you’re writing and thinking for a lot of what you do, 9 to 5, you need to give it a little bit of time to rest.

• And then the third thing is you’ll eat more mindfully if you get away from that activity that you’re doing and sit and enjoy your lunch.

P: Yes.

M: And so if you’re struggling with weight or weight loss. Eating mindfully is one of the biggest new trends in weight loss. It’s not about what you eat. It’s about more mindful about how you eat is the latest thing there. So definitely taking a lunch break can have a huge impact on your weight loss journey.

P: I want to pick you up on that second point as well Marie, in terms of the productivity and having the break. There is a lot of science that supports the fact that we need to stimulate our brains in different ways to allow different pathways to be accessed and allow different synapses to open up. So frontal lobe, parietal lobe, accessing the different lobes makes for a healthy brain. And if you are obsessed over a problem or an issue and you’re focused and you’re inside that issue for over an hour, I can’t quote the study because I didn’t have time to look this up. I know this is true, so you’ve just got to blind faith here.

[Laughing]

P: Walking away from the problem and then coming back, allows you to reset.

M: Yep.

P: It allows new ideas to drop in and allows you to come back and perhaps look at the issue in a different way, which results in a better, it brings about a better result.

M: Also what we were all told, when we’re studying for exams at school, come back to it. Yes, because the more you focus on something the less likely you are to solve it. But the other thing is, we have natural body rhythms and –

P: – Circadian rhythms.

M: Yes, that’s day and night time sleep. We’ve also got a 90 minute blocks of time that your body goes through during the day. Right? So again, there’s so many different studies and different research about whether your body clock or your brain in their own different times at times can function. Some people say, for only as much as 20 minutes at a time. If you’re fully focused. So again it depends who you look at, whose study.

P: Yep

M: And again the other side is, they say take a break. Now what does that mean? So some studies have definitely shown that just a few minutes is enough to help you reset and go again. But taking as little as 20 minutes in one study has been shown to increase your productivity for the entire day. So if you can’t do anything else, take a 20 minute lunch break.

P: Yep. And the idea of having 20 minutes is, it’s long enough to actually allow yourself to be distracted and to re-energise and to be distracted by something else. And getting up and physically getting away from the desk is really important there, because walking around is going to stimulate a whole heap of body things that go on that create chemical reactions and allow your brain to focus. But it’s allowing your physicality to override what’s going on in the brain. And it wakes everything up gets things stimulated and moving.

M: I think it also resets you. So as someone who’s been through burnout at work through a particularly busy period in Corporate Australia. So I was working for a large corporate we we’re going through a royal commission I was working in public affairs.

P: He he.. [Laugh]

M: Things were shit.

[Laughter]

M: Right? And I just felt like I didn’t want to go take lunch because I didn’t want to be there for another 30 minutes at the end of the day. It just meant, I wouldn’t get through everything, and I’d be there until eight o’clock, not seven thirty or whatever it was. So the logic made sense and I was still just slugging through stuff that I needed to get through. But what that lunch break does is it stops that day to day build of stress, the cortisol levels that build over time. It’s a circuit breaker, and it takes you back to zero again. So the irony of that burnout period is that I knew I needed to exercise, but I stopped exercising. I knew I needed to eat well because it was going to be a very stressful year… or three.

[Laughter]

M: And I started taking getting take out. I didn’t have time to prep my meals. I knew I needed to just get out and get some sun even.

P: Yes.

M: Get outside and to take that mental break. And I just felt that I couldn’t and lo and behold, burnout.

P: Funny that.

[Laughter]

M: We know it and I think that’s the trick, really is actually finding a way to dig yourself out of that hole when you know you’re in it.

P: And that’s where the physical thing can come out, getting yourself…

M: But even 20 minutes, and you can combine them all. Get outside, eat a salad or some protein and vegetables. Eat something healthy-ish.

P: Eat something you’ve cooked yourself. It’s as simple as that.

M: If you’ve got time or find time. Or buy it, I mean there’s plenty of options in most big cities or food courts. You can find healthy food and then walk for the rest of the lunchtime. Get out in the sun or through the mall if it’s raining and walk.

