Brain Breaks

Disclaimer: We started taking brain breaks this summer during our muraling days, so I figured they were related enough to art to include on this blog.

Because of the way our schedules worked out, when we were painting the mural this summer, we would come in to paint for whole days at a time rather than a couple of hours per day. Even though we both love art, painting a wall for hours and hours can get exhausting. You’re standing up on a table, painting the same square piece of wall with its 5th layer of purple and pink paint and things just start to blur together: you start losing track of time, you start forgetting where you wanted to paint the clouds, you start questioning why you chose the colors you did, or even why you chose to paint the mural in the first place. To solve this problem, we started taking something called “brain breaks.” Brain breaks are by no means a new concept (just google it, there’s tons of suggestions), but for us specifically, brain breaks meant putting down our brushes, forgetting about the mural for a short period of time and going on a walk outside. Then, when we’d come back, we’d be filled with a new resolve to finish our project and new ideas on how to improve our mural. 


Now that muraling is over and we’ve transitioned back into normal school life, we’ve brought the idea of brain breaks with us. Whenever we have free blocks (blocks with no class), time before a class starts, or longer lunch periods, we like to get up and take a walk around the school. In fact, our brain breaks are so common that, by now, we’ve shorted the whole interaction to the simple suggestion, “walk?” followed by a nod (we’re hoping to eventually become completely telepathic). Lately, I’ve been thinking about why we actually take so many brain breaks. On the one hand, we can write it off as a sort of “quirk” or habit we’ve developed in our numerous years of friendship, but I think there might be more to it than that. Contrary to what some people may believe, by taking these periodic walks, we’re not “procrastinating” from potential work time; rather, we’re taking a mental breather from an informationally loaded day (maybe that’s just a fancy way to say procrastination?). The fact that we actually get up and walk around helps us physically feel like we’re taking a recess from mental work: we can still continue to subconsciously process the ideas or information we’ve received throughout the day, but we don’t have to actively obsess over them to a point of disinterest (or what sometimes feels like a point of insanity). 

Considering how beneficial brain breaks have been for us in terms of splitting up our day and helping us refocus on our learning, it’s surprising to me that this isn’t something that’s encouraged at school. Generally, in our school, we don’t have that much time between classes. We only get about 5 minutes between when one class ends and the next one starts, which is just enough time to quickly pack up and speed walk to our next class (usually less because, as teachers like to say, “the bell doesn’t dismiss you, I do”). We used to have a 10 minute “snack period” after our first two morning classes, but that was replaced with yet another structured period of time called ~advisory~ during which we have to speed walk to another classroom and talk through an assigned discussion topic with a group of usually apathetic peers. 

We understand that the idea of brain breaks may be hard for a school administration or teachers to understand, accept, or justify. It may seem as though students who are more interested in aimlessly wandering the halls than getting in extra class time are unmotivated, or it may seem inconvenient to add time for “not thinking” when there’s always so much material to get through and so little time to get through it.

Yet we would urge teachers to consider not only quantity of information students learn in a day, but also the state of the students when they learn it.  If we sit through seven hour school days during which we have virtually no breathing room and are taught Math, Science, English, History, etc. one right after the other with no time left for processing or just mentally resetting, then how much information can we really retain? Wouldn’t it only be natural for our thoughts to wander or for our eyes to glaze over during a class, even though, had we felt mentally “awake” when we took it, we would have been blown away by how interesting it really was? Maybe with the 24 hour days we have, we can spare a few minutes for an occasional brain break.