Want to Be Better at Your Job? Take a Break

You need a break. You’ve been staring at your screen too long. There are 50 other things you need to be doing right now instead of reading this and that’s just at work. After you’re done here, you’ve got plans for your weekend, activities that need to be completed, yard work that needs done and oh don’t forget to stop at the grocery store on your way home.

Before you go and do all of those things, you overachiever you, it’s important that you allow yourself a mental break. I’m sure this won’t surprise you, but many studies out there today point to the importance of giving your brain a break in order to better allow your brain to make the mental connections necessary to work efficiently at your job.

• Rest Is Not Idleness: Implications of the Brain’s Default Mode for Human Development and Education
• Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation
• Why Your Brain Needs More Downtime

Stew Friedman, Ph.D., the director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project at the University of Pennsylvania tells us that the “mind needs rest. Research shows that after you take a mental time-out, you are better at creative thinking and coming up with solutions and new ideas, and you feel more content."

So, we’ve got the mental break you need. Go ahead and perform a mental stretch before getting back to the task at hand. This word search features health care quality acronyms that many of you are familiar with already.

Or if you prefer to solve the word search on paper, download and print it out!

"The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration—it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done."

- Tim Kreider, The New York Times