P: I’ve actually found that I do that myself. If now that I have my prolonged lunch break [laugh], I actually go. Oh, I’ve had my lunch, I’ve not done anything, I’ll go around the block and it is just a simple walk around the block, and it’s just to get out, get a different stimulus, get outside even though it’s in CBD and it might be a bit smoggy and so forth. It’s still, it’s still better than staying in those four walls because you feel like you’ve had a change and then you can come back for the afternoon session and go hard again.

M: And just getting your muscles moving.

P: Mmm really important.

M: Absolutely so they say sitting is the new smoking. So it is definitely proven to not be as bad a smoking. But just like everyone jumped on the idea that smoking was bad and we saw all those horrible ads come out. Australia’s really bad for shock ads. I’m surprised we haven’t seen sitting shock ads. What do you make of that?

P: I don’t know. It’s probably not dramatic enough.

M: [Laugh] A whole bunch of people just sitting around, “oh the horror!”

P: “Oh the humanity!”

M: The diseases and illnesses that are tied to long term sitting include cancer, heart disease and type two diabetes. And the research shows that the effects of long term sitting are not reversible through exercise or other good habits.

P: That’s a very interesting one.

M: Can’t take these [away].

P: You can’t get it back.

M: And It’s also going to take time off the end of your life. So morbidity rates with not being able to move, comes back to that lovely little test you can do about getting sitting cross legged on the floor.

M: Yes, this is a good one.

P: And getting up without using your hands.

M: Yes, so if anyone hasn’t seen this, they give this test to people in their sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties, and they ask you to sit down on the floor with your legs crossed. And then if you can kind of rock forward onto your feet and get your body up into a standing position without putting your hands down, then you’ve got the core strength and flexibility that you should be able to live far longer into the future.

P: And have a better quality of life in your senior years and because it’s the ability to be able to get yourself up that has complete links with morbidity, with heart disease with diabetes and it also [is good] in terms of range of motion and being able to look after yourself in case you fall.

M: Well it actually shows that you are less likely to fall because you’ve got the body strength.

P: Exactly.

M: And once someone who’s elderly falls and starts losing their balance, then it’s a very quick decline from that point forward. Generally.

P: Yes

M: The other thing that adds onto that is the injuries that come with the fall. The broken hips or legs etc. Also not good.

P: Yeah

M: Anyway this is a complete sidebar.

So taking lunch breaks.

P: [Laugh]

M: Maybe we can all sit down and practise standing up…

[Laughter]

P: with your lunch!

[Laughter]

M: So what are some good things to do, even if you only have 20 minutes, we’ve talked about a few of them already. So if you’re going to take a lunch break, you’re busy, you’re stressed. How do you maximise that 20 minutes that you make time for, if you can only make time for 10 minutes. What do you do?

P: Prepare. You’ve got to be prepared.

M: That takes more time Pete.

P: No, what I’m saying is that if you know you’ve got 20 minutes for a lunch break. Then you need to pre-prepare your meals. You need to have that installed so that you don’t waste 15 minutes wandering around the food court going, ‘Oh do I have curry? Or do I have sushi? Do I have curry? Do I have sushi?

M: Well, see my mind would say prepare before I leave the office to go get sushi.

P: Well that works. That’s still preparing.

M: Straight downstairs, get something that’s not deep fried.

P: You know what you’re going to have. You know what you’re going to have and you’re setting up and you have a goal in place. So you’re not going to be distracted by the deep fried southern chicken burger which may have come to $10.50 from Betty’s burgers today.

[Laughter]

M: Oh I love Betty’s Burgers.

Which is still okay, in moderation.

P: Absolutely.

M: Alright. So you’re saying prepare. I’m saying get outside and mindfulness. So once you’re outside, if you are struggling to find 20 minutes a day to go and have a lunch break and you need to maximize the time that you spend then:

1. Make sure that you refuel, obviously, and the healthier the better, as we all know. But refueling is refueling.
2. Secondly, get some sun if you can.
3. Thirdly, while you’re out, take a moment to look at nature. So wherever you are it’s about stopping and smelling the roses or at least noticing them.

P: Yes

M: And that is a really good reset for your brain. So this is that mental reset. If you go out and you rush from shop to shop and you have to pick up milk for breakfast tomorrow and you get your food and you make it back. And oof, you’re out of breath and it’s been 20 minutes. There’s some definite positive benefits from a physical and recharge perspective, but not necessarily from a mental health perspective.

P: Okay.

M: So if you’ve just rushed through your lunch break and it’s just another tick box activity for you that you had to get done and that you had to make sure happened in your day. You’re not resting your brain. If it’s a stress to get it done. So just taking those moments to enjoy the sun on your face or to stop and smell or notice the roses or even the grass.

P: It’s funny when I’m like working in the CBD. I often find myself searching for green space because there’s, where I am, which is down towards King Street Warf, it’s actually a bit of a walk to get to Hyde Park and that’s really the only green space in that corner of the CBD. There’s blue space, which is down by Cockle bay, which is fine, but to be actually able to sit and have your lunch in a green area. It’s actually not that easy in the CBD of Sydney.

M: And to get sun at the same time, you’re in shade most of the time.

P: Yeah.

M: Absolutely, if you’re in the middle, it’s a decent hike.

P: It’s where roof gardens would be really advantageous.

M: Yeah, we don’t do roof gardens in Australia.

P: We don’t make enough. I don’t think we do to take enough advantage of our rooves in Sydney. I think that we’re falling short on that one a little bit. Maybe another episode, [Laugh].

But I do want to clock one thing about exercising in your lunch break.

M: Yes

P: Now I was shocked by this one. According to my stats, only 7% of us use the lunch break to exercise, which I really didn’t think I thought would be a lot higher in Australia.

M: Hold on look, it takes women, and men, but mainly women 30 minutes to get ready in the morning, at least often an hour, depending on what your hair rituals are. If you’ve showered and washed your hair, which you have to do after you sweat. Okay before you go, especially corporate. Before you go back into an office, it’s let me just say it’s rude if you don’t. Let me just put that out there. If you do now shower after you exercise and you come back in the office. Don’t come near me. It is not something that everyone wants to smell in their two o’clock meeting.

P: [Laugh], no definitely not.

M: So I fully understand why people wouldn’t exercise at lunch because you just don’t have time to turn it around. You’ve got to get there and back. You’ve got to do the exercise, whatever it is and you’ve got, if you’re doing something that makes you sweaty; if you’re going to go do a nice stretching class.

P: You can still sweat.

M: A nice, light stretching class. Then maybe you could make that work without the shower and all the prep to get back into your corporate attire that goes afterwards.

P: I still, I was a lunchtime exerciser. I would duck down in between 11 and 12:30-

M: -That’s an hour and a half.

P: So 90 minutes and it didn’t always happen, but yeah again it was about planning that in. So that was a Tuesday and Thursday thing, and I knew that Tuesdays and Thursdays I took 90 minutes, again scheduling and preparing and that was my days exercise. Where I did go down and do some exercise in that time and then come back so that I was ready and prepped to go again in the afternoon.

M: I think that’s lunch break Nirvana to be able to do that.

P: [Laugh]

M: But then you’ve also got to find time to eat as well, and that’s the potential downside to putting exercise in.

P: And that’s what I wasn’t doing as well. In that I was grabbing food on the fly and shoving it in and half eating lunch and then waiting for the next client and half eating it after that. Yeah, maybe I wasn’t quite clocking that in the right way, but it felt like I was.

M: Well look I think it never hurts to get some exercise in at lunchtime. To get some exercise in, in general.

P: Well, again, it helps your mental energy as well.

M: Yes. Oh, so good for your happiness levels in general. All right, well, I think that’s about it for today.

P: Done.

M: Thank you for joining us. If you do want to hear more, please remember to subscribe and like this podcast.

P: Stay happy, people.

Related content: Listen to our Podcast: Wellbeing and Your Environment (E21)

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